There are many hundreds of ways to promote a business in both the online and the offline world. But perhaps the most useful for small businesses and those who will ambition to expand is to use social media to generate visibility and clicks to your website. Social media hosts billions of the world’s consumers, making it one of the most important town squares in the world. Whether that’s on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter, marketing on these large platforms can return you huge numbers of customers. Here’s how you’ll do that in 2022, using some of the tricks of the trade to enhance your strategy.
Know Your Audience
First and foremost, you’ll need to decide which social media platforms are most valuable to you. The likes of Twitter and Facebook have the most users, many of which are highly active on the platforms. The downside to these platforms, from the perspective of a marketer, is that they tend to host older consumers – and if you’re looking to capture the attention of younger demographics, you’ll want to host your content on other social media platforms. Snapchat, Instagram, and TikTok are far better places to host marketing content if you’re aiming at consumers under 35. Know your audience in order to decide which social media platforms to focus on in your upcoming campaigns.
Setting Up
Now that you’ve narrowed your focus, it’s time to set up your page on the platforms that you’re looking to market upon. Make sure you’re featuring your brand logo prominently, and keep everything on-brand throughout your profile. Share pictures and descriptions of what you do or sell so that consumers are able to quickly ascertain what it is that your page might offer them. Once your pages and profiles are set up, make sure that you share them on your website and in your email marketing material so that customers who want to keep up to date with your company can do so on their favorite social media platforms.
Communication
Social media is precisely that: social. It’s a place not just to share marketing missives into the great digital ether but also to communicate directly with customers and curious consumers. As such, you can use social media to speak in a more conversational tone with those who would like to get n touch with your business. Equally, if you don’t quite have the time to be chatting with people endlessly on instant messenger, most social media platforms have a plug-in bot that’ll answer questions for you automatically. That way, you’re offering a line of communication on the platforms your customers use the most, but you won’t have to have an employee constantly monitoring messages for you.
Paid Posts
Social media is an excellent place to share your business updates and your new products, services, and developments. But it’s fair to say that you’ll not be able to amass the following you’re after simply by posting once a day about the goings-on in your firm. It’s far more effective to engage in a little paid advertising, which you can do in a number of ways on the different platforms that you may well be using. You might, for instance:
- Choose to pay for a promoted post, which will generate a certain volume of extra views and clicks. You can often target these posts at the audiences that you care about the most
- Engage with an influencer on the platforms you’re on, who will be able to share details about your business with their larger audience, some of which will go on to search through your website
- Partner with another business in order to run a campaign, a competition, or a discount or offer on some of your products or services, helping you expand your audience
Bear in mind that paid promotional posts can end up costing you quite a bit of money over the long term, so it’s important that you’re honing your message as much as possible so that each paid post is perfectly equipped to generate interest, capture attention, and encourage web users to click through to your page or website.
Analysis
You won’t be able to run a truly effective social media marketing campaign without knowing what’s working best for your business. You can send out paid promotional posts and partner with affiliates and influencers, but at the end of the day, it’s the cold hard data that’ll show you how well any of these strategies are working for your firm. Use Sprout Social social media reporting to understand how this is all working. By gathering data on all of your campaigns, Sprout Social quickly processes that data and provides real-time insights that are designed to help you hone and perfect your marketing output on social media. It’s an essential service to help you make the most of your social media marketing spend in 2022.
Going Viral
Another strategy that is perhaps a little more high-risk is to attempt to go viral with a post on social media. Virality has been a feature of social media platforms from the very beginning. The ability for one post to sweep across the world, generating millions of impressions, is, of course, of great interest to ambitious marketers. Still, you’ll need to come up with suitably compelling content on a regular basis in order to come in with a chance of going viral yourself. Hire an expert social media practitioner in order to give yourself the best chance of going viral this year.
Overall Approach
In summary, then, there are several important factors to your social media marketing success. Bringing them all together, working side by side is often the best way to ensure you’re marketing wisely on social media. If your overall approach is scattergun and uninformed by the data, you’ll end up wasting cash that you could spend more wisely elsewhere. Instead, take a unified and holistic approach to your campaigns, gathering important data to help you understand their effectiveness in order to learn the best way to market your small business on social media in the months and years ahead.
Make great strides in your social media marketing efforts by following the tips outlined in this short guide.
