Social Media Marketing For Local SME Owners, That Works!
Ignoring It, Will Negatively Impact Your Business’s Bottom Line
Click >> Contact Us << Today to Discuss Your Social Media Requirements
- Why Social Media Is Important For Business
- How To Grow Your Business With Social Media
- Why Work with DMS for Your Social Media Marketing Management?
- 4 Steps to Assess The Effectiveness of Your Social Media Marketing
- How To Improve Your Social Media Presence – 11 Top Tips
Is managing your social media marketing eating up far more time than you can afford to allocate? Are you feeling guilty that other aspects of your business are suffering as a result and want a better way to engage?
Regardless of whether you’re doing this yourself, you have a team, or you’ve engaged either a freelance social media manager or a local digital agency, the core question is, how well is it working for your business? Is it generating a steady supply of quality leads? If not, don’t delay further, take action today.
We’re a data-driven digital media agency, working with small and medium-sized local businesses, exactly like yours. We leverage proven communication and marketing techniques to derive results from the internet for your company. Whether you’re based in London or the Home Counties, contact us today, to discuss how our social media marketing services can help your business.
Why Social Media Is Important For Business
An ever-increasing number of people, of all ages, are spending large amounts of time, online, keeping up with friends and family. There are a variety of social media platforms, each with a slightly different focus. Whether you’re a B2B or B2C business, your ideal client is using one or more of the social platforms. It’s imperative to know which type of social media app (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Linked-In, to name three) is most popular with your target market and to prioritise your focus and activities accordingly. As a minimum, your objective is to put your brand in front of your target market.
Social media marketing has been around for several years, and its use is growing exponentially. Actively engaging on the platform(s) is not only a great way to raise your businesses profile, it will also drive traffic to your site, boosting enquiries, sales and ultimately, financial return.
Companies across every market and industry, are leveraging the various social networks to share with their target market, how they can help make their customers and potential customers alike, lives better. Social media networking is something that business owners ignore at their peril and detriment to the bottom line. If social media didn’t work, large firms, with access to more significant amounts of finance, would not be actively marketing and communicating about their brands, products and services. As a smaller business, take note of the larger, global organisations actions.
The Typical Buying Process
- Awareness
- Interest
- Desire
- Action
Many consumers will visit your social media profile before heading to your website, to get a better understanding of your brand before they consider making a purchase. The more types of social media you use, remember to ensure that you’re talking with a consistent voice across them all. This is just one of the reasons why your business must actively use social media as part of your overall advertising and digital marketing strategy.
At DMS, we have a holistic approach to digital marketing. A piecemeal approach does not serve a business well and is a sure-fire way to limit the effectiveness of your investment. It’s vital to ensure that your front and back-office activities align, your digital presence and social marketing activities must support your business’s tactical and strategic goals.
Do you have a digital marketing strategy and aligned social media campaign? If not, get in touch with us today. >> Click Here <<
How To Grow Your Business With Social Media
- Why Use Social Media For Business
- How Many People Are On Social Media?
- How Best to Utilise Social Media to Expand Your Business
- Social Media For Start-Ups
- Social Media Management Will Improve Your Search Engine Ranking. How?
- Paid Advertising
Every business, regardless of size, ultimately, needs sales. Except for a monopoly, the company must either sell more (greater quantity or higher value ticket items) to its existing client base or attract new customers to buy from the current portfolio. Social media can help you grow your business by raising awareness of your brand and generating quality leads, relatively inexpensively.
Why Use Social Media for Business
According to Social network Examiner’s 2017 Social Media Marketing Industry Report, more than 65% of small companies are on social media to increase leads. However, the most significant benefit of using social networks isn’t merely the leads; it’s the capability to create highly qualified leads through advanced targeting. A further report found that enhancing the quality of leads was shown to be a significant barrier to success. For this, you need content that works; this means it must be of interest to your followers. How would you describe your social media strategy?
Are you successfully creating engaging content that’s driving good quality leads, or would your business benefit from some assistance with your social media management? If yes, contact us today to discuss how we can help you.
How Many People Are On Social Media?
A paper published by the LSE, advises:
- Facebook has some 1.2 billion users globally, across all age groups, where c. 42 million are in the UK and a further 307 million in Europe;
- Twitter has c. 325 million users worldwide, with c. 16 million in the UK;
- LinkedIn has 500 million users worldwide, with some 21 million in the UK;
- YouTube – where to start! Every day, over a billion hours of material’s uploaded! Daily!
- Instagram – owned by Facebook, has c. 600 million active users.
Whether you’re in the B2B or B2C sector, based on these numbers, even at the 0.01% level of interest, most companies would be very hard-pressed to service the resulting demand.
How Best To Utilise Social Media to Expand Your Business
At a minimum, you need to get your brand in front of your prospective ideal clients; note the word, “ideal”. This is important. How many of your existing clients would you describe as your “ideal” client? If the answer is not enough or, worse, you’re not sure; you need to work out who is and do so quickly. This is central to how you communicate and interact with them, in turn, impacting the return on the money you invest in your digital activity. It’s very easy to waste money on the “next shiny object”, be this the latest fad for paid ads or boosting your social media campaigns and not see the expected results.
The messages you share will be different, to someone familiar with your brand, product or service than it is with someone who doesn’t know you. Remember the typical buying cycle. Monopolies aside, even if you offer a service that warrants a more immediate buying decision, e.g. a burst water pipe, the buyer is likely to complete a short, but quick check to verify the chosen business is reliable, professional and competent.
Social Media for Start-Ups
Businesses just starting face a multitude of challenges and resources and finances are going to be scarce. Every penny counts. As you’re likely to be starting with minimal presence in your market, raising your profile with your target audience should be high on the “to do” list. Do it right from the outset will save you a lot of time and effort later on, as you will not have to undo things previously done “wrong”. In a way, you’re in a good place, and social media is a useful tool to help level the playing field with the more established firms in your industry. Your goal is to quickly and efficiently make your brand and product/service visible to your target customers. Many of the aspects raised here, are as applicable to business starting as those already up and running.
The take-away, identify and verify which social platform your ideal customers primarily use and focus your efforts accordingly. You can expand to the other platforms afterwards.
Social media management will improve your search engine ranking. How?
The domain and page authority (two important aspects for SEO) of your website increases when the social media share rate rises; securing genuine likes will bring bigger dividends; don’t be tempted to buy likes.
Paid Advertising
There is a wide range of social media platforms, each with its advantages and disadvantages.
Facebook advertising
Facebook algorithms are almost second to none. The knowledge that the platform has about its users is extensive. This means, from an advertising perspective, you can, if you want, have laser-focused adverts.
Linked In advertising
The tone of Linked In is different. It is more professional in nature. Consequently, the type and tone of an advert is more business-focused.
Social media marketing has been around for several years and it is showing no signs of slowing down. With the ever increasing number of consumers who are spending large amounts of their time keeping up with friends and family online, it’s imperative that a business puts its brand out there, not only is this a great way to raise your businesses profile, it can also drive traffic to your site, boosting enquiries and sales.
It is not just consumers who are using the various social sites, companies are also turning to these networks to share with the world how they can help make ones life better in one way or another. Social media networking is something that business owners ignore at their peril and detriment to the bottom line.
Why work with DMS for Your Social Media Marketing Management?
At DMS, our goal is to provide value to your business, ensuring our actions deliver real financial returns for you. We use a range of proven digital media techniques. We work and have worked for local business just like yours, to develop and deliver a social media marketing strategy and accompanying campaign. As we mentioned earlier, we take a holistic approach to digital marketing. If we were to look at things in isolation, critical aspects could be missing, which will compromise the effectiveness of our actions and will be a waste of your investment.
Do you have a digital marketing strategy and aligned social media campaign? If not, get in touch with us today.
Social Media Management Service Pricing
We offer competitive pricing for our social media management services. We have standard packages and do tailor our service accordingly. Contact us in the first instance to discuss your requirements, and we will give you a no-obligation quote.
Social media marketing management should form a core aspect of your overall digital strategy.
4 Steps To Assess Your Social Media Marketing Effectiveness
When was the last time you reviewed how well your social media activity is working? At a minimum, is it still meeting your target KPIs, be this increased social activity, social engagement, referrals, likes or qualified leads?
If the results were not what you expected, 4 steps to take:
- Identify your ideal client
- Identify and verify which is their primary social media platform
- Actively engage and become involved on the primary platform.
- Interact with your market, encourage these followers to share your page with others in their network.
- Depending on your company and what you provide, you may choose to give a coupon or great offer to those who like your page.
- Similar to the last point, you could run a contest, providing an enticing prize to a new follower (this could simply be the 50th or 100th person). Just note, be clear and transparent in both running the contest and awarding the prize. The prize needs to be relevant for your target market
- Verify your KPIs / metrics and check how well these are being realised.
How To Improve Your Social Media Presence – 11 Top Tips
Get up and running without any costly or time-consuming action
First off, you need to set up a page for your business. There are many different types of social media apps, so the one or ones that you choose should be the ones which your target audience are most likely to visit. If you have many images, Instagram is an excellent platform, if it’s more snippets, think Twitter, social Facebook and professional, LinkedIn. As you create your page, ensure that it is a professional representation of your brand. Pay attention to spelling, images – ensuring that these are a good representation of your products/services – and provide adequate information about your business, with precise details as to how you can be contacted.
You need followers. Once you’ve created your social profile or profiles, you need to build up your followers. There are many different ways that you can accomplish this.
Be Present & Active: As you continue with social marketing, it’s essential that you have a presence on your page. As there are so many people who use social media on a daily, and even hourly basis, publishing posts on behalf of your company, you will start to gain their attention. Be clear how and who will manage your social engagement. There is a fine line between posting too much and being a bit annoying and posting just enough to keep your brand visible.
You may have to study your followers to see how often they are on social media, how often they post and then determine what will work best for you. Being present during your online marketing campaign, you will want to be mindful about the things you post. Yes, ultimately you want your target audience to take the desired action (e.g. visit your site and buy from you), but there are many ways to go about doing this.
With so much of the world now online and more specifically social media, today’s consumers are big fans of brands being personalised. By doing this yourself, you can draw in those who would benefit from what you have to offer. This means that you should not only share information about what it is that you sell or services you provide, but also share funny or entertaining stories.
Ask questions that provide an opportunity for those who are interested in sharing their thoughts and feelings about things related to your brand. Share other matters related to your company such as alternative uses for products you may sale, tips on how to clean a specific item, or additional information that your audience will appreciate.
Be Responsive: In addition to being present as a way to market your brand, you will also want to be responsive to your customers. For instance, if you receive a comment or question on your page, be sure that you respond within a reasonable period; this doesn’t necessarily need to be immediate but should be within a few days. This shows your customers that you value them and their time and will go a long way in forming relationships.
Build Trust: As with any relationship, trust and rapport need to be built to ensure it’s long term survival. It is a well-recognised business truism that applies to any and every market, it is easier and cheaper to sell something to someone who’s previously bought from you than to someone who doesn’t know you and hasn’t.
Create Visually Enticing Material: If you’re not creating visually enticing material that gets your audience’s attention, your competition is. Visual marketing will help you raise your profile and stand out online! This may be with the use of images, aim for natural rather than “staged” or professional photos. People on Facebook, for example, are more likely to click on or share natural images. Equally, consider creating video clips to share and promote your brand.
Create traffic. One of the most reliable methods is to produce a profile for your small company on each of the relevant social network platforms. Then, take advantage of these platforms by sharing personalised content for each of them. An active social networks existence will encourage your followers to go through your lead funnel and eventually reach your product purchasing page. Make sure it’s clear and straightforward to purchase from you. Any barriers and they’re likely to go to your competitors.
Include a Clear Call To Action: If you can, include a Click to Tweet function on an interesting statistic, quote, or other detail to make it more shareable. Now it’s merely a click away for readers to share your material. This may sound strange; however, social networks are a great way to watch what your competitors are doing!
Secure Social Likes: This demonstrates to the search engines, Google, Bing, Yahoo et al., that your business is genuine, you have legitimate products/services that your customers want, in turn helping to rank your website on the SERPs (search engine results pages). Social signals are increasingly important – think of it as the digital equivalent of a word of mouth recommendation. Don’t be tempted to buy likes.
Competitor analysis. You can see what type of material they’re posting, and how they’re communicating with their followers. Social networks can also assist you in building up an insight into what’s currently driving the market, what pains and problems are being encountered. There has to be a significant reason why your competitors are performing better than you. Learn their methods, but make sure you don’t just copy and follow them. Modify their ideas and make them your own. Competitive analysis on social networks is all about discovering from the successes and errors of your rivals. It’s also helpful and crucial to self-analyse and see where you stand compared to your competition.
Use Tools: Finally, there are a variety of tools you can use to. Before you jump in and pick which tool to use, look to see if the company offers a free trial period. Utilise free tools like Pro Rank Tracker or Tiny Rocket to track your ranking. Social networks are so much more than just a platform for promoting and providing your small companies services or items. It allows you to build and develop loyal consumers.
To summarise, create a social strategy, build a relationship, engage your audience and provide material that is informative, valuable and on the social platforms used. Start by getting your company on the best network for your brand. Then be a presence, so your customers know they are valued.
If you’d like to discuss how our social media agency team can help you, click on the button below, fill out the simple form and one of the team will be in touch within 2 working days.
