Use Social Media Marketing to Promote Your Business (Updated)

Social media marketing has become a powerful tool for businesses to promote their brand and increase sales.

According to Hootsuite, social media advertising is the second biggest market in digital ads. Ads on social media had worldwide revenue of $153 billion in 2021, which is expected to grow to over $252 billion in 2026.

Social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, Pinterest, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc., allow companies to connect with loyal customers and prospects through various channels. These include posting promotional information, sharing company updates, and interacting with followers.

There are several ways to leverage social media to promote your business. For example, you can create a blog or start a podcast to attract new customers. Or, you can share valuable content on social media to encourage interaction and generate leads.

What marketing technique can you use for free that serves your customers while earning you free publicity?

The answer: social media marketing, i.e. using websites like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube and several others. In this article, we look at marketing on social media and answer how you can use social media for marketing. We shall also learn about the benefits of social media marketing.

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What is Social Media Marketing?

Small and large companies can reach new prospects and customers through social media marketing. A social media marketing strategy involves creating content on social networking sites and sharing it to achieve marketing and branding goals. The social media space allows you to build and promote your brand.

What Are the Benefits of Social Media Marketing?

According to this article, in a recent survey of 250 business executives, 72% currently use social media as a source of data and insights to inform their company’s business decisions. Many marketers believe social media positively influences their company’s revenue and sales. This article says that according to MarketingSherpa, 95% of online adults ages 18 to 34 are likely to follow a brand on social media.

Social media is a great way to share your brand’s mission and stories. A solid social media marketing strategy will generate conversation about your brand, products, and partners. Share stories of people who use your product or service. Using social media has developed way beyond simply broadcasting company content to customers. Focus on sharing content that naturally creates a conversation with your customer.

Do you promote user-generated content if you have a Facebook business page (not your profile)? Asking a simple question can increase your engagement rate. And most times, all you need to create content is your mobile phone. It will enable you to take good-quality photos and videos to post to your channel to spark the conversation. You can also ask your customer to share their picture and video of your product, service, or company.

You can use Facebook and other social media platforms in social media marketing to promote brand recognition, increase sales, and drive website traffic. A quality social media marketing strategy can create loyal brand advocates, influence leads and increase sales for your business.

All the above will ultimately influence everything from your marketing messaging to how you approach customer service or social selling. Whether through promotional posts or social ads, monitoring conversion rate and URL clicks can help you better determine your ROI from social media.

Social media marketing for small businesses involves being present on social media and interacting with existing customers. By so doing, you can get valuable customer feedback about your brand.

What Can Social Media Marketing Do For Your Business?

SMM can help with several goals, such as

• Driving conversions
• Establishing a brand identity and positive brand association
• Improving communication and interaction with key audiences
• Drive website traffic and sales.

You will be more likely to reach any other marketing goal you may have on your list the bigger and more engaged your social media audience is!

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What Are the Major Social Media Platforms?

At the moment, (and in no particular order) the following social media platforms are top of the list:

• Facebook,
• Instagram,
• Twitter,
• LinkedIn,
• Pinterest,
• Reddit,
• YouTube, and
• Snapchat.

These are some platforms where your customer base will probably hang out with you. Therefore, you must consider snagging your business profiles on these networks if you have not done so already.

What Platforms Should I Choose?

Choosing the channels into which you will put your time, money, and effort strategically to get optimum results from social media marketing and achieve your business goals is imperative.

As a business owner, it’s better to pick a few platforms you think your target audience is on than on all platforms when starting social media marketing. Avoid stretching yourself too thin—instead, target networks in which your core audience already participates. Maybe you’d like to attract a more dedicated audience. Any combination of these goals mentioned above is fair game and can help you better understand which platforms to use.

You can use Facebook and other social media platforms in social media marketing to promote brand recognition, increase sales, and drive website traffic. Click To Tweet

With social media, Facebook is often the first site mentioned for a good reason. You should use Facebook if you choose only one platform for your business. Facebook makes it easy to engage your audience, collect reviews, and provide customer service and advertising. You let readers know where to find your most recent content by sharing links to new articles and pages.

If yours is a B2B operation, your best bet for your business marketing and business development is LinkedIn. LinkedIn is essential for reaching B2B prospects and hiring managers as a professional social network.

How Can Social Media Be Used for Marketing?

You should use social media for marketing your small business because your customers spend time on these platforms. Connecting with your target audience is simple if you are active on your customers’ favourite channels. Your company can make authentic connections with your leads and customers on social media rather than just delivering direct marketing messages.

Start with Facebook: Engage with your audience to know more about them. Listen to your audience to understand their pain points. Develop a contest and giveaway strategy to help improve engagement with your page and post. Promote your events to attract existing and prospective customers. Use Facebook Live and Facebook Ads to give your posts an extra boost.

Create a Page: Create a Facebook business Page (not a personal profile) to promote your company activities. Claim your Page’s vanity URL (e.g. ours is https://facebook.com/mauconline). Add a great cover photo to showcase your business focus, product or service.

Build an Audience: Take some time to create marketing personas for your ideal customers. Give them names, backstories, interests, the whole nine yards. One of the best ways to grow your audience on any social network is to get engagement. The more engagement with your content, the more likely you are to build an audience. Create valuable, engaging content that people feel compelled to share on the major platforms and consider using a social media calendar, scheduling tool or content calendar to schedule your posts. Another easy way to build an engaged audience on social media is by contributing to the conversation. Scroll through your social media feed, liking, commenting and sharing other people’s posts. Don’t just contribute for contributing sake. Put some effort into ensuring that you make meaningful contributions to the conversation.

Engage Customers: Customers want to feel like they have a relationship with your brand. So be sure to pull back the curtains and give them a sneak peek into behind-the-scenes activities on how your company operates. Teach your followers about your company, products and services. If appropriate, make them laugh by sharing interesting content. Sell your products and services by the side. Social media allows your company to connect and engage personally with current and potential customers. Post pictures, stories, and live videos representing your brand and attracting a relevant audience. Responding to comments, shares, and likes and shares is also critical. Knowing your target audience is vital to creating tailored social media marketing campaigns and successfully engaging customers through social media. You must be engaged if you want customers and followers to be involved. Stay active and respond to comments and questions on your social media channels. The unique benefit of social media marketing for small businesses is that it allows you to talk directly to customers. Increase customer engagement and lead generation by providing fun activities. Engaging your audience on social media boosts brand awareness, increases loyalty, and encourages word-of-mouth marketing.

Grow Your Following: Choose the right social platform for your brand. You don’t need an online presence on all social media platforms. Know your customers and the social media platforms they hang out on, and stick to those. Do a competitive analysis to know what platforms your competitors use. This can help you discover hidden gems you are not yet aware of. Complete your profiles (yes, your personal ones, too) on every platform you create an account. This step is critical in growing your following. Be consistent with your brand. Strictly adhere to your brand style guide when creating content or banners for your profiles and pages. This will help your audience recognise your brand on the platform. Share awesome content using relevant and trending hashtags when appropriate. Don’t forget to connect with industry thought leaders and influencers.

Use Twitter: Twitter connects you and your business with what’s happening in the world every day. Learn the latest, real-time social media trends and invest in social listening. There’s a lot to Twitter, from hashtags and pinned tweets to Twitter lists and social media influencers. Businesses can promote their products and services on Twitter with the right marketing plan. Advertise on Twitter to increase reach and sales. With effective ad formats and targeting tools, Twitter helps you build awareness and drive conversions. Gain Twitter followers by engaging in conversational Twitter chats and use Twitter ads to your advantage. With Twitter, you can run Promoted Tweets to help reach people interested in your business.

Set Goals: All businesses need to create a social media marketing strategy and operate the business social media accounts in a thoughtful, measured way. The most crucial aspect of any social media strategy is to set S.M.A.R.T. (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timely) social media marketing goals. Build relationships: These platforms open up direct and indirect lines of communication with your followers through which you can network, gather feedback, and grow your business. Integrate personality through humour and emotions into your social media posts so your audience can relate to your brand. Undoubtedly, social media marketing is working for companies of all types. By driving brand awareness, you reach more people to increase the likelihood of your brand getting seen by the right people. These are just a few of the SMART goals you can set.

Measure Results: Measure the results of your social media marketing efforts. Social media ROI is one of the key performance indicators (KPIs). Social media engagement metrics show how much people interact with your content instead of just seeing it. Creating a strategy and monitoring engagement, reach, and conversions are essential to measuring the success of B2B social media marketing. Your social media marketing results can be measured in several ways, depending on your objectives. Campaign-focused metrics can help you understand the impact of targeted marketing initiatives and will vary from campaign to campaign. Hence, measuring your social media ROI is essential to determine if likes and shares are growing your business and not just your follower count.

Use LinkedIn: LinkedIn is excellent for networking and growing your business. When you use LinkedIn to market your business, you gain access to valuable features related to analytics, connections, brand-building, etc. The best way to promote your business on LinkedIn is by being helpful and adding value – posting content, sharing content on profiles and pages and contributing to relevant conversations about your brand or industry. In addition to your profile, create a company page and post regularly on your personal and company pages. Engage with content shared by others in your industry. Join relevant LinkedIn groups. Share content about your industry, not just about your company.
Use video to boost engagement on your posts. LinkedIn allows you to drive traffic to your website, identify quality leads, and share your expertise through thought-leadership content. LinkedIn allows you to post long-form content, which many business leaders have used to build influential thought leadership reputations. It would be best if you remembered that the readers of your content on LinkedIn are consuming and sharing content to further their careers.

Use YouTube: Video is highly engaging and helpful for many businesses. Creating a YouTube channel for your company offers a centralised platform for your videos. Do some keyword research to understand better what viewers are searching for. When uploading your videos include the most important information and keywords at the beginning of your title.

Use Instagram: Add professional-looking photos and videos of behind-the-scenes activities. Use Instagram Stories to tell your story. Stream live videos on your Instagram account. Regularly interact with your followers and use relevant hashtags to give your posts an edge in the Instagram feed. Use features like Instagram Reels, etc. Advertise on Instagram if this option is available in your location. With Instagram ads, businesses can drive awareness and increase their customer base through visuals and obtain audience insights.

Use Pinterest: Pinterest marketing is a set of tactics incorporating Pinterest into your business’s more extensive social media marketing. Pinterest is a powerful online marketing tool that can help you increase brand awareness, boost conversions, increase sales, and create long-lasting relationships with your target audience and buyer personas. Pinterest is an excellent way to promote your brand and drive traffic to your business. Promoted pins take things a step further. They look like regular pins but have additional capabilities to increase visibility, so you get to the right audience at the right time. Your Pins, images, and videos will more likely be seen if you share them in other areas. To use Pinterest to promote your company, it’s essential to sign up for a business account. Use Pinterest Ads for marketing goals like awareness, consideration and conversions. When it comes to attracting new customers and influencing their product purchases, Pinterest can be a goldmine of opportunities for businesses.

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Active users are plentiful on social media platforms because these marketing channels offer a fun and simple way to network, communicate with friends and family, and stay connected with current affairs. However, when these active social media users follow brands and engage with their social media content, they find the content and information valuable in a social media campaign. Social media may allow you to show consumers a different side of your brand and be more conversational, which may be why consumers are more receptive to your marketing message. As mentioned above, you can share photos and videos of behind the scene activities in your company. If you want to go further, you can ask your followers and other active users to share photos and videos of how they engage with your company on social media. We know this type of content as user-generated content (UGC).

Getting more inbound traffic to your website is another way to take advantage of your social media profiles. As mentioned above, another benefit of marketing through social media is that it helps you improve visibility and thus increases recognition for your brand. Posting engaging content that adds value for your target audience makes your brand more accessible and familiar to new leads and current customers.

Social media sites and platforms like Facebook have sophisticated targeting capabilities, allowing you to connect with more relevant buyers and helping drive traffic to your site. Facebook advertising, you can identify new potential leads by defining your ideal customer through the ads platform.

Social networks are, most times, viewed as an excellent analytics tool for avoiding costly market research. You can thus strategically target different audiences through social media marketing, depending on your brand’s channels.

What Can We Do for You?

Mauco Enterprises can assist you with your social media marketing strategy or your social media presence. How? By crafting and optimising your social media strategy if you don’t have one. Helping you choose the social channel that will give you the best bang for your buck and integrate it with your other marketing efforts.

We’ll show you how to effectively use social media channels and content for advertising your business and attracting customers. Schedule a marketing consultation session with us today to get started.

Conclusion

In conclusion, social media marketing is one of the most effective ways to market your business. You can start by creating a page on Facebook, then build an audience and engage them.

Related Article(s)

• How to Market on Social Media
• Understanding Social Media Marketing
• 3 Ways to Use Social Media for Your Business
• How to Be Successful at Social Media Marketing
• 7 Signs That You Should Invest in Social Media Marketing

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