Are you using social media consistently to build your brand awareness and connect with your audience?
If not, why not?
What holds you back?
There’s nothing to lose, and in return, you’re rewarded with an active presence that looks professional and trustworthy, making it easier for people to contact you. Not to mention a cost-effective or even free way to market your business to a wider and broader audience.
If you’re not consistently using social media to maximise your online potential, here are seven ways you can boost your business.
1: Build your brand
Suppose your goal is to sell more products, bookings, items,
subscriptions to have the best chances for success. It would help if you had an
identifiable brand and a following (it doesn’t need to be huge) to get there.
Social media is perfect for brand building.
You can use Instagram
and its interactive features (for example) to create relatable and interactive
content that engages directly with people who may benefit from what you’re
offering.
As you build your
brand, your audience should naturally warm and be engaged in what you’re
building. Over time people get to know you, like you, slowly trust you and then
interest piques, leading to traction, messages, inquiries, and sales which
wouldn’t be an avenue if you weren’t online.
2: Content that connects with an audience
The best bit about social media is it’s fun!
It’s more relatable,
you can show up informally, and if you take advantage of the features available
from the platforms you’re using, there’s so much you can do to learn directly
from your people.
You can literally ask
what they prefer, gold dust for research, allowing you to make content that
connects.
Using the features and different content types like stories,
reels, polls to get a sense of what makes them tick, asking questions,
involving them on decisions (great market research), quizzes (who doesn’t love
a quiz?) all by getting creative with what’s available to you.
You may not have time to post more than two or three times per week, but you can still show up on your stories to interact and learn what your audience is most engaged in.
3: An opportunity to provide practical customer support.
Mostly, it is quicker these days to get information from a
company’s social media vs calling or emailing and waiting several days for a
response.
Not only is this helpful for people, but it’s also an
excellent way to build your customer service experience, trust and reputation
that can help position yourself against your competitors.
4: Boost sales by being visible.
What brands do you get drawn towards when you’re using
social media?
The ones with not the best images? Some of the visuals are a
bit blurry? There appears to be no posting schedule, so you aren’t sure if
they’d respond if you DM’d and asked a question? Let alone purchase something?
So, what most likely
happens? You hop on over to a similar page but one that’s much more active, it
looks good, trustworthy, the community’s booming, the brand is helpful and
engaging with you.
Who would you choose?
5: Spread the word offline
The power of word-of-mouth recommendations! I don’t think
anything can beat it.
The word will spread
offline when you’ve built a brand/business that people know, like, and trust!
When we love
something we’ve found, learned, tried, or tasted, what do we do?
We talk to people!
Tell our friends family, “you must try this thing; it’s amazing!”
Having a positive
online presence can help you spread the word offline about your business.
6: Does your business have a marketing budget?
As a rule of thumb, B2B businesses are advised to invest
2-5%, B2C (typically more) of annual takings back into the business on a marketing budget.
Yet so few smaller businesses do.
When you’re starting up or in a growth phase, you may want to keep costs down to invest in tools, staff, or other essentials and skip the marketing.
Especially for smaller budgets, social media, in my opinion, is unbeatable as a cost-effective marketing option.
Free to use, the only trade-off being your time, depending on the worth of your time, it may make more sense to outsource it.
If you are looking to outsource, check out how I may be able to assist you here.
7. Connect with your community
Loving your local?
A supporter of independent businesses?
A pillar in the community?
How wonderful was it to see local communities rallying together to support one another during the pandemic? It was inspiring, a beautiful, positive thing to witness in such doom and gloomy times!
Social media can truly connect you with your locality and open doors of opportunity for collaborations, networking, other local events that also provide social media-worthy content, and super easy too.
Want to see how my I met a great local business turned dream client amid the pandemic? Read here.
If you’re going to do something, try going all in.
I know how hard it is to be consistent. Business is a juggling act at the best of times. Once you break the habit, it can take a real push to get back online!
Yet, something I find to be true is that it’s always worth the effort because there are too many opportunities for growth to ignore it for too long!
Building a brand identity getting to know new people while keeping the doors of possibility open to you as a business. The more avenues,the better right?
It does take time, consistency, and an effort to provide something of true interest and value to your people, plus a strategic approach with a goal like more web traffic, so you have something to measure your efforts are working in your current approach.
Even if you don’t have tons of time, finding any consistency that works for you can be worth it for growth.
It’s got to be worth trying it out properly, right?
