If you have a small business and are trying to improve your social media marketing, this article is for you. There are 4.2 billion people actively using social media today, these users spend an average of 2 hrs and 25 minutes on social channels each and every day. During that time frame, businesses can have the opportunity to grow their digital presence, increase brand awareness and build relationships online. In today’s article, we will look at some ways to improve your social media marketing strategy as a small business in 2021.
Tip #1: Focusing on quality to gain quantity
When it comes to leaving an impact with your marketing campaigns, quality trumps quantity. Whenever you see an absolutely amazing ad online or on television, you can tell that a lot of time and effort went into producing it. If you are trying to produce numerous ads all at once, that may not be the most effective strategy for your business. It comes down to resources, planning and having enough people to help you create the campaign. It’s a lot more important to create quality content on a couple of key channels than it is to constantly push out mediocre ad campaigns on all channels. You want to create that impact that’ll drive people towards your brand and you can do this by making beautiful campaigns. Social media marketing is about building relationships and growing online. When you first focus in on producing high quality content on at least two channels, you can reach your target audience a lot more efficiently and leave a lasting mark on them because you have shown them your amazing ad campaign! From there, once you have mastered these two channels, you can build up and expand your work.
Tip #2: Utilizing tools
What we love about social media nowadays are the growth tools that are offered to us as a business. Seriously, if you aren’t taking advantage of these tools that are offered up, then what are you doing? There are a bunch of them that can help boost productivity and give you better insights into your target audience. Some of our favourites are insight tools and graphics. So, in order to gain access to insights (which usually includes audience engagement and reach rates, number of profile visits, and audience activity times), you must be a business account. What's incredible about this is that you can take note of the most active times your followers are online, what content they interact with most, and what content has reached a wider range. And that’s just to name a few, there are a lot more perks as well! Also, graphics should be included in your branded posts. If you want to make sure you have that high quality content that catches the eyes of consumers, then seriously improve on your graphics. Branded posts always do extremely well and overall just help to increase brand awareness!
Tip #3: Using different forms of content
You know when you go on a businesses page and the feed just looks bland because the same sort of content is being shared over and over again? The average consumer loses interest in just the first few seconds if they aren’t automatically intrigued by a brand’s content. This goes for both websites and social media pages. Keep this in mind when scheduling your posts because the last thing you want is for people to visit your page and be disappointed with the content they are looking at. You need to impress them right off the bat and there should always be something new going on. So what you can do to improve upon this is to mix up your content. Post infographics, gifs, short video clips, user generated content or pictures. If you normally just post pictures, switch it up and post a video next time! Take advantage of what is offered on platforms too, for example, use LinkedIn stories, Instagram reels, 60 second Tiktok videos and live video. You can then analyze what your audience is attracted to or which content has been shared the most and go off of that. In the end, you are creating content for your target audience and want to reach them in the best way possible. Content diversity is crucial to any successful social media marketing plan because switching up content could definitely help boost online reach.
Tip #4: Discovering new trends
When you see a brand’s content go viral, it’s usually because it is unique and on trend. There’s always going to be new trends to discover daily on social platforms. On Instagram you can discover new trends on your explore page or from another account, on Tiktok you can click onto the search button and automatically find trending sounds, videos and hashtags. Your Facebook news feed is just full of new trends as well! It’s not hard to find out about upcoming trends, what can be difficult is using them uniquely to help you gain exposure and capture your target audiences attention. This is when connecting with social media marketing experts would be a good idea if you are having trouble! Also, by staying on top of trends, you can establish yourself as a leader in your own market because you can be the business to go to when people want to learn new things and stay in the now.
Tip #5: Interacting online like no other
The more you engage and interact with the online community, the higher the chances are of you becoming more well-known and established. When you want to build up a following or brand loyalty, you have to utilize marketing strategies in a personable and genuine way. What you can do to interact efficiently on digital platforms is connect with other entrepreneurs in your market, consult with marketing specialists, meet with brands that share the same niche, repost followers’ stories or posts that mention your brand, include UGC, and ask for feedback from your followers. If you can engage with your community daily and form strong relationships, you can generate a long lasting social media presence for years and years.
Don’t hesitate to reach out if you need a helping hand with your social media marketing strategy! Microswift specialists would be more than happy to provide their expertise to get you to where you want to be digitally!
