For small businesses, social media is a fantastic gold mine to build relationships with your audience. Since most small businesses operate locally, platforms like Facebook, Twitter and even email can help you reach out to your target audience at a personal level which in turn contributes to sales. In this article, we will take a look at some of the top social marketing tools for small businesses and how they can grow your business.
If you are looking at social media management, look no further than Hootsuite. This is the most popular tool available in the market today for social media management. If you are a bootstrapped entrepreneur who cannot afford a paid plan, you can go with their free package that lets you manage up to three of your social media profiles. However, for advanced features and larger social profile management, you could choose one of the affordable paid plans. Hootsuite features include the ability to amplify your social media reach by seamlessly sharing your posts with your coworkers to share, scheduling messages for future and a sophisticated analytics and insights tool to understand who is engaging with you and what type of content works well for your audience.
If you are a local business, you may be interested in using conventional tools like email and SMS to network with your customers. This is an all in one marketing platform that lets businesses send emails, text messages, picture messages, pre-recorded voice messages, fax or even postcards to their customers from a single dashboard. Hubbion also has a few advanced features like the ability to automate your engagement like the ability to auto-reply based on SMS keywords and schedule messages over SMS, email, fax or voice. All of this is pay-as-you-go and does not require monthly subscriptions.
As a small business, a significant chunk of referrals are likely to be inbound through word of mouth referrals. Reviews can thus make or break your business. With Yotpo, it is quite easy to send post-purchase feedback request to your customers over email. The tool serves more than one crucial function. It lets happy customers share their testimonials over social media helping your business with word of mouth referrals. Yotpo also lets businesses aggregate all your feedback on your website helping you with SEO. The basic version of Yotpo is free and should sufficiently help you get started on building word of mouth referrals. You may however pick a premium version for more advanced features like SEO rich snippets, email upselling and visual marketing.
Affiliate management can consume a lot of resources and often requires a full time manager. But having said that word of mouth referrals is one of the largest contributors to the bottom line of small businesses. GrowSumo brings the two together and lets small and local businesses quickly and easily create referral links for their customers who could then share these links over social media platforms like Facebook or Twitter. It’s a win-win since it lets your loyal customers earn commissions for referring new buyers while you get to spread the word about your business. GrowSumo is easy to join and only charges customers for new purchases made over the platform.
