Social Media Marketing!It’s obvious that if you do well in social media your small business is going to have a much easier time of it. That goes without saying. The far trickier problem is how to actually do well on social media. What does it actually take to grab social media by the tender bits and get it to do your bidding?
Master Social Media Marketing For Small Business
After all, if that was easy then everybody would rock. But they don’t. In fact, 99% of companies barely manage to get noticed at all. So what are they doing wrong and what are those companies that do manage to rise to stardom doing correctly?
That’s what we’re going to explore today.
Attention is a limited resource
Attention is prime real estate. We’ve got a limited attention span. That means there’s only so much of it to go around and everybody is competing for it. In other words, for your content and your social media to get noticed by people, you need to beat the other people in your field for the attention of your audience.
Not just that, but you also need to beat ingrained habits. If there is already some site out there that provides information that is similar to what you aim to provide, then even if your content is better than theirs, you might not actually get anywhere, as you’re battling against how they’re used to doing things and what pages they’re used to checking out.
Needs and wants
What you’re aiming to do, in order to get heard over the noise, is tap into a basic want or need. These can be positive or negative. These motivations include desire to belong and not be ostracized, desire to get pleasure and avoid pain, desire to find hope and avoid fear.
For you to be successful, you need to engage these emotions for your audience with your content, so that users are tempted to click on this content provided by a new player in the field, rather than somebody who they know and trust.
Who is your audience?
Of course, for that to actually work you need to know who your audience is. If your answer at this point is ‘everybody’ then you’re doing something wrong. You can’t have ‘everybody’ as your audience as ‘everybody’ has a huge range of interests and very little overlap. By targeting them all, you’ll never be able to permanently shift anybody over to your social media channels, as you’ll only ever make them lukewarm.
What you want to do is make a segment of the people out there red hot for what you’re offering. In this way, they’ll keep coming back to your channels to see what you’ve got on offer today. If you can keep that up for long enough, then your site will take over as their location of choice and you’ll have created a new habit.
So define your audience. Know them. Study them. Then move on to the next step.
5 whys method
With your audience defined, you can start crafting pieces of content towards their wants and desires. A good way to do that is to use the five whys method, as devised by Taiichi Ohno. Simply ask ‘why’ five times in a row and you should get to the base need that the piece is trying to fulfill.
So, I’m writing a piece about mastering social media for small businesses (just came up with that – no idea where it came from) then I would ask:
- ‘Why does my reader want to read this’ and the answer would be ‘because they are trying to get better at social media’
- Then I ask ‘why are they trying to get better at social media’ and the answer would be ‘because social media would help get customers’
- ‘Why do they want to get more customers’ and the answer to that would be ‘because it will make their business bigger’.
- ‘Why do they want to make their business bigger?’ and there the answer is ‘because they’ll have more money and be more resistant to shock’
- ‘Why would they want that?’ and the answer would be ‘Because then they can get what they want and be less at risk for losing it’.
And there you go. This article, therefore, aims to get pleasure and avoid pain. So would that be an effective article for the people whose attention I’m trying to attract? And the answer to that would be ‘yes’ as small business owners often care a great deal about having their business succeed and not go under. And so, the best websites will use that to motivate them and to get them to click on and try out the new content (or return to it, in case you’ve already won them over before).
Balance the creation and the marketing
When you’ve created a piece of content, the next step is to market it correctly. This means more than just popping it up on social media once. That really isn’t enough. It means marketing it again and again – preferably on different social media platforms and on different times of the day so that you reach different audience segments.
Just re-marketing a piece of content several times has been demonstrated to double your audience. That’s a small effort to get several times the number of people to view your content, don’t you think?
Try small runs
Don’t just rely on organic marketing either. You should certainly try different types of paid marketing as well. The secret here is to try out different strategies and different tactics before you commit to a specific strategy. Create several campaigns, but only commit a few dollars at a time. In each of these campaigns, vary something slightly. Try out different headlines, different buzz texts, and different images.
Then you can compare the different ideas you’ve tried out and see what works best before you commit more resources to it.
Use your size to your advantage
Bigger companies have a lot of advantages. They’ve got bigger budgets, larger teams and a lot more. You can’t change that. That does not mean that you don’t have any advantages of your own, however.
For example, you are smaller which means that you’re more nimble and can react more quickly to new occurrences. That can be hugely advantageous if you pick up on some new trend or idea and can jump aboard quickly.
Also, because you’re a smaller company, you’ve got a human element. You’ve got a cohesive story about your own struggles and motivations. Many people will appreciate that. They like a human side to their stories and they always love a tale of the underdog taking on the big boys.
So make sure that you use that to draw them in.
Last words
Social media marketing is something that will take time. It isn’t just that you’ll have to build up your platforms and create a following, but there is a lot to learn as well. So don’t despair if your strategies don’t initially pay off as big as you’d hoped.
The trick is to stay nimble and to keep changing what doesn’t work. From there, your strategy will keep getting more effective and you’ll keep getting more bang for your buck.
And in that way, you’ll be able to beat out your competition and create a social media platform that will build up your audience and attract new customers both.
