Small businesses have a lot on their plate as they try to find a spot within a noisy and cluttered social media landscape. The pandemic shifted many consumers’ shopping behaviors to online and forced small business owners to take their social media efforts more seriously.
The fact is that most of the world is now on social media. A study made in 2020 found that 79% of Americans have a social media profile; that is up from 10% in 2008! Social media started as a way for people to connect and communicate with friends and family, and now with their favorite brands. The most powerful action a small business can take to drive people to purchase your product or service is to be responsive to your customer’s needs while being honest, friendly, interesting and offering promotions.
Unlike the big corporate giants that can afford social media teams, small businesses have to take on the brunt of the social media work, whether it is the founder or a single team member. Many small businesses struggle with their social media marketing because they do not know what to post, what to say, how to say it, nor have large budgets to outsource this task. So, ensuring your social media marketing is producing monetary results, a simpler approach is needed.
Here are five key steps every small business marketer needs to do to create sales through social media.
- Provide clarity on your offering. It should be easy to see what it is you sell and how your service or product helps your consumers the moment they visit your social media profile. Use videos, images and graphics to highlight your products or services. Also, utilize your biography space to explain your features and solutions in three sentences or less. The easier to understand, the better.
- Know who your customer is. Understanding your target market is critical to success in business, especially as you communicate with them more on social media. An easy way to increase your engagement is to connect with them by using the same nomenclature and hashtags your customers use. For example, if your customer has a nickname for your service or product, use it in the way you talk about it, too. This is an easy and effective way to make your customers feel heard.
- Have an easy-to-find call-to-action button/link on all your social profiles. Most social media sites now let you add links for users to learn more about your business. Make sure you have the right links for any campaign or general posts you create. Use call-to-action words like “learn more” or “shop today” to encourage clicks on your posts. Without a call to action, your posts are just posts. Customers need to be told what to do.
- Create a sales or landing page for the call-to-action link. Your social media profiles come with a small space for you to describe what you do or sell. With your link on hand, make sure you create a sales or landing page where your customer can see in more detail what you offer. In many cases, you can use a how-to video instead of a sales video. Education with the intent to sell always does better than direct selling. A landing page for your product is different from your web address because it takes the consumer directly to the product. You want to avoid having your consumer do more work than necessary to find what they need.
- Make the purchasing process easy to do. Once you have created a new and neat landing page, make sure you have an easy check-out process, too. Nowadays, you have many electronic payment check-out systems that easily allow you to organize your sales offerings and embed directly to your website. Check out Shopify, Etsy, PayPal and Stripe for options to start your online store.
Irrespective of how many followers you have, following these five key elements will create a process you can replicate over and over to monetize your social media efforts. These key elements may seem like an obvious place to start, but you will be surprised how well it works once you start. Keep it simple and consistent.
EDGAR RAFAEL OLIVO is a bilingual business educator, economic advisor and contributor for several media outlets. He’s a nonprofit executive who is passionate about education. He is certified in finance and data analytics and holds a business degree from Arizona State University.
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