Contemporary large businesses like Walmart, Goldman Sachs, General Motors, General Electric, Amazon, and Apple, all started as small businesses. It is the potential of a small business to grow big.
It needs enough nurturing, adequate capital, and visionary leadership. With these, any small business can establish itself as a giant business tomorrow.
The entrepreneurial mindset is growing at an unprecedented pace. This is evident in the face of an increase in the number of startups, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. The abundant energy of these young entrepreneurs has become an immense challenge for businesses.
It is due to the different strategies they deploy to win the market. Such tactics are either the product of their business ideas, educational qualifications, or their on-field experiences.
Significance of Social Media
The 21st century is the age of the internet and social media. Social media is the world’s largest platform for showcasing an individual’s talent. Social media was designed to bring people together and increase the mutual bonds between them. But today its uses went beyond bonding.
Social media has become an online society, comprising various types of people from various backgrounds. It has evolved into a huge public space, a perfect space for businesses to find people, market their products, and mint money.
But a large part of the potential of social media remains untapped. Small businesses especially struggle to have a meaningful foothold on these platforms for many reasons. Those small businesses that have a significant presence on social media struggle to make businesses out of them.
Let me give you a few tips about how to use social media to hack the growth of your small business.
Go Global With A Website
These days businesses are digitized to the extent that even your neighborhood may not know your business if it doesn’t have an online presence. The social media platforms give you many pockets of space for you to promote your website on it.
Owning a website for your small business is more than a business prestige issue beyond syncing it with social media. According to Hartford, having a dedicated website increases your brand value proposition.
In case you don’t have a website, website design services in NYC can help you build a relevant website. Create a website according to your whims and fancies, especially in a social media site-compatible way.
For example, a person is visiting your social media page. He became interested in reaching your website. He should be able to access it with ease.
Should these people feel discomfort with these steps, it is tantamount to the loss of a potential customer.
As easy as it may sound, it is a crucial step to perfect very diligently.
Have a Verified Account to Attract People
As discussed above, social media is the rendezvous of many people after their tiresome work. Proper pitching strategy can make them your customers. But for this, first things first, you must need an active social media account.
According to Forbes, verified accounts make people take your business. It makes them believe in your business more than your competitors who don’t have a verified account.
Post Relevant Content in Your Social Media Page
You now have a verified account. Your website has been bravo-locked to the social media account. Now it’s time for you to scan for potential customers.
Instead of you going to the people to persuade them to become customers, try unconventional creative ways for the vice versa.
Deploy strategies so that the customers themselves come in search of your service. This is less costly, more effective, and, most importantly, it works. Ever wondered how to do this?
As Steve Rogers vowed, “You can do this all day.” It is possible by posting relevant content that your audience could probably and positively look up to.
It may sound simple. But posting relevant content is one of the most important social media growth hacking tips.
For example: Assume you are offering electronics sales and services. You can upload posts like “Top 10 mistakes homemakers do while purchasing an oven.” You can include a write-up that gives solutions to these mistakes as a guide to purchasing the best oven.
Such posts attract people to look into your profile. Often, they will end up purchasing from you, thanks to the credibility your post created.
Know and Understand Your Audience
The biggest advantage of social media is that it connects people from diverse localities. It acts as a digital playground and a place to relax. For small businesses like yours, it may become the biggest disadvantage too.
Choosing a potential customer might give you a tough time. It is not overwhelming to state that it is synonymous with finding the world’s smallest needle in the world’s largest haystack.
Then how can you unblock this blocker? Social media marketing helps. Social media marketing, or SMM, helps any business to strategize its posts. It helps us analyze how, when, and which audience to target.
According to HubSpot, it helps generate more leads and increase the share of sales conversions. Using SMM is one of the crucial social media growth hacking tips, one shouldn’t avoid.
SMM leads to optimized use of your resources. For example, consider the same electronic sales scenario. Let us assume that the post is seen by a person in need of buying an oven. It may lead to a sale. We can also boost the post to reach maximum people.
But if that post is visible to non-decision makers in a home, say, kids, your resources spent on boosting it will be less efficient. It can be solved by proper targeting of the ads or posts, thanks to the modern social media in-built tools.
With the right SMM strategy, you can convex on to potential customers. You can make your posts shown only to them, by targeting the homemakers’ group in your locality.
For all these reasons, social media marketing is a strategy small businesses should never miss.
Utilize the Social Media Tools to Boost Sales
Gone are the days when social media was used as just a platform to like, share, and comment on events and photos. Social media today has evolved in a way that is best suited for small businesses, to exploit and enhance business.
Social media come with a wide range of tools, themes, options, and features to ease the work of business owners.
For example, you are planning to post an offer in your electronics store for Thanksgiving, which is 2 months away. Back then, you had to create the post and then wait for a specific day to upload it.
But today, with the option to schedule posts on Facebook, you can create and post on the go. It will be posted later on the scheduled day.
Back then, you would usually post and leave it without analyzing the response. You may not know the impact created by it, the sales from it, or at least the total number of people who saw it.
But tools in social media today, give a detailed report about the performance of each post. It can give you the total number of total people who have seen, reacted, and responded to that post.
It also shows the number of people who visited your website via that post and even the locality where they’re from. The beauty of this feature is these results are measurable against a benchmark. This can make you realize the type of posts the audience likes.
As a result, it can guide you to manipulate your future content to align with the preferences of audiences.
To add upon these, it breaks confirmation biases of the business owners to upload the posts they like. Thus, it leads them to make data-backed, informed decisions. This in turn makes way to post content that the audience demands.
Another important tool in social media is the use of the short video tool. It leads to the display of crisp, instant, and creative ads. It marked a pragmatic shift in the ad industry’s mode of operation.
Features like Instagram Reels are handy for the vibrant display of ads to the viewers en masse. They increase brand awareness among the common masses, at a lower cost than traditional media.
A new groundbreaking marketing tip using video ads in social media is the use of influencers. Let us see how it helps.
Try Influencers Marketing
The technique of influencer marketing is getting traction in current trends. It is of the social media growth hacking tips for small businesses.
Influencers are popular people online who command the loyalty of a large number of followers. Due to this, they have the power to persuade people to buy the products they recommend.
People trust influencers due to their remarkable history and the feeling that they are not celebrities but one among them. These emotions can be leveraged to successfully market a product through influencers.
Many types of influencers exist, so choose the right person wisely. The influencer should be a representative of both the product and the company and be identifiable with the people.
A challenge exists in finding the right influencer. E-consultancy opines that about 70% of marketers feel it difficult to get an apt influencer.
Once an influencer is chosen, either they can create content or say the content you have prepared for them. Make interesting, creative short reels and promote them from your social media handle and also from the handle of the influencer. It has previous positive experiences and assures increased business.
Apart from influencer marketing, let me give you another unconventional tip. Posting engaging and entertaining memes for business growth. Are you wondering what? Let us see how this works.
Memes Can Make Way for You
Creative, dark, and dank memes fill today’s social media. Memes have outgrown an era of just making people laugh and have become marketing material themselves. As ironic as it may sound, meme marketing gives better reach than traditional means.
Memes are used for their simple form of conveying a message with wit and ease. Memes are universal for the positive emotions they convey. Businesses deploy this simple principle to attract people to their sites, as memes make people associate you with positivity.
As memes keep people laughing, they associate it with happiness. If your business is marketed through memes, people will unconsciously associate your brand with joy. This classical conditioning is working wonders for many businesses in social media.
Courtesy: Keyword Tool
For small businesses like yours, meme marketing should be a must-try strategy as it doesn’t require a lot of investment. All that it takes is an ardent meme creator. A meme creator who is good at following social media trends, knowledge about your company, and a bit of creativity.
Such a meme creator can amalgamate your business’s value with the trending meme and make people interact with your post readily.
Not all people like formal ways of conveying a message. Memes are semi-formal and have become a part of their life. Hence, marketing via memes from your verified social media account will attract more eyes. This gets more sales.
Wrapping Up Social Media Growth Hacking
We have seen the most important useful tips in social media to hack your small business’s growth. These range from using memes to having a verified social media account. From using influencers to engaging in social media marketing.
The list is not limited only to these tips. Small businesses can engage in live streaming about their business. They can post relevant news on social media. They can also start social media podcasts, engage in social listening, and much more.
It is a lifetime dream for many youngsters to start a small business. And to achieve it, they consider it to be their lifetime achievement. It is a fortunate time for people like you who run small businesses in a time of booming social media.
Beyond giving market, and profit, social media gives small businesspersons something very unique. We observe similar small businesses thrive from their social media successes. It gives other small businesspersons motivation to succeed.
Use social media aptly, deploy these social media growth hacking tips and you will hardly find a downturn in your business.