8 Social Media Marketing Strategies SMEs Should Use

When it comes to SME marketing, social media can be a powerful tool, but only if consider these three things:

Your audience,
Your goals, &
Current social media trends.

You will need a solid strategy to reap the full benefit of social media marketing.

These are the eight strategies that will let you:

Increase your following,
Drum up engagement,
Bring in more sales.

1. Educate your audience

Whatever your goals are, it is a brilliant idea to educate your audience. When you give out valuable information or advice, people will see you as an authority. In time, they will turn into loyal customers.

There are two ways to educate your followers:

Directly via social media posts, or
Using your accounts to direct them to education resources such as blog posts and webinars.

2. Focus on telling stories

When you take the educational approach, you focus more on teaching than selling. Storytelling is pretty similar and doubles as an educational tool.

Storytelling can evoke people's emotional responses by bringing relatable characters and situations to life.

Since most of the human's decision-making is based on feeling and emotion, stories that push emotional triggers can persuade people to take action into buying your product, better than constant self-promotion.

3. Diversify your content

Most SMEs that fail to be engaging only post pictures on Instagram or post short tweets on Twitter. Did you know that you can post various forms of content on social media? Here are just some of them:

Microblog posts,
Infographics,
Threads (very useful on Twitter),
Videos,
Twitter Fleets and Instagram Stories.

You might ask, why should we diversify our content?

First, people get bored quickly when you post the same type of content over and over.

Second, your target audience may respond more enthusiastically to a type of content compared to others.

It is good to break up the monotony by creating and sharing different kinds of content. You will learn more about what your audience wants from you and keep them engaged long-term by checking your page's analytics.

4. Micro-influencer marketing

Yes, SMEs might be reluctant to partner with micro-influencers because most of them are not truly bringing in sales. But this issue only happens if they don't research who they are partnering with.

When you partner with respected and well-connected influencers, you will receive a significant boost in credibility and marketing reach.

It seems like a good idea to partner with influencers with hundreds of thousands of followers, but the truth is that working with micro-influencers is a better choice. Why?

Micro-influencers have a smaller following, but they are more engaged. As a result of your partnerships, the people you connect with are more likely to be your ideal clients and more willing to engage with you.

Livestreams are now a great way to communicate directly with potential customers.

5. Take advantage of customer loyalty

Loyal customers are just a step away from becoming brand advocates. Brand advocates can:

Spread the word far and wide about your business.
Provide valuable social proof,
Help you build trust with potential customers faster than you could.

Social media is a great tool when in the hands of a motivated brand advocate. However, you are the one who must motivate them. Here are some ways to do just that:

Ask for reviews on social networks such as Facebook and Google page.
Encourage customers to share their positive experience with your business online. You can use this in your social media campaigns.
Interview satisfied customers and share their stories on social media.
Contests, giveaways, and offering incentives would motivate people to spread the word about your business on social media. This is very easy to do on Twitter and Instagram.

Basically, your most loyal customers are the ones creating compelling content and doing your social media marketing for your business.

6. Make use of live streaming marketing

If you look at local Facebook activity, you would realise that many SMEs resort to Facebook Live to sell their products online. They are directly engaging with hundreds (or even thousands) of people online.

Since the pandemic took over the world, most people are forced to stay home. Since people cannot go out and shop, many SMEs would bring their shop to the people.

People can chat directly with the streamer, which means that it's not one-way communication. You can promote your product while your viewers enquire about it.

Any person with sales skills would fare well in this format, as long as they engage and communicate with their viewers. Live streaming boosts engagement and gets real-time feedback from your viewers.

7. Use the human touch

Nobody likes impersonal and insincere marketing. Empathetic marketing is now more critical than ever.

So, we need to reply to comments, personalise the experiences we deliver to our audience, and encourage them to create their own content about us.

It's even better if the person behind the company's social media page has a face, voice and name. This way, people will see that you're not just another faceless company but also a business with real human touch.

8. Use chatbots

Chatbots are a great tool for humanisation. A chatbot can:

Start conversations,
Encourage unlikely sales,
Answer FAQ, and
Produce individualised customer service and support.

For these reasons, chatbots are becoming a staple of social media marketing. Chatbots can both increase your business appeal and improve results.

Can you do better in any of these eight areas mentioned? Remember, there's always room for improvement. There's no better time to evaluate:

Where you stand,
What your social media marketing goals are,
How these goals fit into the bigger picture for your business, and
What you can do to improve the results.

This is the time to do your homework on which of these strategies can work for you and start experimenting!

Source: LOCALiQ

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