The small business world is all about working hard to achieve goals and milestones as the business grow. Owners perform several duties all by themselves and often excel at them. However, the day-to-day requirement of operation, sales, invoicing, payroll, and service take a lot of time and energy.
In all this, something that goes unnoticeable is marketing. The marketing mix is an essential element for a business as it covers the essentials and things that help in increasing business. These things are identified as the website and campaigns which can generate lead and sales and are close to clicking to conversion. All these elements are email marketing, SEO, paid search, etc.
Nevertheless, out of all these elements, social media is left out; it is given minimal importance. Not all business owners have a massive commitment towards social media, or they invest a lot of time in it. But, this doesn’t mean that it cannot impact the business positively. It can fit into the marketing mix.
Let’s not take a look at the tips how a social media strategy can help in the engaging audience and impact the business positively.
Table of Contents
Identify Personas
There are many resources that talk about the process of persona development and how they help in the content market. It can build an overall marketing strategy for a small business. If the business owner doesn’t have a defined target audience for his products or services, then he should start from here.
The business owner doesn’t need to go through a massive research project to get this info. If the business owner doesn’t know where to start from, he can go to Google Analytics. There he can activate the interests section of the users to see their groups. However, if the business owner doesn’t have the luxury of current data, he can dig into the Google and Facebook ads to explore different options, such as demographics, interests, and behaviour. Accordingly, he can see the categories that fit his understanding of the customers or clients.
Know the Customer Journey
Everyone typically knows the steps that drive engagement, leads, or sales. It can be due to any specific campaign, marketing channel, or category of content. The point that we want to cover here is that most businesses don’t have customer journey on tips which result in the sales.
Notably, it can be a bit difficult to get a complete picture of the customer journey. But there are ways of getting the same. For example, the business owner can look at the content that interests the audience. It can be a great value in decision making.
Besides, there are several reporting platforms that can be tied together. However, the business or product should first get some visibility to ultimately make customers reach the goal of buying/purchasing the product or service.
Track Everything
If the above mentioned tips are a challenge, the most probable reason for this can be a lack of data or information. Well, it goes without saying that tracking and measuring are very crucial for marketing. With no data, the business owner is left using the industry trends or giving it a guess based on the things that work in the offline world.
It is crucial to ensure that Google Analytics tracks all the pages on the website. Besides, ensure that the content going in email, social media, or other sources go with UTM so as to enable proper tracking parameters through Google Analytics. Also, find ways to utilize other source codes or promo codes to merge online and offline data.
Significantly, the more the business owner would track data, the more information he will drain from it. Subsequently, he can make changes in his campaigns and strategies. Also, without any objective or evaluation, the strategy would just waste of time, money, and effort.
Use Active Methods
Whitepapers, webinars, Ebooks, and long-form content can be a perfect option to engage and resonate the audience and customers. However, all these are significant investments and require a test before deploying. A great wat to test this and figure out the right content type, target options, frequency of posting content, etc. to perform all the tests in smaller quantity.
Agile marketing is a valuable strategy in these terms. Many small business owners don’t have time or budget to statistically choose the sample size, search the best content from the wide range of content, and check which option works the best. After getting the results from the test, the small business owner can plan a single strategy for content.
Repurpose Content
Wherever and whenever possible, the small business owner should look for opportunities to leverage the current content and its sources. If a blog is created for SEO purpose, test it on social media handle! If a content piece is created for email, repurpose it for social. By using one content at more than one place, there are better chances to get a return on investment on a single content piece. Plus, it helps in getting more data and check how the content is performing across different channels.
Notably, if the information is relevant and accurate, there’s no harm in re-sharing or repurposing it on the website, or social media handle for more than once. The hidden gems of content quality might be limited or little to just one set of audience. Using content at different places would help in resonating a solid content strategy on all platforms.
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