Cost-Effective Social Media Marketing Strategies for the Small to Medium Sized Business

Ten Ways to Develop Cost-Effective Social Media Strategies

Photo Courtesy of FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Many small to medium sized business owners find themselves too busy to develop solid social media marketing strategies that will do what they are supposed to...grow their business. Instead, business owners are working in their business, 50 to 60 hours or more per week, not having any time to focus on what matters most. Social media marketing is a way that business owners can expand their reach, but there are certain strategies that business owners should follow to make their campaign as successful as it should be. 

Social media marketing allows you to grow relationships with your potential customers and current consumer-base. If you don't have the time  to focus on social media efforts alone, you might want to consider utilizing a company that is known for growing businesses and their social media efforts. 

The article below discusses ten ways that you can develop your social media strategy to ensure that it provides you with the results you need:

• Does your business lend itself to showing off its work? Strutting your stuff brings to mind visual portrayals, like photographs and video, although it can include other presentation formats. Social media is very useful for businesses where prospects perceive there are high risks. Many bridal photographers use blogs to highlight their work while many bakers use Flickr to show off their masterpieces. Show real patrons using your services with before and after photographs. Don’t forget to get patron’s permission to use their likeness.

• Can you give prospects information they find useful? Think in terms of small bite-size chunks of content. Twitter is great for providing a tip of the day whether you’re an accountant or a massage therapist. Clothing stores could provide an outfit of the day. Think outside of the box when it comes to information. How about food recipes or scrap-booking.

• How do you solve people’s problems? At the core of most marketing is fulfilling prospects’ needs. Therefore, create content that helps people with their problems. For example, if you’re a financial advisor, why not give out tips on budgeting so that prospects have money to invest. Here’s some advice to create a professional blog.

• Does your product lend itself to some form of education? This is a great way to win prospects over. Teach them! Not the old-fashioned school marm but the fun stuff. Think: how to add memory to your computer or how to apply makeup. You can use videos, webinars or ebooks.

• Can your business disseminate entertaining content? This information doesn’t need to be your business’s main focus. Orabrush built its brand with the use of entertaining videos. Is there something funny or engaging about your product?

• Are there targeted or niche communities where your prospects and customers naturally congregate? While this doesn’t apply to all businesses, where it exists, it’s a useful way to participate in the community. You can participate in the social media community and advertise to targeted prospects. For example, yarn shops participate and socialize on Ravelry, a knitting community.

• Does your business tap into people’s passions and/or hobbies?When it comes hobbies and special interests, participants often make different spending tradeoffs. The strength of these interests is great since your customers want to share their share their hobbies and special interests using photographs, videos and blogs. This can apply to fishing as well as it can to quilting.

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For B2B businesses or small to medium sized businesses who would like some tips on successful marketing and social media marketing tactics, please contact us at Classic Image today to see how we can help your business with all of your marketing campaigns from social media marketing to direct marketing. We strongly believe that combining inbound and outbound marketing tactics is a great way to help any business flourish.

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Social Media Marketing Tips That Will Help Grow Your Business

In today’s technological world it is almost unmanageable for a small to medium sized business to flourish without utilizing social media marketing. Marketing tactics change regularly, so keeping up the rest of the world is essential. With that said, regardless of what kind of business you run, it is very important to continuously look at other avenues that will grow your business.

Social media marketing or SMM is imperative
for the success of small to medium sized
businesses.
Photo Courtesy of FreeDigitalPhotos.net.

Now, while there are a million different methods that you can utilize it’s also equally important that you find ways that will not require you to spend hours upon hours working in your business, rather than on your business. Social media marketing can do just that, if managed properly and efficiently. Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and other platforms are increasingly becoming a well-known—and successful—marketing tool. These platforms can assist your business in obtaining a healthy and growing fan base that will generate leads, word-of-mouth and conversions.

At Classic Image we have managed hundreds of social media marketing campaigns over the last five years. We understand that the concept of a small to medium sized business handling their own social media marketing campaign can be overwhelming, but there are many tips that you can consider utilizing to make your life easier—and to help your business grow. The last thing you want to do is spend hundreds of hours on social media efforts only to find out that your approach will not bring in the results that you desire.

Throughout this blog I’m going to mention a handful of tips that you can use to help strengthen your social media efforts and growing your business:

Get More Leads with a Call To Action. There is no question about it—a social media call to action is an integral and often overlooked element of a social media strategy. Social media gets prospects, customers and the public primed to want to find out more about what your business is offering or to engage with you further. You can use any platform to achieve this, too, such as a blog, Facebook, Twitter or a landing page. If you strengthen your call to action you will receive a better success rate, compared to ones without them.

Optimizing Your Business’ Facebook Posts. Many people don’t even think about adding a call to action to their Facebook page. However, sometimes just the act of inviting someone to share your post will be the encouragement a fan or follower needs to take your suggestions. And this works with any niche. For instance, you can post a link to your blog or another piece of useful information (something that you are offering) and ask your fan base to SHARE the information with their followers or colleagues. It can really be as simple as that. Take the image below, for example. 

 Experimentation. As you continue with your social media efforts it’s always a good idea to experiment with different call-to-action’s. Take Twitter, for example—it’s a fast moving stream of content and because of that updates can quickly flow by readers. While they are deciding on whether to read your full update, a call to action can practically seize the moment. AND if that reader likes what you have to offer they will be more inclined to follow you, retweet your message and visit your page.

Content is KING. So give it the significance it deserves.  Many small to medium sized businesses do not take into account just how imperative content is when it comes to all of their marketing campaigns—but especially social media marketing. Fresh, frequent and quality content is necessary to bring in new clients and customers. In the same respect, though, even the BEST content in the world won’t do a lick of good if people are not engaged. Make all of your content engagement-friendly.

There are many more tricks to the trade when it comes to social media marketing and how to utilize it to truly benefit your small to medium sized business, but the best bet is to test…test…and test again. You will need to test your results and see what works for your individual business because what might work for your competitor might not do any good for your business.

If you are someone who is interested in learning more about how Classic Image can help benefit your business, we are here to discuss your needs seven days a week. We are home to some of the top marketing professionals in the business, but at the same time we are a group of creative professionals that use all tactics to help push businesses to the top.

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