Marketing has always been a time-consuming process. However, the relatively new concept of social media marketing as escalated the time needed to focus of marketing activities.
Most small business owners know that if they don’t engage in any form of marketing, they will likely to be left behind by competitors. It’s all very well claiming that you have a sufficient amount of business purely through “word-of-mouth”‘. However, as we move into a recession competition will be is fierce. Businesses will still have to invest in marketing, at the very least from a customer relationship point of view.
Why You Need Social Media Marketing?
There’s been a meteoric rise in the number of individuals and companies going online to interact. It’s now a way of life for hundreds of millions of people around the world. Whenever people are interacting, this is also an opportunity for the smart business marketer to engage. So, even though you may feel as if you’re lucky enough not to need to “push” for new business, you should still be interacting with your present customers online.
Where to Begin
To begin with, you need to determine your best course of action. You do not necessarily have to dive right in and sign up for every social media network or site under the sun. Some may simply not be appropriate for your demographic or customer base.
Nevertheless, it seems to be a good idea to have a Facebook presence no matter what kind of business you’re in these days. Facebook is still the dominant social media site; as such a high percentage of the population regularly visit the site (according to Statistic 1.69 Billion users in 2020). It’s a great platform to inform, educate and entertain your clients and prospects. Including the options to form groups or deliver live streams adding to the interactivity and engagement.
Professionally, LinkedIn is the dominant business-to-business network, and this is a site you should consider to help generate leads, useful business contacts and to find new members of staff.
While many don’t consider YouTube as a social media channel, it is the 2nd largest search engine (behind Google). When you create a YouTube channel, you have an excellent repository for all of those videos you should be creating, to help educate people in your niche and to effectively showcase the products and services that you have available.
The Importance Of A Blog In Social Media Marketing
Of course, the ideal mouthpiece for any business is the blog. It is a way of attracting visitors to your website, from where they can browse your services. Additionally, if SEO optimised blogs can help improve your website ranking in the all-important Google search. It’s relatively straightforward to set up a blog, especially if you use the dominant WordPress platform. However, if you commit to a blog you need to be sure that you are populating it regularly. Publishing a mixture of content is important. Include self-generated content, as well as content gathered from around the net, modified to promote your particular point of view.
How a Virtual Business Manager Can help
As a small business owner, you have to ask yourself a very pointed question -How much of my time is this going to take?
The answer is quite a lot.
In addition to the amount of time you’ll be investing in setting up and configuring a presence on all of these sites, you may find that you are allocating valuable time daily maintaining your presence. It is for this reason you should put the entire series of social media projects in the hands of your virtual business manager. A Virtual Business Manager is an expert in the vagaries associated with each platform, who will allocate a specific schedule, based on your exact requirements, to interact with each one.