How To Start Marketing Your Small Business On Social Media

Listen, it's virtually impossible to run a small business without marketing on social media. But odds are that the social media marketing that you have to do is only a fraction of your task for the day. Tiny little baby fraction. That's why in this video, I'm gonna help you learn the basics of social media marketing that can increase sales in the short and long term. What's up? It's Jamal and welcome back to the channel. Now, to do any job, you gotta have the right tools. That's why I want you to take a moment and find the link in the description to download our free social media templates kit. It's going to be your wrench for this video, all right? A key tool. In it you'll find 10 different templates, some of which we're going to go over in this video. So it's worth grabbing now so you can follow along. When it comes to social media marketing, the first thing you want to identify is the goal you hope to achieve. Social media can increase awareness of your product. It can also be used to make sales, it can drive leads to your website, or it can simply help build your brand in the minds of millions of customers. All of these are good things that can lead to more business. But unless you have a whole team of marketers working on your social media you want to start with with just one or two goals, don't be super ambitious at this stage, you know what I'm saying? A good way to consider which goals to go for is to think about short and long term results. Short term results are things like direct sales or lead generation that can become sales rather quickly if your business needs quick injection of cash or you have a special promotion that needs juice right now. Revenue Direct social media campaigns can be highly effective, but unfortunately there's often a limit to how many leads and sales you can accumulate with a small audience. And even paid campaigns can have their limits before the cost per action becomes too high. That's why it can be better in the long run to focus your social media resources on building brand efforts. These activities are defined by goals like awareness, engagement and public sentiment that aren't tied to an immediate revenue metric, but will in time open your business up to far more sales than would have been possible using short term social media marketing alone. Once you've determined the goals you want to achieve on social media, the next step is to decide which platform to use to do this. The first thing you want to consider is what media assets you already have. You could already have followers that you haven't been servicing but are primed for your message once you start tending to your accounts more closely. Remember the Social Media Templates kit I had you download at the beginning of this video? Now's your chance to use it. Open up the Social Media Audit template and fill out the tabs for any platform you're already actively on. Leveraging the audience you've already established can be more time and cost effective than trying to build an audience from scratch. But if you are building from scratch, the best way to decide which social media platform to focus on is by considering where your audience is most primed to receive your message. The average individual has more than eight social media accounts that they use for different things, so you can't just target a person, you have to target their user Persona, which is a combination of demographics like age, gender and location, as well as a user's profession and activities. A user's demographics stay the same across platforms, but their interest can change depending on what platform they're on. In other words, a 32 year old woman from San Diego might be an HR specialist on LinkedIn who follows pet groups on Facebook for her dog and watches tennis instruction videos on YouTube to help improve her game. Whether you sell human resources solutions, organic pet food or tennis racket, grip tape will determine the platform you use to target the same 30 year old woman in San Diego. If you haven't fully analyzed the audience you're aiming for, it's worth taking a few minutes to fill out one of HubSpot's free buyer Persona templates. The free link is down in the description. Now that you know who your audience is and where to find them, you're ready to start creating content that will work to achieve your determined goals. But what exactly does that look like? Maybe you want to post cool photos of your products to increase awareness or run a survey to enhance engagement. Live videos are great for projecting brand authority, while performance ads like Pay per Click can drive leads and sales right away. You could even partner with a social media influencer and have them promote your product on their channel. For brands with a solid budget looking for rapid growth, this is a great way to jumpstart a campaign. If you're still not sure which way to go, spend some time doing a competitive analysis of what's working well for others in your space. You probably already have a good idea of what your competition is up to, but it helps to keep a formal inventory. Start by making a list of your three to five closest competitors, then build a spreadsheet to record their number of fans and followers Posting frequency and consistency Content Engagement Like Are users leaving comments or sharing their posts? Content Virality how many shares, repins and retweets do their posts get? Now you've got your goals, your audience, your platform, and your analysis of what content works. I'm sure you're thinking to yourself, geez, Jamal, can we finally post something? It's been ages. Listen, I wouldn't hit that tweet button just yet, but it is time to start planning your content, and we make that easy to organize with the social media editorial calendar also included in the Templates kit. Now the time's to bust it out and start filling in the blanks with all of your brilliant and creative ideas. I say creative because even though you've done a deep dive on the competition, you don't just want to copy what other people are doing. Every brand is different and it's up to you to make that special X factor for your brand shine through. Because you're a beautiful, unique little snowflake and I love you so much. All right, anyway, I wish I had time to tell you all of the ways to creatively optimize your content on social media, but there's just too many possibilities for me to cover on this video. Fortunately, we have a whole playlist full of videos that will help you maximize results on whatever platform you've chosen. You can guess where the link is, but since you're still here, I have a few final tips that are almost universal. Keep copy short and sweet and use keywords to help people find your content. It's also been proven that using emojis actually really does work. Make sure that any images you used are sized correctly for the platform, and use original images, not stock, if you can avoid it. Videos should have the primary message in the first few seconds to capture the user before they scroll past. And always give your audience some sort of CTA they can follow, unless your goal is strictly engagement, in which case it's better to just ask questions or make statements that people will want to respond to organically. And like everything else in business, be sure to keep careful track of how your social media is performing so you can keep doing what's working while changing up things that aren't. Every social media platform provides analytics, and if you're posting lots of content or posting on multiple platforms, you might want to consider a tool like Hootsuite or Social Sprout or HubSpot's free marketing hub to help you organize and analyze the metrics generated by all of your social media efforts. And when it's time to report your performance, just grab the social media reporting template from the same template kit I've been talking about in this whole video. It truly has everything you need to execute an effective social media marketing strategy. When I tell you that we're literally just giving away the nectar of the gods straight ambrosia, it's like people are like, no, Jamal, there's no way, way, way, my friend. We're doing that. You're welcome. Still love you. And while you're down there, go ahead and subscribe to this channel so you never miss a future video about social media marketing. We're constantly making new ones with the latest information on the changing social media landscape. So we'll see you next time. Until then, I'm gonna be looking for your content in my feed. If I don't see it, just let me know where I should be following you. You know what I'm saying? See you next time.

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