Social media provides an opportunity for any large or small business to build a company brand. It’s all done through relationships. By building strong relationships with new and existing customers in this way, businesses build brand awareness (people know who you are) and loyalty. Social media is also by far the best option for marketing, since it relies heavily on the most trusted form of advertising – word-of-mouth.
How to Make It Happen
As a business owner, you need to reach out and slowly, often step by step, build a presence on social media websites. To do this, take it one step at a time by following a few key small business tips.
Establish an Online Presence for Your Brand
Creating online experiences or destinations on the web where customers can reach out to you, learn about you and interact with you, is the cornerstone of success. It’s easy (and most of the time free) to do. Create a blog. Sign up with a business page at Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter. Establish a destination that allows you the best reach to your customer base.
How Will They Get To You?
There are a couple of things to keep in mind here. First, you need to give people a reason to visit your website. You’ll do this through creating effective, interesting and even off the wall content. You want people to want to read it and share it with their friends. You’ll publish this on your blog and then link to it on your social media sites.
Why do this? It creates multiple ways for people to access your site and connect with you. They can do so directly through their blog. However, you now have people sharing your post and creating new links that feed into your blog. This equates to new opportunities to build your network.
What else can you do to increase your social media skills as a business owner? Consider a few more marketing tips.
- Join forums and blogs. Write blog posts for other websites that contain a link back to your own. Answer people’s questions on these sites.
- Never sell. Rather, give. In other words, give people information, encouragement, resources or something else. The more you give people, the more successful your marketing methods will be.
- Know who the influencers are of your target market. Do you know where your best customers are online? They could be using one site or another. There may be someone in the industry that is well known online. You need to be in that circle to get the attention.
When you do all of these things, you build your brand one step at a time. It is not instantaneous, but this organic method is by far the most effective way to put your business sin the hands of your most likely customers. Social media and marketing is not about selling, but about creating a brand that others recognize and remember, especially when they need whatever product or service you have to offer.
