You understand very well the pain of wearing multiple hats if you run all your business facets or if you’re a solo entrepreneur or on a small-sized marketing team. You’re likely to rank social media marketing as the last option in your business goals because of the countless deliverables that you handle to see your small-sized business succeeding.

But, writing off social media marketing is a great mistake you can make. Currently, most people spend much of their time on various social media platforms. Also, research shows that those using social media platforms interact with their companies of interest or the ones they do business with from time to time. Therefore, besides being a free marketing channel, social media features many potential customers ready to purchase your services/products.

Fun, free, and easy to use

Social media is a powerful channel for exposing you to your potential customers if you run small businesses that focus on individual customers or community customers. With social media, you get a hassle-free way of building brand loyalty and brand awareness.

Other than this, most businesses use social media as a reliable platform for generating more leads. This platform allows you to create resources and quality content, capable of adding value to your potential customers. It makes this possible while hurting the potential customers’ brand affinity.

If users click the offer or content, it means they need it, or they want more updates relating to your business. After following your business, they’re likely to become customers compared to those individuals who see offers or ads unrelated to the things they need.

Besides being a free and fun platform, social media is also an easy tool that makes it hassle-free for businesses to get in touch with their potential audiences. However, fun, easy, and free does not suggest that you can quickly generate more sales by creating a social media account and posting your services/products.

So, how can small businesses maximize social media and generate more leads and sales?

Let’s see!

Plan! Plan! Plan!

 Source: Venngage

Using social media tools is not a challenge, and you can promote organic posts without paying anything. As a result, you’re likely to get tempted, create an account, and start posting. However, you must begin the process with an effective plan to generate more sales using social media.

If you don’t have a plan, you don’t know what you want to achieve with social media marketing. Also, this means you can’t measure your social media marketing results. Therefore, consider setting some of your time and highlight what you aim to achieve with social media marketing. Through this, you will focus on social efforts that support your business objectives. To create an effective social media marketing plan:

●   Create Goals

Here, you should create social media goals that adhere to the SMART framework. The SMART framework means you should create timely, specific, relevant, measurable, and attainable social media goals. Let your social media goals rely on metrics with a significant impact on your small business. Aim to generate more leads or acquire more customers instead of racking up likes.

●   Know Your Competitors

Conduct research to get ideas on how your competitors put social media into use, what kind of content they post and how they advertise their business. Yes, you don’t have to copy their strategies, but it’s critical to learn their operation mode to reduce your study curve. With competitive analysis, you can quickly tell the plan that works and the one that doesn’t work.

●   Social Media Audit

Have you started using social media? If yes, then it’s time to pause and analyze your existing social media marketing efforts. While conducting a social media audit, check the social media accounts that are likely to be utilizing your online thunder without your knowledge. Here, you can use various social media audit templates to handle the process.

●   Know Your Inspiration

Yes, you have checked the strategies employed by your competitors, but what about the remaining businesses? Check the companies that have emerged victorious in various industries and let them be your inspiration. But, which is the source of these success-related stories?

Worry no more because you can quickly get them on business sections of several social media platforms. In these sections, you will get useful case studies that will inspire your social media marketing efforts. Also, consider getting ideas from the existing followers about what they need most and then focus on that line.

●   Create A Calendar

Source: Asana

With a social media calendar, you will post quality content on various social media platforms quickly and at the required time. However, ensure your social media calendar features a plan relating to your social media content mix. Here, you can start by implementing the 80 to 20 rule. This rule means entertaining, educating, or informing your potential audiences using 80 percent of the content and selling your products or promoting your brand using the remaining 20 percent of your content.

Know Your Potential Audience

Do you understand what a potential audience means? Well, a prospective audience or target audience refers to the audiences who’ll find the services/products you offer to be beneficial and relevant. These are the people you’ll focus on most and convince them that your products are the best than those of your competitors.

Before taking any step, it’s crucial to check your followers and group them into different classes. Conduct research and know the impact of your data on the audience’s job title, income, age, and location. Through this, you’ll quickly understand how your product/service will change their day-to-day life.

Furthermore, ensure that you’re overly specific. Don’t focus your target on only one thing. For example, if you sell fitness wearables, don’t focus solely on millennials because not all millennials can afford your fitness wearables.  And this is the point where segmentation plays a critical role.

Make Content Creation Easy

Source: Openview Partners

You’re likely to take more time in creating quality social media content if you miss the right tools.

For example, if you have an Inoreader, you will quickly get the relevant social media content and remain updated with your best information sources. With this tool, you will save website pages and view them at your convenient time and even register yourself with social feeds.

You can use tools like Canvas or VSCO to process your phone videos and pictures quickly. You do all this directly from your phone. You can also schedule and post your social media content across different networks by using tools like SEMrush, Sprout Social, or Buffer.

As a social media manager, you can make small errors, but social media can punish you mercilessly if this happens. However, you can keep your business’ reputation intact by using tools like Grammarly.

RiteTag works well if you need hashtags. A professional social media needs to have this tool. With this tool, you will quickly get tag suggestions relating to social network text or images. You only need to right-click on that text or image.

Note The Critical Metrics

Note down the metrics with significant impacts on you and your small business before putting social media into maximum use. Take care not to end with ‘vanity metrics’ that ensure you have a good feeling but can’t assist you in decision making, judging value, or taking action. Avoid these metrics because they don’t focus on your business goals.

Focus on the sales you make and not the likes you receive. However, there are several valuable metrics other than sales numbers. You can also track the engagement rates generated by each post, the traffic that’s driven to your site by social media, and the specific engagements like retweets vs. likes. Remember, each metric stands in a better position of giving information, but the value relies on whether you can use it to make effective decisions.

Post Daily

Posting every day helps to keep your accounts active. You might discourage a potential audience from following you if they visit your page and realize your last post was two weeks ago. Most audiences will not follow a brand that doesn’t post frequently.

Also, put your existing followers into consideration. Always keep posting so that they can get updated about your services/products.

Research shows that over half of small-sized businesses post from one day to another. This study means it’s your time to utilize this gap and outshine your competitors. You’re likely to give your followers a long-lasting impression if you post daily and your competitors post only a few days per month or once per week.

You update your followers about your services/products each time you post. These followers are likely to choose your company and avoid the other ones that post a few days per month or once per week.

Most small businesses don’t post on social media daily because they don’t know what to post. Consider re-checking your social media marketing goals if your small business falls under this category.

For example, consider posting a promotional offer relating to your products if your social media marketing goal entails promoting new products. Update your social media page with fresh content you just published on your site. Post links directing your potential audience to the posts you published recently.

Final Thoughts

Maximize social media power to run a small business that relates well to today’s era.

Don’t focus only on having a Facebook profile because this does not mean putting social media marketing into maximum use.

Ensure you have a profile on each social media platform having your potential audiences.

Besides this, remember to post from time to time. Also, ensure you post only posts relating to the social media marketing objectives you plan to achieve.

Rithesh Raghavan is the Director at Acodez, a Digital Agency in India.,  and the co-founder of Acowebs, an online store for eCommerce plugins with 25000+ satisfied customers across the globe. Having a rich experience of 17+ years in Digital Marketing, Rithesh loves to write up his thoughts on the latest trends and developments in the world of IT and software development. You can follow Acowebs on their Facebook page to stay in touch with the latest eCommerce updates.