If you want to build an audience of loyal customers, it’s time to take a deep dive into the world of social media. Between advertising tools, excellent marketing campaigns, and easy access to potential customers, social media platforms allow small businesses and companies to thrive with interesting, fun, and unique tactics. If you’d like to become intentional about building your brand as a small business owner, consider the following tips.
1. Set Goals
If you’re building a brand from scratch, it can be intimidating to launch an Instagram profile without any followers. Set goals for how many followers you’d like to attain within the first week, month, and quarter. When it pertains to social media, it’s really a numbers game. When you’re able to create targeted goals regarding how many followers you’d like, you can put strategies in place in order to hit those numbers within a certain time frame. If this helps, look at your list of goals on a daily basis. This will help you to remain focused on the most important tasks because it’s really easy to get distracted in the act of scrolling through various platforms.
2. Social Listening
One of the very first things you should do when creating a social media strategy is to partake in what is called “social listening.” This involves looking observing your target audience through analytical tools and seeing what kind of content they enjoy, what platforms they use and when, what types of things they are discussing, and what kind of hashtags they are using. Knowing these things will help form the basis of your strategy.
3. Create a Recognizable Presence
Whether you’re a one-man show or blessed with a team of colleagues, sit down to create goals for the social media marketing aspect of your company. Consider how you want your brand to come across to your audience. Peruse through social media platforms to see which brands stand out to you the most. Draw inspiration from the brands that catch your eye. Notice the commonalities between the brands you like. Whether you’re considering color schemes to use or different camera tricks that are popular on TikTok, find angles that you can commit to in order to build your brand.
4. Engage Daily
It doesn’t matter which platform you choose to leverage. Just know that it’s really important to engage on a daily basis in order to stay at the top of the algorithms. There’s so much competition out there. By finding your ideal platforms, researching good hashtags for small business, and showing up on a daily basis, you’ll increase your chances of building momentum. Engaging with social media platforms on a daily basis will look different for each company.
If you run a small clothing boutique and you’re using Instagram to sell and showcase your clothing, create a large batch of Instastories in one day. Then, share one new story each day. If you mix up the clothing content with inspirational quotes, interesting videos, or simple videos that showcase a moment in the company’s workday, this is enough to begin gaining traction on a daily basis.
5. Be Responsive and Inclusive
When you begin to gain new followers who like and respond to your posts, always respond. Do your best to use the comments as the starting point for an ongoing conversation. Follow the comments up with questions. A great way to connect with an audience is to do a live broadcast. By going live, you can share valuable information, answer questions as they come, and develop a rapport with your followers.
Cherish the time when your small business is building followers because the company is in a space where you can know your customers by name. As you grow and scale, it’s going to be harder to know each customer by name. By recognizing handles and regularly connecting through live broadcasts, you’ll arrive at an interesting space in the company’s growth where you can truly build the loyal tribe that may promote your products for you.
6. Scale What Works
When you find a strategy that works well, do your best to scale and automate the process. If Facebook ads provide an excellent return on their investment, place more money into ad placement. If posting three times a day at scheduled times proves to be the most feasible and lucrative time to reach interested buyers, continue to add more content during those times. You don’t want to bombard your followers though. Do your best to scale your efforts to gain new customers in order to truly see sustainable growth.
7. Use Social Media Scheduling Tools
A common myth is that social media is too much of a time investment. This however is not true if you create the right social media marketing strategy. By using social media automation tools you can greatly reduce the amount of time you actually spend posting on social media. There are a number of free tools out there that will allow you to schedule posts on multiple platforms far in advance. You could sit down for a weekend and easily create all the branding posts you need for your business months in advance. You could even reuse a post three months later so you continuously have content.
8. Hashtags and Trends
When creating posts for your social media pages pay attention to certain trends that are happening which are relevant to your audience and product/service. You will also want to be strategic about your hashtags. There are hashtag research tools that can show you want hashtags that are popular for a given topic to ensure your post will be seen. You also want to refrain from spamming too many hashtags as that will actually hurt you rather than helping you.
Conclusion
When you’re first launching a small business, there are a lot of moving parts to consider. Trying to maintain a responsive website, satisfy customers, and build a strong brand are all parts of the larger picture. However, if you master the art of social media marketing, it’s much easier to gain traction that will contribute to a long-lasting brand. With these strategies and consistent effort, any small business can experience its fair share of social media success in due time.
