Start-Ups Guide to Maximizing Social Media Marketing

A stock photo of social media platform icons in a mobile device. (Pixabay/Pexels)

In 2021, social media for business marketing is no longer foreign. With 4.48 billion people across various social media, if your startup business isn’t on social media, then your presence is at the base.

Let’s face it, social media is the new marketplace, a global one at that. However, just as every other form of marketing, it requires strategic planning, proper execution, and time to yield proposed results.

You may belong to the wagon of startup owners who might agree to the relevance of social media, but do not understand how to fully harness the platform for your business goals and growth. This guide is aimed at helping you to understand, get started and acing the process of marketing your startup on social media.

Benefits of Social Media for Start-Ups

As a playground of almost all demographics, social media present a lot of benefits to startups who can leverage on the large pool of audience, who are in the face of business, potential customers.

Many small business owners still feel that social media marketing is a hell of a ride and that it is meant for more established firms. Thing is, marketing your business on social media isn’t a walk by the park, but you’ll be shooting yourself in the foot if you think it’s meant for the bigger wolves of walls streets.

Social media provides an opportunity for startups to grow and engage with a close circle of an audience, create a community of present and prospective customers.

There are many benefits to social media marketing, but the key benefits include:

Generates and Promotes Brand Awareness

Increase Website Traffic

Market Products and Services

1. To Generate Brand Awareness

Leveraging the number of people on social media only results in one of the glaring results—awareness.

The catch here is, compared to traditional marketing platforms such as Radio, magazine, TC channels, etc, it cost you little to nothing to spread information’s about your business in a timely manner, effectively and efficiently with the potentials of reaching millions of people within your business district or over the globe depending on your target market.

With more people interacting with your firm interprets to followership and awareness which in turn transforms to more clients for your business and higher conversion rates.

2. Increase in Website Traffic

Look at it this way, you got some great awareness on social media, resulting to thousands of followership, it’s easy to redirect those social media followers to your website. This will invariably, improve your inbound traffic, and help you gain more website authority.

3. Market Product and Services

The more active you are on social media, the more people you tend to attract every day. This results in a number of followers for your business to whom you can market your products and services.

How To Get Started With Social Media Marketing

So, here is it. You’ve decided to go all-in… That means you need to start with the fundamentals.

Draw Up a Social Media Strategy

Like every successful marketing starts with a good plan, so does social media marketing require a proper digital marketing strategy. A strategic plan before launching out on these social media platforms gives you a good knowledge of how to execute your plan and an expected result.

Some of these tips should help:

Set a Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Timely (SMART) Social Media Goals and Objectives. For instance, you can target aim at securing more customers or raise your conversion rate, rather than just racking up likes.

Research Your Competitors on social media. Understand what they’re doing right and wrong. Adjust their strategy and use it. A competitive analysis will help you understand what’s working and what’s not within your industry.

If you’re an existing user of social media, and conflicted with not meeting with proposed plan, then it’s time to conduct a social media audit. A proper audit will help you understand what is wrong and what’s wrong. You just have to be sincere with yourself.

Create a social media calendar—that way you can plan to post the right contents to a targeted audience. You can employ the 80-20 rule, where you post informative, educative and entertaining contents 80 percent of the time to educate your audience, while you promote your brand and sell your products for 20 percent of times.

Choose a Social Media Platform Suitable for Your Business

A wrong move to make at the start of your social media marketing campaign is guessing where your target audience spends their time.

For instance, if you’re targeting Gen Z, you may decide to focus your attention on Tiktok and Instagram, however, statistically, you should also consider Facebook with which as nearly a quarter of their users between 18–24.

So, the major thing here is to get to the statistics before choosing. Know your audience, and know-how they spend their time, and what they engage with.

Understand the demographics in accordance to your SMART goals and objectives. You can use different channels for different goals, Facebook for traffic, and lead generation and perhaps, Twitter for customer relations and services.

Know Your Audience, Expand Your Reach and Establish Relationships

Just as aforementioned, to better target and meet your goals, you need to know and understand who your target audience is.

As a startup, you can start by checking into every objective, and analyzing who is most likely to use your products. Understanding that will help you know their pocket power, spending behavior, and how they use their time on the internet.

Once you understand this, you can expand your reach through various media, it’s easier to reach out to them through social media ads since you already have their demographics.

Most start-ups that went on to become great firm had to build a solid relationship with their customers. Social media allows you to connect directly with your prospective clients. Quite a number of people use social media to research brands. If you have a good relationship with your followers, your business will be easily found.

Maximize Social Media Automation Tools

Someone once told me, “Never do a job a robot can do effectively...” and I quite agree. Considering the task around social media marketing is time-consuming, you may need to learn how to use automation tools such as Buffer to schedule post on various social media channels your business exists. You can schedule posts for up to a week-long, and all you have to do is answer queries and questions posed by your followers. That way, you still have time to spend on other things apart from social media marketing.

Pay Attention to Trends

Another way to market your brand on social media is humping on social media challenges or trends. You probably have to create content relating to the trend, or just talk about it. The more you can resonate with trends, the easier it is for users to get acquainted to you.

Concluding Remarks

Social media marketing is the goldmine of marketing at the moment, and we might not see the end of it. So, what better time to get your business on social media than now.

Connect with new audience everyday,

Nurture your followers, provide value through the information you share,

Be more of a problem solver and value creator than someone stacking cheese in their lungs and you’ll see an uproar in your marketing efforts.

Best of lucks out there!!!

By Solomon Shojobi