How Small Businesses Use Social Media to Advertise and Market

Social media is a powerful tool that has quickly become one of the best ways to market for small to medium business owners. Though it can be tempting to dive right in to social media marketing without much knowledge due to its low cost and apparent ease of use, business owners should have a working knowledge of how to use it to its best advantage. Here are five ways that many small business owners are using social media to effectively advertise and market their products and services:

To Increase Top-of-Mind Awareness

Making sure your prior customers or prospects continue to think of you when they need your products or services requires consistent marketing. Fortunately, with the low cost of social media marketing, small business owners can make sure their prospects are continually reminded of how they can help them. Boosting posts about new products or services for as little as $15-$20 on Facebook is a great low-cost marketing tool that takes advantage of the platforms demographic information.

Businesses can also create ads featuring new products or inventory for Instagram or engage with followers on Twitter. Consistent creation and promotion of posts is a low-cost way to make sure potential customers know who to call when they have a need.

To Reach New Customers

Social media makes it easy to reach new customers who aren’t familiar with your business. With Facebook, you can boost or create an ad campaign to reach specific target markets such as those in a certain geographic location or those who like pages similar to yours (i.e. your competitors). You can utilize hashtags to reach new customers on Instagram or Twitter and LinkedIn provides a perfect platform for seeking out other professionals in specific industries you can reach out to connect with.

To Engage Current Customers

Encourage current customers to follow your business on social media by including prompts in digital or print newsletters or in the signature line of your emails. As soon as they follow or connect with you, you’ve got an easy way to engage them with contests, surveys, or by producing high-quality content they are likely to read and react to. The more you can engage current customers on social media, the more likely they are to buy from you or use your services again in the future.

To Drive Traffic to Their Website

If you’re a smart business owner, you already have a mobile and user-friendly website that is full of great content. However, what you might not have is the visitors you need to make all that work on your site worthwhile. The end goal of all social media strategies should be to drive traffic to your website. Ideally, your social media posts will send interested prospects to landing pages that address their specific interests or needs. With the appropriate call-to-action on each page, you can efficiently turn social media followers into actual customers.

Using social media is an affordable and efficient tool for small business owners to stay top-of-mind, attract new customers, and drive traffic to their website. By using the appropriate platforms and creating a consistent strategy, small businesses can spur growth without sinking too much into their marketing budget.