10 Tactics to Make Social Media Work for SMBs

With most companies shifting their marketing attention from traditional media to social media, the importance of good marketing tactics has constantly been increasing. Getting the right marketing tactics is very important, or else the strategy is ineffective.

There are a lot of methods that people have used from time to time-related to social media marketing, but not all of them are effective. Here is a list of 10 marketing tactics that have been tried-and-tested as effective marketing methods.

10 Effective Social Media Tactics for SMBs

#1. Post Frequently

Frequently posting on various social media mediums is important, as this helps maintain a connection between your brand and its customers. With an active social media account, people will stay updated about your brand, its products, and all information relevant to your brand. Also, regularly posting content improves page engagement and redirection of traffic to the company website. Social media users are constantly engaging with your content on a regular basis, facilitating brand recall.

#2. Have Good Content

Good engaging content is key for a good social media marketing strategy. If people do not find your content good or appealing, they will not share that content or remember it, which affects both brand awareness and brand recall. For a successful campaign where content leads people to the website, it is important to have engaging content that your target audience would relate to. You also have to factor in the timing and frequency of posts, or else people will block your content from their feeds.

#3. Run Collaborations and Giveaways

Running collaborations with big social media influencers and other brands help in widening your reach. This brings more post engagement and website traffic. The number of leads increases, which helps with sales. With new people seeing your content and interacting, brand awareness also increases. Also, with campaigns like giveaways, the brand engagement increases by a lot, making more people follow the posts and experience the content. This, in turn, will also make people engage with the company, and become potential leads.

#4. Keep it Organic

Don’t indulge in too many paid or in-the-face ads. People only like to see the content that they want to see, not what you want them to see. Don’t try selling them your products directly. Instead, involve them in discussions or interaction on topics relevant to your company. Discussions are the best way to ensure brand engagement on social media. Such discussions also help maintain brand recall and brand loyalty, as everyone loves a healthy discussion.

#5. Be Prompt

Always be prompt in your interactions with your audience. People like to feel involved and have the knowledge that their grievances are being heard. They feel a sense of belonging with the brand and that builds a sense of brand trust and loyalty with the customer. This also helps in making existing customers come back for repurchase as a part of this loyalty. Building a community of the interested and existing customers and keeping them in a loyalty program makes them happy with your brand and more likely to get more customers for your brand in the future. Giving this loyalty group added benefits from time to time works as an icing on the cake for customer satisfaction.

#6. Use Analytics

Using social media analytics, you can monitor and understand what communications or posts were successful in grabbing attention, and which ones didn’t succeed. Using this data, you can create better social media campaigns, which will have greater reach and engagement. It also helps you understand your ideal customer persona - what they like, what they dislike, what drives their interest and what subgroup of people they belong to. This helps answer questions like, ‘What age group is my audience majorly from?’ or ‘which region does my brand enjoy maximum popularity in?’ This information helps you create targeted content, which will help boost activity and engagement of the company via the posts on social media.

#7. Monitor Mentions

Monitor any mention of your brand, whether in a good sense or bad. Be appreciative towards people who like your products or content. It gives a sense of loyalty for the customers. Never ignore negative mentions. Always respond to them in an effort to solve people’s grievances. Seeing this responsiveness to grievances builds trust towards the brand, which helps in widening the customer base and improves brand recognition.

#8. Tell People about your Team

From time to time, share team pics and tell them more about your team. This brings in a sense of freshness and keeps things informal. People feel more engaged when they know who they interact with or talk to. This helps humanize the experience that people have engaging with your company.

#9. Use Social Media Influencers

Social media influencers are people with big fan followings on – you guessed it – various social media sites. They have huge pre-built networks, and when they share any content, the reach of these posts are widespread in nature. Collaborating with such influencers to promote your content means that a new, huge community is being reached with your content. This is a huge bonus for any company. Many such influencers readily promote brand content for publicity and collaborations. Contact with such influencers on social media can prove to be a huge asset for content promotion.

#10. Online Contests

Hosting online contests is a great way to ensure audience participation. Getting people to create and share photos or videos with brand-specific hashtags is one way to crowd source content for brand promotion. It is also a great way to get people engaged with your brand for a prize, which could be a product of your company. People readily take part in contests in hope of winning the prize. This also helps spread brand awareness and liking, which gets people talking about your brand.

Using these tactics in the right way ensures improvement in brand awareness, engagement, liking, and trust. It helps generate leads for sales and also help retain existing customers, making them promoters of your brand.

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