Social Media Marketing for Entrepreneurs in 2023
The need for social media marketing has never been greater for entrepreneurs than in current times. With fierce competition a part of every sector and business, it has become essential to promulgate a business on social media channels for maximum impact.
The primary ingredient for any Digital Marketing initiative is to have a proper strategy in place. Social media marketing for entrepreneurs requires incorporating all the important components of the web domain optimally to create a strong social media marketing campaign.
Want to know the secret of successful social media marketing for entrepreneurs. Today, we are going to look into the marketing strategies that help to set the motion for the social media marketing objectives of entrepreneurs. Though the nature of entrepreneurial activity might vary, this can be regarded as a guide whatever your niche is.
With the unprecedented popularity of social media channels, you can leverage them greatly for your entrepreneurial activities. Some of the most popular channels are Instagram, Yelp, YouTube, Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest based on the specific product and/or service you deal with.
Some statistics to prove how social media affects businesses positively
The impact of social media is known to people worldwide. Take your own example for instance. how many times you go through Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, WhatsApp, Snapchat, Pinterest every day.
The frequency of using these apps might vary for every individual. But it is a known fact that people search social media channels the most when they are on the internet.
Most of the time is spent on watching videos, listening to music podcasts, reading websites, and blogs for information.
Here are some more examples to prove the points made above.
- Instagram which is the most popular youth social media channel has more than 1 billion monthly active users. Interestingly more than 50% of those Instagram users are women. The age group that uses Instagram most are between 25 and 36 years old approximately.
- Facebook, the most widely used social media channel, has 2.5 billion users monthly. It is also the most searched word on Google.
- Twitter has more than 150 million daily users who are monetizable. According to Twitter statistics, the number of users has gone up 21% in 2020. The majority of Twitter users are men. (Hootsuite)
- According to Buffer, 81% of businesses are inclined towards creating video marketing on Facebook.
- More than 80% of consumers prefer content on YouTube. It is considered one of the most popular forms of social media marketing globally as per Hubspot study.
These figures speak of the importance of social media for entrepreneurs and business houses no matter the size of the business. You have to invest time and creative strategy to incorporate social media into your overall digital marketing endeavor.
Before moving on to the steps of social media marketing for entrepreneurs, let’s look at why social media marketing is considered an integral part of any business activity.
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Importance of Social Media Presence and Marketing for Entrepreneurs
Brand Recognition and Recall
Social media channels are extremely popular today with most of your target consumers as well as existing customers. They are present in at least one or more of these platforms.
This helps to build recognition and reputation for your products and services. There is always scope to explore these digital channels and come up with new ideas to help customers and focus groups recall your brand instantly for related products.
Wider Audience Reach
As reiterated, most of your consumers today are found in social media channels. It has also opened up great avenues to reach a wider range of audience and promulgate your product successfully. The cost for acquisition is far less than the return on investment. You get successful SEO rankings, email marketing leads, through diligent social media marketing.
Engagement and Rapport
Social media channels help in direct engagement with prospects, thereby helping to build a great camaraderie with your target consumer. They also play an instrumental part in personalizing your messages to your consumers. This further helps to strengthen the bond you already establish initially.
Greater chances of inspiring People
The various social media channels have come up with different features like videos, stories, reels, which enhance the chances of getting your message across with more clarity.
You have the opportunity to inspire confidence in people and nurture a sense of trust. Your customer support is also readily available to your consumers 24/7. With the focused promotional techniques, you will always remain at the top of the minds of consumers.
Consolidating Brand Goodwill
Social media provides opportunities to represent your brand and its unique features with the utmost transparency as well as proficiency.
Not only does it help you to get better brand awareness but it also helps to consolidate your Goodwill across these channels. A judicious Omni marketing channel approach that interacts and communicates within themselves should be adopted. It provides the best chance possible helps to turn your consumers into staunch loyalists of your brand.
This can also aid the process to maintain your brand reputation in the long run. It has been evident in various brands like Flipkart, Rajasthan Tourism, Sabyasachi, Swiggy in the Indian social media context.
Link to your site and resources on your website
If you perform your social media strategy for business well, you will be able to get traffic to your website smoothly. When your content is high-grade on the social media platform, you will automatically attract prospective customers to your website. It will generate curiosity and they will want to know more about your products, services, and features.
One of the distinctive and most popular features of social media is the ability to share any content that a consumer likes. Formulate content in a way that it becomes easy to share and retain by the existing and focus groups.
Re-targeting
Social Media allows you to re-target customers who have earlier visited your website. With the features of multichannel and omnichannel marketing, you can provide your customers with specific content suited to their preferences.
Since they have explored those products and services before, targeted content and ads can yield great results for your business. Retargeting is a great way to increase conversions.
Several social media channels today like Facebook, Instagram provide a variety of advertising options that help to track customers’ activity on your website and then display ads related to their interest on these social channels.
Great CRO strategy overall
You might wonder how social media facilitates conversion since it is seldom a direct process of conversion. Social Media helps in link building which inevitably helps SEO ranking.
And SEO ranking gives you mammoth exposure and visibility. It is all the more important for entrepreneurs to comprehend, and leverage the benefits of the characteristic of social media channels to improve conversions.
Apprising customers of the latest developments
It helps to assist customers and prospects with social media features and posts. The best part is social media channels are inherently interactive. Hence the name social media. It is a great conversational means of disseminating powerful information. It can empower, entertain, and educate customers equally.
That invariably helps to establish domain expertise in your niche. You become the go-to entrepreneur for any queries, questions regarding products, and services in your area of work.
Competitor Analysis
Social Media helps to get a clearer picture of where you stand in relation to your competition. It gives you an idea about the content produced by your competition.
Through the different social media tools, you can also understand how well your competition is doing, what kind of content they are providing to their social media community to build and sustain their reputation.
For any business to succeed one has to be careful and strategize wisely. You have to nurture your leads and practice patience. When you venture into a specific market that has high competition, it will take time for you to see results. But without continued efforts, you will see results that will far exceed your expectations.
Now let’s talk about the various steps that entrepreneurs can take to social media marketing to publicize their brands and communicate the utility of their products and services effectively.
Research and Learn about the different social media channels
It is important to understand the properties of the particular social media channels to be able to leverage the benefits perfectly. For example, Pinterest is an app that is used mostly by women (70%+). There are home decor, food, accessories brands that perform excellently on Pinterest. People are intrigued by new products that are on display on Pinterest.
Similarly, LinkedIn which is basically a B2B social channel has the majority of its users as males with 43% of women using LinkedIn. This is also a primary means of generating leads for B2B businesses. Instagram is a huge avenue for brands of all niches to generate traffic for their website.
Likewise, every social media channel has its unique traits that make them suitable for certain businesses. Before venturing into the domain of social media marketing entrepreneurs have to make a thorough analysis of the different platforms.
We have numerous options to study and observe which one is ideal for you. It is important to have a social media presence but it is also important to emphasize promotion on one or two more important channels that will yield greater results.
You have to create content aligning with the social channels you are targeting. Facebook content will be different from Instagram. In the same way, content meant for Twitter will be different from content disseminated on a social platform like LinkedIn.
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Create an audience persona
Other than researching social media platforms, you also have to create customer personas. This is the most important step in identifying who you are catering to. Also, how to promote your product to have the maximum effect.
Customer persona requires you to research the different digital platforms. Observe the exchange between your target consumers and see what content they are sharing.
Create a spreadsheet of their age, education, job, wants & preferences, pain points, and challenges. After you determine all these elements, match your content with the requirements of your customer. Try to provide incisive information as much as you can. It should help them to solve their life’s challenges.
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Social Listening and Building Community
Social listening is very important for any successful social media marketing efforts. It gives you clarity on elements such as which topics are important for your target audience.
Hashtags and mentions help to know what they are interested in. Shares, likes, and comments help you to create content that offers them the most focused content that is relevant, useful for their particular needs.
Building a community, nurturing, and fostering it with greater engagement helps to build trust and support. Moreover, you create content that is popular and consumed by your audience in plenty.
The communities which you develop in social media help in the word of mouth publicity as well as share your content on several digital platforms for visibility.
The two most important factors to consider here are transparency and distribution of real, authentic information. A strong community of social media audience vouch for your business and branding provided you offer great service.
You should always aim to provide value and treat your customers with the greatest respect. Do not take them for granted, ask for feedback, and measure and evaluate your performance. Cultivate a good relationship with your community with consistent effort.
Schedule your posts regularly
When you create blog posts and topics that are relevant to your niche, you should make a concerted effort to share them on social media consistently. Several social media tools help to smoothen your process of scheduling your posts and publishing the matter at a certain time.
For example, buffer gives you the liberty to schedule a week’s worth of post as and when you want. It also comes with the pro version which gives you several more benefits. The basic and paid version also works well. In the same way, there are other tools like Coschedule, Zoho, Hootsuite, etc that perform these activities.
Pay attention to Product Positioning
Product positioning speaks of the efficiency with which you perform your marketing activities whether digital or non-digital. For product positioning on social media, you have to pay attention to a few elements that can help in a more optimized brand reputation.
You have to perform analysis on social media accounts frequently. This will help in creating more targeted content that aligns with the social media channels.
For example, LinkedIn is a great place for business-to-business communication. Instagram is a great avenue for B2B as well as B2C businesses.
There are several niche areas in social media like publishing, advertising. You can find writers, publishers, content creators, in specific niches. If you deal with areas like books, e-books, content you should explore the social media channels like Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn that specialize in these specific areas.
Learn about Facebook Ads, Sponsored posts on different social media channel
Instagram has sponsored posts, Pinterest has specific ads. Similarly, Facebook has ads feature that helps you to provide targeted ads to your focus group for conversion.
You can only become proficient in all these elements by working on them. Research read about them, and implement them in your practical projects.
Merely gaining knowledge in these factors isn’t enough. You have to execute them practically in real-time projects for you to understand these excellent features proficiently.
Connect with your existing and target consumer
This is a corollary of the above points but needs a mention. You should formulate all your social media marketing objectives keeping in mind that you have to communicate with your customers.
It is important not just in the initial stages of the sales funnel, but also equally important after you complete the entire sales process. If you do not follow up with your customers, they will lose the trust you have fostered for so long.
Therefore you have to take the initiative to invest a certain amount of time, understanding whether your products and services are delivering properly as per promise.
You can also ask them to rate your product and service on a scale of a certain number. There are other methods such as polls, different kinds of surveys, question answers that you can implement to strengthen the bond you have, and build affability.
A business can only become successful in the long run if you take the proper initiative to leverage the interactive trait of social media channels and use it to the maximum. Engagement through social media channels also happens with direct messaging and 24/7 customer support.
Leverage the digital marketing modules for an all-round Marketing strategy
All other digital marketing modules are equally important and can work in sync with social media marketing to provide the best results. Social media accounts can link to your website, provide email details, and engage with mobile marketing to provide an all-round experience to your customers.
It can give you great conversions and help to get a greater number of qualified leads. All these elements along with social media marketing work together can perform in the best way possible for an entrepreneur effectively.
Learn about the different digital tools that will assist in better social media marketing
Social media marketing is not only about writing. It incorporates many elements like images, videos, infographics, interactive content to make the maximum impact. The digital world today offers a plethora of tools that help to accelerate your social media marketing strategy by helping you create unique content.
There are several categories of tools like graphics, content creation, content curation, analytics, security, consumer persona, lead generation, scheduling tools that give you great advantages to optimize your strategy.
They all have distinctive features. Graphics tools come with a variety of templates, stock themes, fonts, colors. You can add text, video, music, voice, to your content to make it more appealing. Then there is Tweetdeck that helps you to understand what consumers are discussing on platforms like Twitter.
Some of the tools for optimizing social media marketing for entrepreneurs are Canva, Animoto, Buffer, Tweetdeck, Facebook Messenger, Bitly, BuzzSumo among many others.
Analyze your Performance
Creating a great social media strategy is fine. But you cannot stop at that. Especially for entrepreneurs who have started new ventures, it is necessary to continuously evaluate your performance through different analytical tools.
This helps you by providing a concise yet extensive report on the various metrics that facilitate the engagement and success of your marketing activities on social channels.
There are many advanced tools that measure the growth of your followers list, engagement, content performance, clicks, shares, hashtag performances, most used hashtags.
They also provide you with topic previews and appearances. Other metrics are the percentage of engagement, total impressions, reach, comments, likes, stories viewed for a certain period of time.
Some of the most popular tools for social media analytics evaluation are Hubspot, Google Analytics, Social beat. There are Instagram insights, Twitter Analytics, YouTube Analytics.
They come in basic and Pro versions. You can start with the basic versions, get used to them. Then, as you grow in your business, you can invest in the pro versions for more exhaustive assessments and detailed performance reports.
An important Principle of Social Media Marketing
You don’t have to categorically read to know about the importance of social media. Your colleagues, friends, and professionals go through their social media feeds multiple times every day. The same applies to you too.
One aspect that you have to be careful about is is eliminating any chances of conceit on your part. Own up if there has been a discrepancy of any sort with your customers and try to solve it as soon as you can.
We get so much engrossed in the marketing activities that sometimes we might make mistakes and are unable to provide the greatest value to your consumer. Social media is a place where you get to interact frankly with your consumers.
As a result, it can give you tremendous positive feedback. On the other hand, the negative experiences of consumers can be extremely detrimental to the interest of your business.
Therefore, do not make the error of not owning up to a mistake that has been committed by your business. Make efforts to solve it through your actions, conversation, and engagement. This is one of the foremost principles when you are promoting your product on social media platforms. Do not give your consumers a reason to lose interest in your business.
Conclusion
Social media has become such an important part of our life today that any online activity is incomplete without visiting one or more social media platforms.
Once they were regarded as channels for communication and interaction with friends, relatives, and associates. Today, social media is a major channel for promoting your brand and business. With so many options available to you it might seem exacting to find the platform that is apt for your specific market.
It requires the highest standards of performance in terms of research and analysis. But once you have determined the channel suitable for your product the work becomes easier. Formulate a plan after considering all aspects and you can successfully carry on social Media Marketing.
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