I speak to hundreds of small business owners about marketing each year, so the trends in their questions and concerns are easy to spot. When it comes to microbusinesses, although there are those who love to be on social media, there are many who shudder at the thought of social media marketing. They are told that they need to be on social media for their business, and they open up however many accounts because they believe they have to do so to market. But – is it really a requirement? Let’s talk about whether social media marketing is mandatory.
I will start out by saying that different marketers have different philosophies. I don’t discourage others from having their opinions. I am sharing mine here, and I will walk you through my logic.
Is social media marketing mandatory? My answer is no.
When I work with a small business owner to develop a marketing plan, there are a number of factors I take into account. I want to know where their target markets are. I want to know how their brand is best represented. I want to know what resources they have to market (how much time, money, connections, or team support they have, for example). I also want to know what they are actually going to do. Consistently. Well into the future.
That last one is important to me but often not addressed by marketers. I don’t want you to have a plan that will burn you out in a year, making you stop marketing altogether. My goal is to help you find a way to be consistent in putting your business out there.
I don’t want you to have a plan that will burn you out in a year, making you stop marketing altogether. #socialmedia #marketing #business #smallbusiness #smallbusinesses #microbusiness #smb #smallbiz #entrepreneur
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When it comes to social media marketing, there are certainly advantages to be had. Most social media platforms have a way of helping you isolate the audience you are trying to reach. Whether through groups, hashtags, pages following other pages, or a variety of other little tricks we use, you can find where the people you want to reach are hanging out. Social media can be used for no cost to market your business. Social media gives you a way to engage people in conversations, come up in notifications, and help people discover you. (Read here to learn more about why social media engagement is more impactful than posting.) It also makes it relatively easy – on most platforms – to give people links to get them back to your website or other calls to action. And, of course, social media lets you have control over what you say about your business, while giving you an open forum to respond to customer comments and inquiries in the voice of your brand.
Social media is a place where you can help new customers discover you, keep your business top of mind for the people in your pipeline, enhance the perception of your business when people see how popular you appear to be, or share more information about your business and brand that could persuade someone to become a customer if they are trying to learn more.
But, with all these benefits, there is an important caveat. Social media marketing is a long-term marketing commitment. When you create an account for your business on any platform, know that people can see if you are hardly posting to it or getting hardly any interaction on it.
Social media marketing is a long-term marketing commitment. #socialmedia #marketing #business #smallbusiness #smallbusinesses #microbusiness #smb #entrepreneur #smallbiz
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If I see an account that hasn’t had a post in months, I am wondering if that business is still open. If I see a business that posts once a month, I know that hardly anybody actually saw the content. If see an account that has barely any people interacting with it, I wonder if the business is doing okay. Social media can make your business look better, or it can make it look worse.
The businesses that do well on social media tend to be ones that post multiple times per week with a variety of engaging content AND go out of their way to interact with other people and pages to bring more traffic back to their page. Social media is meant to be social, and it inherently works best if you are willing to be proactive in your interaction long term.
Social media is meant to be social, and it inherently works best if you are willing to be proactive in your interaction long term. #socialmedia #marketing #business #smallbusiness #smallbiz #microbusiness #entrepeneur
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If this sounds scary to you, please admit it to yourself right now! There is no written rule that your business has to be on social media. If there were a rule like that and everybody were on social media, that would make it too saturated for most people to get noticed and not a viable marketing solution anymore.
Marketing your business effectively requires a strategy, and it requires knowing what purpose each tactic you are doing has in the grand scheme of things. In what ways can new leads discover your business? Once they discover it, what is the next step to give them more information or woo them? How and where do you address objections? How do you stay in front of them until they are ready to buy? Once they buy, how do you follow up with them to encourage them to buy again, buy something bigger, or refer you to someone else?
Social media marketing can play a role in more than one of those areas, which is great if you want to include it in your marketing plan. If you don’t, what else are you doing to make sure you are satisfying all of those elements of your marketing strategy?
You could meet leads at a networking event, a tradeshow, through cold emails, from podcast interviews, from strategically-planted referral sources, by partnering with other businesses, or so many other ways. You could help convince people about your product/service or brand by having more informative content on your website, such as blogs, case studies, FAQs, stories, testimonials, or videos. You can stay on everyone’s radar with email marketing or newsletters – which I encourage you to do anyway, even if you are on social media. There are many ways to fulfill the various elements of your marketing plan. Most of them can be done with less overall time commitment than social media.
So, if you want to market your business on social media, please do! If you are there because you think you are supposed to be – but you are not actually doing much marketing there – I encourage you to ask yourself if that is truly the best use of your marketing resources. If the answer is no, give thought to this question: What type of marketing is a better use of resources for you?
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