How to Leverage Social Media Advertising for Small Businesses
Do you know how to use social media? Isn’t this a silly question?
In this article, I will explain you how you can use social media for generating huge profits from your small businesses. Using Social Media for small business can be the next big thing for you. Before moving to the real topic ie How to Leverage Social Media Advertising for Small Businesses? Let’s give a reading to this terminology. Social Media advertising refers to increase your site’s traffic and conversions on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and Pinterest via using their paid advertising services.
Basically, in this digital era, nothing is free, even social media too. As you all know in recent years whether it Facebook or Twitter, LinkedIn or Instagram they have raised their advertising prices. This happens due to an increase in social media advertising competition. Every time you log into your Facebook account you can clearly see that many large consumer products companies are making good use of the spaces in the sidebars of the social engines. Their ads often appear in your newsfeed right?
So now one question may arise in your mind, how much they pay? In case if you’re running a small business, how advertising can increase your business or brand exposure? How much you have to pay for social media advertising?
Fact to remember: About 50% of the respondents said they have spent money on advertising in the past or are currently spending.
I can assure you one thing that you need to pay a little on the social media as compared to the traditional marketing activities. Social media advertising has a very low initial investment both in terms of money as well as in time. You may ask me how? Let me give an example if you spend as little as 200 INR and few minutes of your time, you can boost a post, photo or status whatever. The boosted post will be shown to hundreds and thousands of new prospects. These prospects can also be converted into leads if he/she finds it insightful. Isn’t it sound interesting and profitable? Yes, it is.
Social media advertising for small businesses is a necessity in today’s era. Advertising on social media can help you to reach a wider and targeted audience. To reach the target customer on Social Media small business owners have lots of choices to opt for their much needed platform.
Do you want to know where companies are spending their money secretly for social media marketing for a small business?
You will be amazed to know the fact that people are not using social media for business conventionally. They are targeting the top social media platforms wisely that are actually going to convert for them.
One of the most converting Social Media Platform is Pinterest. Lead Generation of Conversion rate of Pinterest is higher than any of the platforms. One of the major point of success rate of Pinterest is its audience. Maximum Pinterest users are women which are shopping freaks and are likely to shop more online than men. Moreover, Pins which are promoted via paid Pinterest advertising used to stay alive for longer time even after the campaign ends
Nowadays LinkedIn is also preferred moreover Google. This is because of the fact that LinkedIn is a spam free social media platform where real time professional shares and connects with each other. Social media advertising on LinkedIn converts more than other social engines.
Instagram is now trending platform for advertising on social media. Its reach is awesome and with proper use of right content, you can reach the target audience. You can convert this raw audience to business leads later on.
Youtube also offers innovative ad solutions. You can run video ads on youtube. A video is worth more than any other form of the ad platform. The only thing you need in the youtube marketing is to keep your video short crisp and informative. You can learn to make professional videos easily.
Twitter is no new to us. The most authoritative website where you get information in a concise 140 chars. You can use twitter for business. It is counted as one of the top social media sites for business. Here you can run sponsored ads and tags by which large targeted customers can be approached within no time.
Facebook is still a hot property for advertising, interestingly many companies are turning to Facebook more than twice as often as they turn to Google. This is because of the fact, Facebook is interactive and people can contact with real time people of a company via their business page or profile.
Why advertising on social media is popular? What are the benefits of social media for business?
Because it boils down to these three things from traditional advertising that are ease of use, audience segmentation and affordability.
1. Ease of Use
Using Social Media for business is very simple in nature and effective in online campaigning. It takes just a few minutes to set up. Just a few clicks, owner can boost an existing piece of content. An important feature of advertising on social media is business owner’s dashboards; it allows you some of the sophisticated advertising planning. More specifically process of picking keywords, and hoping you have the right, selecting the target audience and locations.
Here you must remember you’re not competing against other businesses for a top spot. You’re planning to reach a targeted audience in limited time. Creating an advertisement is need some of the insights, take Facebook as an example; it does have some stricter guidelines for what can appear in an ad and what shouldn’t. You must follow their rules and regulations to create the ad so that you can make most out of your social media advertising campaign.
2. Audience Segmentation
Segmentation is the method of identifying the specific needs and wants in any field. Same applies to social media marketing for small business, now Facebook knows almost everything about their users, from relationship status, career choices to choices of entertainment they enjoy. With this information, the advertiser can build the advertisement with custom information of available audience.
Recently, studies suggest that the best in the market is LinkedIn; here you can target ads by industry, job title, size of a company or even specific companies if you want as per the requirement. You can bang on the target audience that is going to convert for you.
3. Affordability
Most important factor in advertising and marketing is how much to spend? But remember don’t spend more than your budget. Your results may be a little slow but surely it can keep the pace. You can start social media marketing for small business in as low as $5.
Frankly speaking, you can create wonders with such a low cost; all you need is passion and creativity. To get started is easy but why so many business owners have lost their plot? It is due to unplanned objectives and wasteful techniques. Whatever the marketing you are planning or else running must have clear set of objectives, plan you’re counter attack, run a few trails, measure the results, adjust your plans, strategy and run again
Unfortunately, almost many small business owners are being a bit of hesitation in their approach. They do not find much benefits of social media for business dues to their undernourished vision of the online world. They have limited trial in their approach and then they chose to giving up rather than continuing to test is painful.
4. Social Media Advertising the Trend to Watch
All the new social media tools will continue to evolve and revolutionize the advertising world. So nothing to lose in experimenting something new. Many business owners are experimenting with small social advertising campaigns and techniques that will eventually come to something big one day. Some will create and develop a systematic approach to reach mass audience and see real success and real results.
Social media is not a fast track. It is slow but most important for a long term online business. Remember the success will follow your hard work at any circumstances, sometimes you may be front or back end of the trend. But never lose hope in social media; slowly your results will follow. All you need is to participate in and advertising on social media for business can be a huge success. Even you can set new standards by playing differently with your creativity in Social Media.
Conclusion
Now, we all know Social media advertising has plenty of benefits/features over other forms of advertising. Millions of people everywhere in the world connected to the Internet and using social media every day. So business owners can’t afford to ignore this kind of marketing potential and top social media platforms. With the right strategy, your social media advertising can let your business to grow exponentially and increase your business’s exposure.
You must have proper attention to social networks as they exist now, and watch how they change in the coming years. Social media marketing for small business will never fade away, and neither will advertising on social media. Hope you have enjoyed this piece. Feel free to share your views in the comment box.
Summary Article Name How to Leverage Social Media Advertising for Small Businesses? Description Using Social Media for Advertising for small business as a marketing strategy is a great idea these days. It is the best way to reach your target customers.
Author: Santosh Reddy
