Social Media Marketing Strategy For Small Businesses

One of the major issues for many businesses is not selling enough to generate income. They cannot even manage to earn enough to run the business let alone make profits. So, why don't they sell just enough even to run the business? I think they are not marketing their businesses well.

It is true that most of the businesses are already marketing, yet not generating sales, why is that so? Well, in that case, they are not marketing through proper channels, they are not marketing to the right audience. You need to market your business to the right customer to remain successful.

Social Media is one of the most common marketing platforms for big as well as small businesses. In fact, a lot of businesses are already marketing on social media, yet they are not earning profits. One of the common reasons is they do not have the proper knowledge and skills.

You have an online business, you have spent a lot of money on your business. Why not spend some more money in learning social media marketing and apply it to your business, instead of going to a social media agency for marketing your business on social channels. You might argue that it is more beneficial to work through social media agency compared to doing yourself even if you are an expert. Well, you might have a point. But consider this: What if the likes on your Facebook page are not from real users but fake users; what if the subscribers on your youtube channel are all fake. This kind of shady things is happening rampantly.

Building Social Media Following? Never Buy Social Engagements and Followers

You might have come across numerous sites that promise you to build social followers and social engagements for free or for a certain price. If you use these sites, you can actually see growth (followers and engagements) on your social pages. These sites are actually a broker between the owners of social pages and the social media followers. Just like you join these programs to build social following, a lot of people join these programs to earn some money, they follower your pages for money.

Let me exemplify, you buy a package that gives you 100 Twitter followers for $2. You care paying 2 cent for one follower. The site will ask its users to follow your Twitter account and will pay 1 cent for following and keep 1 cent as a commission. You get real people on your social page.

But do you actually benefit by using these tools and platforms?

Answer is NO!

Why?

People are following your page for incentive only, they will never bother with the content you share. They might even un follow you after earning incentives.

My Experience With Social Media Advertising, Promotion and Marketing

I have used facebook ads, google ads and also have marketed through influencers. The key to success in using ad networks or influencers is finding the right market. This is called ad targeting, if your ad is targeted to the people who will actually buy your product, your return on investment in ads will be high. If you targeted to the wrong people you cannot generate any sales.

Let say you are selling toys, your ads need to target parents or people interested in parenting topics for you to generate sales. If you are selling kitchen items, you need to target your products to married couples, especially women. If you are selling games, you need to target to the gamers.

Social media is not the only platform where you can market your product It is true that social media have billions of regular users but this does not mean marketing on google is not beneficial. You should choose the platform based on your product category and the market. You will become successful in your marketing campign only when you target your ad to the right people.

I once used Facebook ads to build followers on my Facebook page. By spending $10, I received 1000 followers, hundreds of engagements, and a lot of clicks on my website address and links. I was thinking to continue promoting my page to build followers, engagements and traffic, but I had to stop because financially it was very expensive. I had to spend $100 to build 10K followers, and when you are marketing 10k followers is not a big number.

First published on Trendri, in author's name