One of the most important part of my occupation as a marketing consultant is when I have to devise specific strategies for micro businesses, simply due to the fact that most of them have certain common problems initially, including very limited budgets and the need of establish a name.
A few years back, this problem caused me some real bouts of headache while I would sit and design how a client should go about building their brand and market it. To come up with cost-effective strategies, I would usually regard having a website and blogs as the most important social media for small businesses to build rapport and relationships with their niches.
However, since other media, like Youtube, Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest, a whole lot of new doors have opened for small businesses to reach their customers and build strong relationships.
Want to know why, as a small business owner, you need to be present on online social media? Well, there are a hundred reasons why you shouldn’t stay away, but let me share 5 key reasons with you that I now share with all of my new clients who own a small business.
Cost-Effective Relationship Building
Online social media is highly cost-effective, and I don’t say that only because access to most of these services is usually free. On that point, it should be remembered that while there are no registration or usage charges for making blogs or joining Twitter, Facebook, or Youtube, producing good content and promoting it takes time.
Producing blog posts of good quality requires not just expert opinion on the subject – which, in turn, means a lot of research and/or experience – but also a number of other skills.
Similarly, promoting content or products/services with 140-character tweets, or short statuses on Facebook, is fairly easy and takes a minute or two, but you need appealing website content or products/services to promote in the first place, and, again, that takes time (This holds particularly true in the aftermath of Google’s Panda and Penguin updates which have made online marketing truly dependent on original content or good quality).
When I say online social media is cost-effective, I mean the amount of time and effort you put in really pays off in the form of loyal customers and an admirable reputation as a business firm, even if it takes time. The good news is, being a small and starting out business, in all probability, you don’t have any set deadlines to meet. So, if you spend your time on online social media wisely, it will definitely pay off. You will see the fruits were worth all the hard work.
No Rocket Science Involved
Using online social media is really a piece of cake. Establishing a website and blog is a piece of cake. Making and maintaining your Twitter and Facebook timelines is a piece of cake. All you need is good content that appeals so much to your market that people not only visit your website and want to do business with you but also share it with others. If you’re using some of the video-based platforms like TikTok or YouTube as well then the same principle applies, but you can also buy TikTok followers with easy checkout for an extra bit of support, and this can help immeasurably in building up your online media presence.
In other words, make content that goes viral. What you should remember is that even this doesn’t mean you need to go through extensive education or thick books to make your presence on social media visible to your niche market. Much has been written about these matters by successful business people in their blogs in the form of witty anecdotes or interesting stories.
You’ll have no problem finding such material through Google and you will also be delighted to see there are countless remarkable tutorials (even videos) to help you guide through these initial problems and instruct you about how to use online social media effectively. Piece of cake!
Best Measurement Tool
Another remarkable incentive for you in using online social media lies in its capacity to provide you first-hand fresh feedback from your niche market, which can tell you exactly what kind of features, benefits, and incentives your prospects expect to find in your business offerings.
This very important opportunity of online social media is often missed by small businesses, which leads them to fail to measure how good their content and offerings are. I always ask my clients to make a clear strategy on how to collect feedback from their niche and utilize it regularly.
That not only helps my clients in designing better and wanted offerings for their market but also in constantly improving their business practices.
