9 Tips to Effectively Marketing with Social Media

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve heard many marketing experts recommend small businesses use social media as part of their marketing strategy. The Internet is swamped with articles on using Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and something called Pinterest, and a heap of other sites, to help promote your brand, products and services. For most small business owners, however, all this information is just causing a problem of overwhelm, and in some cases, just forces the small business owner to do nothing.

Social Media is JUST a TOOL

Keep in mind when using social media to promote your products and services is that it is just a tool. The key question for any business is “What do I want to achieve from marketing on social media?”

Marketing on Social Media… is exactly that, utilising a digital tool called social media to reach your target market and influence them to do business with you. Where marketing on tools like TV, Radio and Print, is mostly a one-way dialogue with your business talking at groups of people that contain a percentage of your target market, marketing on social media is an open dialogue where you attract and converse with your target market, create and build relationships and influence them into doing business.

Here are my 9 Tips to Effectively Marketing with Social Media:-

1. Be where your target market is and not where you are comfortable. If your target market are professionals, then you need to be on LinkedIn, where you like it or not.

2. Keep one eye on what your competitors’ are doing on social media. It makes good business sense to check out what is working, and what isn’t working for others in your industry. No point in you making the same mistakes.

3. Engage and interact with your target market. This builds credibility, relationships and a community, and we all know that “people do business with people (not logos) that they know, like and trust”.

4. Always provide value that is worthy of your target market’s time. Only create and share content that is congruent with your products and services and that builds on a reason why someone would want to do business with you. Every time you post ask yourself “what is it that I want my prospect to do once they have this information?”

5. Integration. As mentioned, social media is a tool, and it doesn’t replace TV, Radio or Print (Shock, horror, I bet you never thought I would say that…) What you should learn to do is integrate all of these marketing tools to get the best results. Use TV, Radio and Print to reach out to your target market and grab their attention, then drive them to social media where you get to build on relationships and prove your credibility building trust and influencing them to do business. Can you see how powerful this could be?

6. Humanise your brand. It’s all well and good to have a great looking logo and brand image, but really, if you think about it, people don’t care about that stuff. It’s been documented that purchases are based on emotion, and one way to stimulate that emotion with your target market on social media is to create a reality around your brand, this requires authenticity, transparency and openness. Converse with your prospects on social media like you would if they walked into your store, look them in the eye, talk about the weather, answer their questions, solve their problems, this builds emotional relationships more than a glossy logo or Facebook cover image.

7. Get OUT! on social media. If you only post in your own little circle you’ll only ever really reach the people that already know you and your products. Venture out into other communities where your target market hangs out and start building a relationship with those other non-directly-competing businesses. Maybe even work on ‘cross’ venture marketing, where you share their content with your followers, in exchange for them sharing your content with their followers. It’s a win-win.

8. Test and measure. “You can only manage what you can measure” so keeping good stats on what is working and what isn’t working is important to get the best results from your time (and it’s a lot of time) and effort.

9. In the end, social media might be cheap, but it isn’t free. Your time is valuable, you can spend your time learning how to leverage social media or you can hire someone that has already done the learning (like us), so you can get back to ‘making money’.