As a small business owner or an entrepreneur looking to start a new business, you may feel inundated with marketing concepts, ideas, strategies and community groups to help market your brand. From local coupons, to signage and online ad space, there is always a new way to spend money to promote your business. So it’s easy to forget about one of the easiest and cheapest ways to build brand awareness. Social Media Marketing.
Social media marketing is simply the use of social media platforms and websites to promote your business. There are approximately 3.48 billion users on social media! According to supplygem.com 1 out of every 3 of those users say that one of the main reasons they use a particular social media platform is to follow a brand or to find products, and that the average social media user has accounts with 8 platforms. So the decision for small businesses becomes, which platform to use or to use multiple platforms.
Using multiple platforms to promote brand awareness can become a full time job and expensive if you’re paying for ad space across different search engines, such as Google ads. There are Digital Marketing Services to help you create an online presence, post regularly and maintain that presence, for a cost, of course. These services can pay for themselves with increased customers and exposure. Most digital marketing companies can help you with reputation management as well. With so many platforms, it may be tough to decide where to begin. Facebook and YouTube are the two largest social media platforms, while Instagram is the fastest growing platform right now.
Each platform targets a different audience and a different type of consumer, even targeting specific demographics. So deciding where to begin your social media marketing may take a little research based on your brand and your targeted consumer. Search engines like Google are now including social media posts, reviews and comments in their algorithms that affect your business site rankings, so by not having a presence, you’re missing out on increased rankings as well.
How does social media marketing affect actual revenue? A recent study by Aalto University, The University at Buffalo and Texas A&M University found that consumers that follow a business on social media will contribute 5.6% more revenue and visit that business 5% more than customers that do not follow the business on social media. Pretty sure any business you ask right now, would gladly take a 5% increase on revenue, especially if it didn’t cost anything but a Facebook login!
