Most Essential Tips for a Startup’s Social Media Marketing
There are a number of activities that businesses need to invest in so that they can come into competition with other businesses in that industry. Without being competitive enough, they will end up running huge losses and be driven out of the industry soon. One of these many important activities is marketing that is used to create awareness about the business and boost sales. Regardless of the scale of business, marketing is essential not only for growth but for survival as well. Marketing helps people know about your business and when you use the right strategies at the right time, the sales increase dramatically.
Historical data and evidences suggests that not one business throughout history has neglected the importance of marketing and businesses allocate a major chunk of total budget to this. Marketing is now divided into many categories according to the platforms used and strategies devised. Due to advancements in Information Technology, while all other marketing techniques have become far more efficient that before, internet marketing and social media marketing are playing a significant role. A lot of people use these terms interchangeably which is incorrect because social media marketing is limited to social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat while internet marketing also includes emailing and SEO.
In recent years, the number of innovative startups have gone up dramatically due to the fact that energetic and enthusiastic individuals are constantly coming up with new ideas. However, these startups begin on a very small scale and do not have much investment to spare on any activity, let alone marketing. However, the major chunk of investment is still important for marketing because if the reach of business is good, it will earn revenue and create growth perspectives. Since budget is low, startups must consider social media marketing as their priority because the reach can be very high with a relatively lesser investment. Following are some essential tips for social media marketing of startups:
- Plan the budget allocation wisely: Do not try to jump in without planning because some strategies can be much more efficient than others. First of all, analyze the social media platforms that can be most useful and allocate the highest budget to them. This must include Facebook because you can find most of your targeted audience on Facebook. Within Facebook, there are certain decisions you have to take. Firstly, your page needs to be created and actively managed around the clock. A new post every few hours is required to increase the reach and someone must always be active to reply to clients’ queries.It is advised that you take this responsibility initially not only because it will save you money but also because you can gain some experience of social media management which is important. Also, you can alter the deals and policies according to what is best for the business when a client asks about something.
- Begin selling on social media: In case of having a trading startup, before you go big and use an e-commerce site for trading, use Facebook page for all trading activities. An e-commerce site requires thorough investment and time to be constructed so making changes again and again could be costly. Therefore, advertise on your page and take orders via Facebook inbox using the cash-on-delivery payment method. This will help you analyze the response from the market and suggest any possible changes in the line of products. You can also design promotional offers according to the response you get from Facebook trading so the website could be made more attractive.
- Filter out the posts and status updates: Not everything you come up with should be posted on your social media page. The readers are very specific about what they want to read and your goal should be to recognize that specific thing. Therefore, you need to spend some money on creativity because the way you articulate the content and design it significantly affects the reach of the post. Bring some variation in posts i.e. after every two posts related to business and branding, publish a relevant meme that makes the followers laugh. This will bring those audience back who might then potentially be your clients.
- Using free and paid promotional tools: Social media websites are aware how essential they are for businesses all over the world. They earn a major portion of their revenue from these businesses and this is evident enough of the fact that you must use these tools for the promotion of your brand and business. One example of a free tool that Facebook provides is the automated posts at the times you set. This tool is very convenient because you simply have to set a time and prepare a post that will be published exactly at the given time. This means you do not have to worry about the posts all the time and there is no stress of forgetting any post.As far as paid promotional tools are concerned, the option of “boost post” is the best and cheapest. You get to choose your budget and Facebook automatically makes your posts available to active accounts so they are attracted towards the page. There is no limit to how much you can invest in this and so you can allocate the budget according to your own needs.
- Build customer loyalty through social media: The initial stage on social media is the best phase to make or break customers. Customers are looking for two main things in a startup: their frequency of posts and their promptness in replying to customers. It is for this reason why you are advised to hire a specific individual to manage your page. If any of the queries remain unanswered, you lose a client which could lead to unfavorable consequences later on.
Through a combination of these strategies, you can make optimum use of social media marketing for your startup.
Author bio: Henry Roster is a biologist who works at a medical center in Chicago at Dissertation Help. He obtained his postgraduate degree in human biology and holds some experience as a freelance social media marketer.
