Benefits of Social Media Marketing for Your Small Business

While there are countless ways your small business can market itself, there’s one method that’s perhaps more powerful than them all – social media marketing. Why? It’s cheap, it’s flexible, it’s relatively easy and it has the potential to rapidly grow your audience when done effectively.

Let’s have a closer look at how social media marketing helps small businesses.

It Gets a Lot of Eyes on Your Business

Britain’s social media usage stats alone are a huge reason to get your business on social media. According to The Global Statistics, almost 60 million people in the UK use social media, with the average user logging over 2 hours a day.

Nowadays, people are more likely to visit a business’s social pages than its actual website. Indeed, many small businesses don’t even bother with websites as social media marketing is such a rich source of customers.

With such an enormous pool of potential customers, can you really afford not to have a social media presence?

Grow and Engage Your Audience Quickly

Word-of-mouth and networking have always been great forms of advertising. When you, your ambassadors or your happy customers spread word of what you can offer at events or among local communities, the impact on leads and sales can be impressive.

Now imagine if that process was turbo-charged with the power of the internet.

The average social media user has a network of hundreds, if not thousands of friends, followers or connections (depending which platform they use). Each time you interact with someone on social media, it shows up all over their network – potentially getting your business seen by thousands of people in a matter of minutes.

Target Your Audience, Tailor Your Message

There’s a whole range of social media platforms out there, all offering something different and popular among different sorts of people.

Facebook’s been around longer than most, so it’s prevalent among older people, while the younger generation are heading to TikTok and Snapchat in droves. LinkedIn caters for business-minded folk.

If you understand who your target market is, you can focus your marketing efforts on the platforms they’re likely to use. You can even repurpose or optimise your content to suit different segments. For example, you might adopt a more informal tone of voice or use video content more on TikTok.

Some platforms enable you to join community groups which give you access to more leads, and others enable you to add hashtags to your messages, which can broadcast them further among people who’d be interested in what you offer.

It’s Free and Easy to Get Started

Unlike building a website, which is often a substantial investment of time and money, it costs nothing to set up a business profile on social media. Enter a few details and you’re ready to start posting.

Of course, marketing your small business on social media effectively will involve a fair bit of knowledge and skill. But there are plenty of resources out there that can help you get started.

Eventually, you may get to a point where you think it’s worthwhile to invest a little more in social media marketing, with paid ads or even paying someone to take care of it for you. But even then, it’s nearly always more cost-effective than traditional forms of marketing.

Forge an Identity

Social media is perhaps the easiest way to develop your business’s identity and image.

The way you engage with the online community shapes how people perceive you. Everything from your tone of voice and the nature of your content to how you choose to respond to people helps to define your brand.

Do you want to be seen as quirky and edgy or refined and traditional? Do you want to share the values that drive your mission, or align your business with social issues? Social media makes all of these things easy.

You’ll Keep Up with the Competition

We mentioned in another post why business websites need to work well on any device[1] , or they’ll fall behind their competitors.

It’s the same with social media marketing – you can guarantee that some, if not all of your competitors will have a social media presence. And those that do so will be scooping up all those leads.

Since we know how many potential customers you can access through social media, you need to get yours up and running to get your slice of the pie. If you don’t, someone else will.

Keep an Eye on the Competition

Another benefit of social media for your small business is that, since most of your competitors will be clearly visible on social media, you can keep track of what they’re doing. Then you can identify ways to get ahead.

If there’s little to differentiate you and your competitors, you might find a way to make yourself stand out and therefore attract more customers.

If a competitor is having a lot of success, their social media might give you insights into why that is, enabling you to adapt and improve your own business.

Conclusion

We hope that you now understand the power of social media marketing for your small business, and view it as an essential element of your overall marketing strategy.

However, we know it can be quite daunting who’s unfamiliar with the many forms of social media out there today. We offer consultancy, training and social media management services. Get in touch and let’s have a chat about how we can help your small business grow.