Social Marketing Strategies For Small Businesses

I am a huge fan of mom and pop stores and one man businesses because I am a one woman operation. I believe that you don’t have to be a Fortune 500 company with 5000 employees to make a difference or get noticed in your industry and I am thankful for social marketing for evening the playing field for all businesses regardless of size.

How do small businesses benefit from social marketing? Well, to reap the full benefits of the social marketing craze, businesses must understand first what social marketing is. They must have a solid social media marketing strategy in place that will be followed and it must be designed and implemented by someone who is actively plugged into how social marketing works and understands the company’s goals, its audience and how to fully exploit social media to benefit the company. This expert must be familiar with blogs, forums, discussion board, social bookmarking sites, video and photo sharing sites, consumer review sites and social networks.

Social media is all about engaging the audience and encouraging conversations and interactions that increase web presence and create brand awareness so this should be a top priority when it comes to social marketing strategies for small businesses. The more loyal consumers are to your brand, the better the publicity you will generate and it can’t be bad for business, money wise.

So when drafting up a social marketing strategy for your small business – think about

1. What your goal is – are you after brand recognition or relationship building with your audience? Do you want customer feedback or are you after publicity (both good and bad)?
2. Which social media marketing sites to use – Facebook or google+ or maybe myspace and twitter

Regardless of what marketing experts say, I believe that social marketing is the one area where a small business should not experiment and make improvements “as they go along”. Better to be safe by having a solid strategy in place with measurable goals and outcomes. That said, there is no secret strategy that offers guaranteed success. As long as you let your creative juices flow and engage your audience, any social marketing strategies you set in motion for your small business will yield positive results.