5 ways to use social media for business growth

For most businesses, especially startups, advertising could be a big nuisance.  One of the most common challenges that small business owners face today is growing their online community or their “tribe”, as some like to call it. Often driven by factors such as lack of budget, inadequate planning, and poor execution, the reality is that most small businesses are misfiring with their social media efforts.

Social media has been innovating both the traditional and digital marketing world. Many businesses study the logic behind using social media as an advertising platform for promotional purposes mainly because they want to see their businesses grow.

No matter how small or big your business is, executing promotions for your business on social media has a high potential to achieve results that positively impact your business goals. Besides, what’s the use of creating content if no one else is seeing it? The more you post content on social media, the closer you get to achieving your success. So how do you go about this social media marketing for your business?

There are five simple steps to follow in order to accelerate your business growth through social media without breaking the bank:

1. Define your buyer personas

What’s a buyer persona, you ask? Put simply, a buyer persona is an avatar that represents your ideal customer. If you don’t know who your services are for, how are you going to promote them? By creating your own buyer personas, you can focus your energy on marketing efforts tailored to suit the right audience. As a result, you can adequately meet their needs and solve their problems.

It’s very important to give your buyer personas names to humanise your marketing efforts. Give them a job title, demographics, goals, challenges, values, and fears. Believe it or not, you can easily market and pitch your services to your target audience then.

Before you even think about creating content and planning promotional campaigns, determine your buyer personas so that you can truly engage your target audience when the time comes.

2. Develop a content plan to appeal to your buyer personas

Create a content plan that combines the right mix of engagement and social selling to appeal to your buyer personas. Gauge your customers; discover what they want and what they’re looking for you to solve. You can hold surveys and polls via your social media channels, interview current customers, and check out how your competitors interact with their customers online.

All of this data will help you gain a better understanding of how you should speak to your audience and what kind of content to disseminate on your social media channels. Did you know that personalised campaigns drive 18 times more revenue than generic emails?

Social media is a huge part of marketing your business, but any effort on this is useless if your content doesn’t reach the right people. So it’s important to gain as much information as you can from the get-go. All your marketing efforts should be clearly defined with your buyer personas in mind and pretty soon, you’ll be rewarded with targeted results.

Click here if you’d like to take a more in-depth look at the role of the Social Media Marketer and how it can benefit your business.

3. Create amazing content to engage your community

Get creative when developing content assets for your target market. You can use short-form and long-form content, videos, quizzes, infographics, case studies, how-to-guides, and other fun material to make things more interesting and engaging for your community.

Concise, valuable, and visually-appealing content will get you positive results, so make sure that any posts you put out contain accurate and useful advice that your readers can apply in their day-to-day.

Write marketing copies with your buyer personas in mind. What sort of headline will grab their attention? Which topics are they interested in? Craft messages that will resonate with them. Use the vernacular if and when necessary. Is your pitch the right style for your target demographic?

Knowing the answers to these questions will make you more proactive and effective when conversing with your audience. Once you share these great content on social media, you’ll surely drum up significant attention for your business.

As long as you post engaging high-quality content that is timely and relevant to your readers, you will slowly but surely grow a satisfied fan base and an intrigued following.

4. Drive social engagement at every opportunity

Whether it’s adding a “Connect with us” button to your emails or simply inviting your readers to comment on your blog posts, constantly driving social engagement will provide you exponential growth in your community size, and in turn, will maximise the potential monetary value of your social community.

Consistently engage with your audience and build rapport. Find out: Where do most of your organic traffic come from? Once you put yourself out there, don’t stop. Most businesses stop after posting content on social media. Connect with your audience and widen your network. Make it your mission to know what they like and dislike about your business, the services you offer, and even the industry you’re in.

Respond to all comments, questions, and complaints in a timely and respectful manner. Before you know it, you will have established a go-to brand identity that people enjoy interacting with. People love to interact, so make sure that they’re talking to a human being and not a robot. Whether they know it or not, these people will help you build a following and promote your business, resulting in long-term growth.

5. Measure success using Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

A Key Performance Indicator (KPI) is a measurement that directly affects your marketing objectives. How so? Well, for example, if your goal is to increase sales efficiency, then you’ll want to measure the total amount of sales divided by total leads.

Setting KPIs for your social goals will provide you month-on-month actual versus budgeted metrics that can be used to efficiently track success. Engagement, sharing, community size, leads, and sales are all important social success metrics that you can use to develop your business.

Make sure to review your business objectives and strategies regularly so that you adjust your KPIs as needed. This ensures that your marketing efforts are focused on common goals and that these goals are aligned with the vision of your organisation.

You may think that developing effective KPIs isn’t such a clear-cut task, but as long as you take the time to select and determine the best indicators of your agency’s success, you will be able to realise your goals more efficiently and advance your business mission more effectively.

In Summary

You need to take advantage of social media marketing if you want to be industry-competitive. While there are several ways to distribute your message to the public online and offline, you won’t know how to maximize your full exposure potential until you realize who your target market is, what social medium is right for your business, and how you should track your progress.

If there’s one thing you as a small business owner should keep an eye on, it’s growth. As an entrepreneur, it will always comes back to expanding your efforts without breaking the bank. So remember these five simple steps to grow your business using social media that will cost you mostly nothing but your time and effort:

1. Define your buyer personas;

2. Develop a content plan to appeal to your buyer personas;
3. Create amazing content to engage your community;
4. Drive social engagement at every opportunity; and
5. Measure success using Key Performance Indicators

Handling and maintaining social media accounts can be exhausting, so it’s best to outsource. Adept social media managers can build your online profile while you focus on the core of your business. Hiring expert social media freelancers can also significantly decrease costs moving forward.

To ensure that you get only the best candidates qualified to do the job, check out the Social Media Marketers at My Cloud Crew.

Once you’ve chosen the right person to generate leads from your Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other social media accounts, your business won’t just grow, it will thrive for years to come.

Start brainstorming your plan today. Create your business’ social media marketing strategy while keeping these steps in mind. To get a summary of this blog post, download the infographic for FREE and paste it on your wall so that you won’t forget each essential step.