Most of us use one social media platform or another. With over 4.2 billion active users across the globe, social media has become one of the go-to outlets for businesses to expand their customer base and brand. When you combine the huge user base with social media’s free-to-use model and low-cost advertising, it becomes a necessary part of a small business’s marketing efforts.
- Social media is popular: Saying social media is popular is an understatement. Almost 70% of Americans have at least one social media page, and almost 50% of those users say they check their social media several times a day. That is a huge pool of potential new customers.
- Low-cost marketing: It’s free to have a social media page, or two, or three. You can’t get a lower cost than that! Simply by having a larger social media presence and creating quality content, you will be advertising your business, generating leads, and bringing in new customers. But if you want to reach a targeted audience more quickly, paid advertising on social media offers a lower cost than most traditional marketing.
- Increase brand awareness: With billions of users worldwide, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter are the perfect places to promote your business. With these platforms, you can share information about your business quickly and efficiently, speak with your audience directly, and your audience themselves can share information about your business.
- Manage your brand: If people are making posts about your company online, you are going to want to read and respond to them. Doing so can increase customer satisfaction, or it can help alleviate frustrations. It lets current and potential customers know that you care about your service or product and are willing to make things right, if there’s a problem.
- Increase website traffic: By posting engaging content and using targeted advertising, you can easily drive traffic to your website. Not only does this improve the quantity of traffic, it can increase the quality of the traffic, because visitors from your social media pages will already be aware of the type of products/services you offer.
- Interact directly with customers: Social media allows conversations to happen directly with your customers. This is a huge change from traditional marketing. Radio, TV, and print are all one-way advertising. There’s no talking back to the radio. But with social media, your customers can ask you questions directly, and you can ask questions of your customers. You can learn what they think, or what they would like to see.
- Help with email marketing: Social media can help your small business’s email marketing in an easy way. It provides a wide-reaching platform from which to share your email list signup link. But even without posting, you can add a link to your email list on your Facebook profile or use a “Link in bio” service on Instagram.
- Boost sales: As social media evolves, so do their tools to promote your products or services. Outside of simply making posts about what you offer, Facebook has an option to sell products from a shop connected to your profile. Instagram allows you to tag products in your posts, so if a potential customer sees something they like, they can click a product link.
- Promote your content: If you regularly write new blog posts or design new products, you can use social media to promote those things. Or you can even offer a coming soon teaser to create interest.
- User generated content: Being able to directly interact with your audience means you can ask what kind of content they want to see from your company. This does two things: it gives you free ideas for what content/products to make, and it allows you to do things your customers want, with no guesswork involved.
- Keep your business in minds: There are always going to be slow times in business. During those slow times, you can use social media to keep your business in the minds of your audience. Social media platforms offer a low-cost, high ROI way to advertise your business and keep your name out there.
- Problem solving/customer support: If your customers have issues or are confused on how to use your products, your social media pages offer an easy way they can talk directly to you. There you can ask questions, problem solve, or offer a way to make up for a damaged product. This can help boost your business’s reputation by avoiding bad reviews.
- Customer data: All social media platforms gather data on their users. Through their analytics, you can access that information to learn about your customers and make better decisions on how and whom to advertise to.
- Learn about competitors: If you are using social media, you can bet your competition is as well. This offers a great way to keep an eye on what they are doing. You can also track mentions of those competitors by their customers. It allows you to see what they might be doing right or wrong, allowing you to adjust.
Even small businesses/startups?
If you run a small business or a startup, you may not be able to afford a lot of traditional marketing options. Social media allows you to advertise to a massive potential audience in a low-cost, high ROI way.
How can SOULO help?
SOULO has a full team of creative service professionals to not only manage your social media pages for you, but to create professional graphics, photos, video, and other content to help turn potential customers into return customers.
What we use to help
- Social Media Management: We manage your social media pages for you. We take care of everything from content creation to content scheduling.
- Content Calendar: Posting regularly is important, so we work with our clients to build out a schedule of content to create and post across your social media pages.
- Specialized Software: When it comes to social media software, SOULO practices what we preach. We use Sprout Social for our own social media needs and that of our clients. It allows us to post across most social media platforms, sort statistics, and create reports to better understand data.
- Advanced Reporting: Sprout Social allows us to dive into the statistics to create reports for most platforms, divide data into organic and paid, sort top content, and take a deeper dive into demographics. Quality data feeds back into content creation, so your posts are better targeted to your audience.
- Dedicated Account Manager: Our Digital Marketing Specialist handles the breadth of the social media landscape for you. With their expertise, they plan out a monthly calendar of content, all personalized to your needs. This can include basic to advanced features; all then sent in a personalized link for you to review and approve.
- Content Creation: SOULO has a full team of creative service professionals to help build your social media audience. We use all our professional services (marketing, graphics, photos, video, writing, and editing) to help your business grow.
- Approval Process: Only approved content will get posted to any of your social media pages. We work with our clients to meet their needs and fit into their approval process.
- Automation: With Sprout Social, not only we can schedule future content, but we can automate responses with chatbots and sort and prioritize your inbox.
- Advertisements: Using each platform’s advertising and analytics, combined with statistics and data, our media professionals create advertising targeted to the right audience.
Whether you’re a small or large business, SOULO can help you manage the ever-shifting social media landscape. Our creative media professionals can oversee it all for you. So if you need a social media team by your side, let SOULO be that team.
