How to Market Your Small Business in a Competitive Social Media Landscape

We’ve got the guide for you to help get your small business off the ground.

Social media marketing is the go to marketing tactic for small businesses. And for good reason. Simply compared to old marketing methods (TV, movie, print, radio, etc.) the digital marketing world is far more accessible, affordable, and effective. Which means that new-born entrepreneurs just getting their sea legs can easily start to market their business.

And the best way to market yourself digitally is on social media. Whether you’re streaming your favorite games like 32Red blackjack online, or selling flipped furniture, we’ve got the guide for you to help get your small business off the ground.

Take advantage of what’s affordable

The beauty of online marketing is that a good chunk of it doesn’t need to cost a penny. Signing up for platforms is free, creating your content can range, and when you have a camera in your phone it’s essentially free, and interacting with everyone is free.

But there are also free marketing tactics that pretty much rely on everyone else doing all the work. The two that come to mind are user-generated content and curated content.

User-generated content is exactly what it sounds like. If you encourage your audience, perhaps with a prompt in your stories, you can have audience members sending you reviews, product placement, etc. that you can then showcase in your profile. The more you showcase, the more people will want to get involved.

Curated content is also known as collaborating in a sense, and it can have varying degrees of work to it. Team up with another brand and give them a shoutout in your socials. Not only will you fill a gap in your content calendar, but you will open the door for them to do the same. Before you know it, you’ll both be sharing audience members that travel between your socials.

Learn your data

The edge that you can have over other small businesses is knowing the importance of data. Read up on SEO, keyword research, and data analytics to know for certain what is working and what isn’t and adjust accordingly.

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and is most useful if you have a website you need marketed. The idea is that no one looks at the second page of a Google search, or even a few results down, which means you want to optimize your website to rank higher and higher in the search results. Mostly you do this by making your website as informed as possible. But you can learn all about that in your research.

Show your authenticity

When it comes to actually creating the content, you want to be as authentic as possible. The idea of the big influencer is out. The one that shills diet pills that they’ve never tried and aren’t going to? They’re not wanted.

We saw this mostly in the rise of short-form video content. Not only was the content a lot less polished, since they were coming from camera phones in the dead of night, but people would start their point with “Ignore my bedhead” and then sail into a point that was appreciated by the audience, rather than shilling something they don’t believe in.

On top of that, users are growing increasingly cynical of the businesses they buy from. Users are researching brands that they buy from as much as possible. Mostly, this is to make sure that the priorities of the brand align with their own. And where do they find this information? On social media. So, make sure to mention anything you like to support, like sustainable products and practices, cruelty free products, other small businesses, minority-owned businesses, etc. As long as you’re real about it, your audience will appreciate it.