Being a small brand can be challenging. Not only do you have smaller audiences, but you have smaller marketing budgets to work with. So, what you do have can only get you so far, and sometimes it may feel like you are simply making no progress.
If you feel this way, you are certainly not alone, as millions of small businesses globally wonder where their traffic is, why customers are not seeing them and why engagement on posts and campaigns is so low. This article will discuss how you can use social media to reach larger audiences, drive traffic to your website, and increase your customer base.
Map Out and Target Your Audience
First and foremost, you need to take a step back and look at your customer profile. When was the last time you mapped out your brand strategy and defined your customer? Learn everything from their demographics to their interests and behaviors and start mapping a strategy to target them with relevant content on social media.
The next step is to start targeting the audiences on the platforms and gain them as followers. It is easy to gain a mass following with bots, but you won’t achieve a lot with this. Now, the trick is to get followers who are qualified as potential customers, as well as real followers. You want real people who will engage with your content and who could genuinely become paying customers.
There are some great companies and tools that can help you gain real Instagram followers, for example. They allow you to target the right content in the right way and increase your numbers with potential customers. Once you have your eye on your key audience, building your following will require posting the right content.
Create and Put Out Great Content
Once you have a firm grasp of your audience and their interests and behaviors, you need a solid marketing strategy so that you can start creating content that will directly appeal to them. An effective marketing strategy centers around knowing what your customer wants to see and hear, even before they do.
It is vital to keep your content as informative and entertaining as possible for them. So, by having this customer map, you can identify what will appeal to them. Younger audiences, for example, are more attracted to more visual content, whereas blog-heavy content can be targeted at customers who want to learn something associated with your brand.
Say, for example, you are an organic food e-tailer. Not only can you post high-quality images of the products on your social media, but you can also create videos of how the products can be used. You can also post blogs around topics that your audience will be searching for.
For example, ‘5 Ways You Can Lose Weight With The Right Diet’, or ‘4 Ways to Use Tofu in your Next Meal’. Do regular keyword research and keep up to date with the trends to create this content, and once posted on the site, share it on various platforms for your audience to see it.
Invest in Paid Ads
The next step is to boost these ads. Putting some money behind the content will extend their reach and ensure that they reach an audience beyond just yours. So, when you raise an ad, spend some time picking out the kind of audience you want to advertise to. Pick out the customer that you have defined in step one.
Then, choose your budget. You don’t need to spend thousands each time, and it’s essential to know when to start the ad and when to stop it. So, you are in complete control. However, one of the top tips that we would like to mention is to boost an ad that is already being somewhat successful with your current audience. So, if you see a post getting more attention, gathering more engagement, and driving more traffic, that is the post to boost.
Set up Affiliates
We are huge advocates for influencers. And when we say influencers, we don’t mean macro-influencers. We mean micro-influencers who you can organically tie to your brand.
Micro-influencers have only a few thousand followers, but those followers are high-quality because they have chosen to follow this person based on their interests. So, if you correctly match your brand to an influencer, you will be directly targeting your audience that is already interested and invested in your field.
Let’s go back to the organic food example. Getting someone like a local chef on board will be a great idea to boost your social presence. You can both create exciting content that can be seen by both audiences.
Conclusion
Social media can be resource-intensive and even confusing at times. But it is a powerful tool that you can use to reach audiences that you would never have been able to reach before. So, get the right content out for your audience, put some money behind the posts and get great partners such as social media agency London to help extend your reach.