Understanding marketing can be difficult, especially when you’re learning. Knowing who to market to is hard enough. Then you have to figure out what approaches, social media marketing or otherwise, to use to execute your master plan!
There are so many good marketing options available that it’s overwhelming. While there are countless ways you can approach marketing, one very popular and low-cost method is social media marketing.
What is social media marketing?
Social media marketing means using sites like Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Twitter for marketing. This is not an exhaustive list, of course – new channels like TikTok pop up as time goes on.
Marketers have to adapt to meet the needs and wants of society. For this reason, social media is a beautiful way to reach people where they already are. You can find an incredibly diverse array of people from different backgrounds, young and old, with varying interests. The potential for highly targeted messaging is immense.
This is how social media helps small businesses grow. You can learn a lot about people in an organic way and you can target very specific audiences.
With this in mind, let’s focus on three main points.
Social media marketing & branding
Social media is one of the best ways to inexpensively raise brand awareness. One of the best things about social media sites is that they are free to sign up! There is literally no start-up cost. This allows you to start marketing any service or product you have for free.
Granted, organic reach is declining on social media channels these days, meaning you are having to pay more often than you used to in order to reach people. You can still get an uncommonly good return on your investment, even despite this.
Paid advertising on social media is surprisingly robust. For example, Facebook has a great ad platform, where you can pay for ads to boost your posts. Again, this is not required to run a Facebook page, but ads can be run for as little as $1 meaning the barrier to entry is very low.
Having social media pages can also help generate web traffic and improve your ranking in Google. In short, social media is, in our opinion, the best bootstrapping tool for completely unknown, shoestring budget companies to brand themselves.
Social media marketing & customer relationships
Social media allows you to interact with your customers. Customer service is a massive part of any business. Having pages on media platforms allows you as the business owner to interact with your customers on a personal level frequently, efficiently, and quickly.
Customer relations are a crucial point in any business. Social media sites are used by the vast majority of people today. They are already there, so why not give them a chance to contact you where they’re comfortable? It’s an easy way to build rapport (and your brand) with your target market.
Social media marketing & advertising
Returning to the subject of advertising, most social media sites have advertising platforms these days. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn are a few examples. With a very small budget, you can start getting more likes, views, and clicks. Once you get a handle on each site’s advertising platform, you can use them to generate leads and even conversions. Basically, social media can make you money if you know what you’re doing with it.
This allows small business owners the ability to market what they have to a large number of people quickly for low start-up costs. You’re not working in the dark, either – these sites can decisively prove their value! Instagram, as an example, has business profiles you can switch use that have powerful data analysis tools.
Final Thoughts
Social media marketing can be a beautiful way to keep grow and expand your business. At Marketing is the Product, we believe that it’s one of the best ways to start from square one. Marketing is a constantly changing and complex field, but social media gives the scrappy start-ups a chance to succeed. You have more opportunities to promote your business than ever before!
