By Anthony Bergs
As a small business, one of the first things that you must do is get a solid brand reputation. Your target audience should be aware of your existence, and trust your brand to deliver quality products and services. It is only after you have a customer base that trusts your brand, can your business grow in scope and size. Once a small business creates a brand reputation that induces trust and quality, customer retention rates will soon spike up and the word of mouth will start spreading like wildfire. The best way to create a brand image that deeply resonates with your target audience is through social media marketing.
Social media marketing provides a level ground for all business to use the platform to interact directly with their audiences. Social media helps in generating brand awareness, increasing customer-business interaction, and building a sense of reliability in the customer’s psyche. The social media platform can be used by any business, regardless of their scope and size. The platform is so level-grounded that even a small startup can end up competing and overpowering a large multinational corporation in their social media marketing strategies.
There is a flipside to the same equation as well, though. Since any business can optimally use social media marketing to boost their business, you are directly competing with a plethora of organizations. This means that you have to be constantly on your toes to ensure that your social media marketing game is stronger than your many competitors. One lapse in judgment or decision making can result terribly for your business. As a small business doing social media marketing, bringing your A game to the table at all times is but a necessity.
A whopping 90% of marketers believe that social media marketing is an imperative for their business growth, but for small businesses, social media marketing must be at the top of your priority list. Here’s why.
Lower Costs
Traditional marketing costs can be huge! A lot more than small businesses can handle. This is the first reason why your small business should seriously consider social media marketing. To sponsor a post on Facebook is more targeted and cheaper than a print or website ad. Instagram and Snapchat have proven to be great platforms to reach out directly to your target audience. Even if you do not wish to spend big bucks on Facebook or Instagram advertising, you can still post updates on various social media channels to generate customer engagement.
Better User Experience
Large corporations are using social media to better the user experience in business transactions. Recently, Facebook Messenger Bots have come into practice, and large and small businesses are using these chatbots to help the users navigate through the buying process, and settle their queries and complaints. As a small business, you can also use social media to interact with your customers. On Facebook, the user can see how responsive a Facebook page is. If you respond to your customers within seconds, it will encourage your users to reach out to you. This is a great way to build trust on social media.
Improved SEO Rankings
The importance of a social media presence on SEO rankings is often left under the radar while doing social media marketing. However, in the SEO rankings, Google takes a company’s social media presence into significant consideration. This directly means that the better your social media presence is, the better your search rankings will be.
Ever since it’s inception, social media marketing has been a boon for small businesses. If an organization can use it to its optimum potential, nothing can stop that organization to reach great heights in their respective domains.
