Wanna boost your local business on social media and increase your sales?
Social media has now taken over all aspects of our lives, especially marketing. Countless marketers around the world are using different social media platforms to build brand awareness and boost their businesses.
Small brands can also take advantage of this opportunity to showcase their products/services and grow their business.
Many local businesses’ owners might think that there would be no ROI for such a small-size company on social media. This is completely wrong because social media can significantly help them build brand identity and gain the trust of their customers.
In this article, we are going to explain how you can generate more leads for your small business via social media marketing.

Set clear objectives

You might consider social media to be as easy as posting and commenting. But please bear in mind that social media marketing is a bit different.
It is highly recommended to define clear and measurable goals with reasonable deadlines for your social media activities.
According to a report, almost 50 percent of people including small business owners spend more than 5 hours a week on social media. So, the only thing you need is to organize your activity towards clear objectives and based on an efficient plan.
For example, start with a goal of reaching 1000 followers within the first 3 months of your activity. Try to define other measurable objectives to be able to track them and estimate your performance. These objectives help you compare your results with or without social media.

Define your target audience

Social media marketing is all about reaching out to potential customers and encouraging them to purchase your products/services.
The thing is that you cannot make all people buy from you so you have to define your target audience clearly. Without knowing your real customers, you will not be able to generate valuable content for them and get maximum exposure.
So, you can start with studying your competitors’ activities on social media and track their followers. This is the easiest way to recognize your potential customers.
Also, you can track your previous customers on social media and reach out to them, or even you can try to refer your shop’s customers to your social media account.
Moreover, you can categorize your audience according to age, gender, position, and other characteristics. This will help you prioritize your content generation.
There are also tools that help you find the location of your followers which can be of use to you. Try to use location tags in your social presence to attract local people and gain the trust of them. People, especially in small cities and towns, pay attention to the local matters and you can take advantage of this trait to target them. 

Choose suitable social media platforms

You need to do research on different social media platforms to know where you can reach maximum exposure.
For example, women comprise more than 75 percent of Pinterest audiences. So if you have a business related to women, you need to use this platform.
As another example, more than 50 percent of TikTok users are aged 15-25. If you have a business related to young people, you need to think of using this platform.
Another way is to use Ahrefs or any other analytics tools to find the active blogs of your competitors and subsequently the shares of their content on various social platforms.
You can also track the social activity of other local businesses in your vicinity (even different industries) to find out which platform has performed the best for them.
By the way, you had better have an account on each top social media platforms including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc.
Try to get verified on these platforms since verification can help you to gain the trust of social users as a real account, not a fake one. The blue badge of verification confirms that you have been recognized as a real person or a well-known brand by the application. Therefore, local people keep following your account.
Another important matter is that you need to use all available features of these platforms to get the best results. For example, on Instagram, you need to use Stories, Lives, Swipe-Up links, Bio, link to your websites, and of course, business profile.

Echo your message via informative content

The most crucial part of social media marketing is to create compelling content so that your niche relevant audience follow you.
You probably know that social users prefer visual content rather than texts. This is exactly why many social services like Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube are multimedia-based.
So, you need to create high-quality pics, videos, gifs, and info-graphs so that you get ahead of the competition. Remember that many accounts easily repost others’ content without citation. So, think of generating branded posts with enough social promotion.
Try to leverage the power of Live videos to build a more strong face-to-face relationship with your audience. This is particularly useful for local businesses since local people will join you more easily.
Try to include local issues in your content. This can help you to gain the trust of local people. Also, you have to schedule your posts according to the pick hours of your local time. This is essential if you want to get maximum exposure.
A perfect approach for you can be sharing user-generated content. You can ask local people and your previous customers to take photos and videos when they are using your product/service. This can help you gain more shares and save your time for content generation.
Last but not least you need to create unique and keyword-focused captions and hashtags to get maximum exposure. Remember that pictures cannot be searched as opposed to texts.
Hashtags are at the heart of searching algorithms of all social media platforms. Try to create a set of viral hashtags and use them under all your posts.

Build a friendly relationship with local influencers

More than 80 percent of marketers believe that influencer marketing is the best means of building brand awareness.
As a small business, you might think that you do not need influencers. This belief cannot be true since a new trend of Nano-organic-influencers is emerging.
Collaborating with Mega or even Micro-influencers might be expensive and sometimes dangerous. Based on a report by Social Tradia, many influencers on Instagram are fake and just want to sell their accounts.
Nano-influencers can be your colleagues, your neighbors, teachers, or any other persons in your vicinity that has around 1,000 followers or even less.
They do not usually charge you but you can offer them some benefits like discounted prices.
So, you can build a relationship with local influencers who are more genuine and advertise your brand because they like your products/services. 

Final word

We have discussed several important aspects of social media marketing for local businesses. Of course, you need to study and practice more to be able to act as a professional marketer.
For example, you have to study about social analytics tools to measure your ROI and optimize your social performance. Also, many beginners on social media use social escrow services to acquire and customize new accounts. This can significantly help them save time and money. 
The post Social Media Marketing Tips for Local Businesses in 2020 appeared first on TechStory.
Source: Techstory