Importance of Social Media Marketing for Small Business
Advertising is a major overhead for most businesses. In this age of shrinking attention spans, you need continuous engagement with customers to achieve customer loyalty. This can be difficult for small businesses with their limited marketing budgets. This is where social media turns into an effective marketing channel for small businesses.
Social media is more than just an advertisement channel. It can provide Small and Medium Businesses (SMBs) with many marketing benefits – from personalised customer engagement to analytic tools. Let us quickly look at a few of them.
Targets community and individual audience
Small businesses generally cater to local communities and individuals and benefit from being involved in these communities. Social media is a useful tool for customer engagement – you can easily and quickly communicate with potential customers and solve their queries. Customer reviews and testimonials on social media are seen as more genuine than on mainstream advertising channels.
Reduces advertising expenditure
Social media is mostly free. There are some paid advertisement options, like on Facebook. The paid advertisements help you reach a target audience base within a small budget. You don’t have to spend huge amounts on traditional ads trying to target a huge customer base outside your area of operation. You can post about offers, products, announcements, testimonials, reviews on your social media profiles absolutely FREE.
Create brand recognition and recall
Customers will generally go for brands they recognise and that resonate with their values. Social media provides excellent opportunities for creating brand value and recognition for SMBs. A good social media strategy allows you to broadcast your brand even when an individual is not actively in a purchase mode. This helps to create a strong brand recall value.
Personalised interaction with customers
Personalisation is an essential aspect of small businesses at all levels of customer engagement. Social media allows for personalised attention and engagement with customers. Small businesses can go beyond the usual scripted responses and respond appropriately to the direct situation of an individual customer. This is an advantage that small businesses have over big businesses that usually go for automated or scripted responses.
Tool for customer behaviour analysis
Most social media channel have tools that give you insights into customer behaviour when they interact with your page. And these tools are free. This provides valuable information for small and medium businesses on customer demographics and areas of improvement.
Create a conversation about your business
It doesn’t have to be all posts on your products. You can comment on industry happenings, send out wishes on popular days, send shout-outs to business partners etc.
Social media is a powerful marketing tool when used efficiently. The Computing Australia Group can help you create a strong and effective Social Media Strategy. Contact our experts or email at sales@computingaustralia.group to know more.
Jargon Buster
Brand – is an identifying logo, name, word, symbol or sentence that businesses use to differentiate their product from others.
SEO – Search Engine Optimisation – is a set of tactics aimed at increasing website traffic quality and quantity through organic search results.
Brand Recall – the extent to which a customer recollects or remembers a brand name when prompted with a similar product or service. (Unaided recall)
Brand Recognition – the ability of customers to confirm that they have seen or heard about a brand when prompted by the specific brand. (Aided recalls)
Social Media Strategy – a detailed plan of how a business will use social media to achieve business objectives.
Customer demographics – Statistical data that describes the unique identities and identifiers of individuals. It can include basic information such as age, gender, location, including zip code and address.
Article originally published on 26/07/2020
Revised on 19/04/2021
Added new point: Create a conversation about your business
Added new terms to Jargon Buster