How can small businesses use social media and digital tools effectively?
I was recently asked to answer some questions live on LBC radio with Emma Jones CEO of Enterprise Nation. And they asked me questions about using social media and digital for businesses.
In this post I elaborate some more and answer the questions in more detail to help small and bricks and mortar businesses to use digital for their business.
What forms of social media have businesses been most keen to know about?
It’s been Facebook and Instagram at the moment. Although curious about TikTok the small and traditional bricks and mortar businesses don’t see right now how that can drive business value. Whereas Facebook really provides a great deal of free training resources for small businesses (such as facebook blueprint) as well as many free opportunities to reach their target customers through the free tools they provide. Also most people are on Facebook in some way or another and so they are familiar with the opportunities it provides. People can also shop directly through facebook and instagram so for product businesses this presents a real opportunity to sell online at low or no cost.
What is your top tip for succeeding on Facebook and Instagram?
Don’t treat social media as a way to just broadcast and sell. Social media works best when you provide value and solve people’s problems, entertain them or inspire them! No one likes to just be sold to all the time, try and find different ways to appeal to your customers and think of creative ways to connect with them and reach them. Keep in mind that having lots of followers and likes doesn’t always relate to more sales, you want to focus on the right people.
Have a plan…
The first thing to take into account is your goals for using social media, what do you want to achieve and by when? Then think about your customer, who you are looking to target? This will help you to come up with a plan for communicating with your customers. When you understand the pain points and problems your customer has you can really start to post content on social media that they will enjoy.
It’s also really important to remember that mostly if you aren’t spending on advertising (like facebook ads) then it may take you longer to build an audience. I always recommend coming up with a social media posting schedule so you plan in advance what you are going to post and when you are going to post it so you can get organised with your content and you aren’t spending time each day thinking of ideas about what to post.
Research your competitors or what similar businesses are doing, try and understand why certain posts are doing well, for example do you see a post or something that makes you stop scrolling and read, why? Learn from these posts!
Play with the tools available, get to know how they work, use stories to connect with people and show them some exciting behind the scenes content!
Look at your analytics / insights on your website and within the platforms to see what people are doing, are they more active on certain days or times? Are they a certain age demographic? Male or female? Are they based somewhere specific, this is a great way to learn about your customers so you can share with them content that appeals and at the times of day they want to see it.
Try and join up with other complimentary businesses and cross promote each other, perhaps do a joint giveaway then you’ll open up to each others audiences and gain new followers that could lead to new customers.
When you’ve nailed your target audience and more you will be able to start using the advertising platfom, here you will be asked questions like age, sex, where they live and you can run ads that target just the people you choose you can even choose to target them based on their interests like makeup or football for example. Ads can be an incredibly powerful tool for reaching new people and getting your products and services in front of them. Typically you can reach thousands of your perfect customers from just a few pounds and when done properly this can be really successful.
What other forms of digital marketing would you recommend?
Having a website is really important, it’s like a business shop front online, here you can create a space that lets your customers know everything they need to about you and include links to your social media you can sell products and services and more. Then getting the right people to see that website is also important.
Google my business is a fantastic tool! Make sure you set this up especially if you are a local business, it is free and it really helps you get those local business enquiries. And it’s still majorly under-utilised. - You can also ask customers to leave you great reviews which again becomes a factor in making your website appear higher up in Google.
Then I would score a news or blog page highly on your website.
A space where you can create guides or articles that answer your customers burning questions, this can really help with SEO - Search engine optimisation, think about it like this, if I am looking for a new shed, i’m going to do some research - i’ll search... New Shed London or how much is a shed or what type of shed is best for example and if you have created a blog answering this question directly you are more likely to appear higher in search for that question But remember every person will get a different search result.
Top tip: There is a website called answer the public dot com where you can type in a word like garden shed and see all of the questions the internet is asking about garden sheds! Write detailed answers to these questions or even better create a video answering the questions and put it on youtube! Another place where you can appear in search. You can then use these videos and embed them on your website and you can use the videos for social media content too!
If you want to learn more about facebook and instagram marketing and advertising, I give free training on Fridays at 10:30am in this facebook group