As a small business owner, your time and the time of your staff is limited. So when you hear about all the time your kiddos, nephews, friends, and colleagues are spending on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and TikToc, it’s natural to panic and think, “I’m not running ads or posting to any of those!!!”
The truth is, you may not need to. The most important aspect of a solid, effective social media strategy is RIGHT MESSAGE, RIGHT PLACE. In other words, your brand, service or product may not even be relevant to audiences on all those platforms.
By way of explanation, let’s look at some usage trends from the past few years. This first graphic displays usage of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, etc.
Social Media Usage averages from 2014 – 2016. For advertising purposes, these platforms are not always the most effective.
If you are a local pizza shop, WordPress, Twitter, and What’s App are likely irrelevant. But because your audience is LOCAL, and searches for your product are local, with a short sales funnel from awareness to purchase (your customer is hungry), Google and Facebook are paramount! Therefore, watching these data trends over the years is a very important component of your social media marketing strategy, and your marketing team should be helping you make decisions to meet your business goals based on trends on those relevant platforms.
Pinterest users are typically in the awareness stage, but if they are referred from another site, they may be further down the sales funnel. Knowing the data of your Pinterest page is important!
But for those small business owners who provide local services that may have a great visual element to them (like diving certification, golf, fabrication, printing, etc.) a different mix of social media must be considered as new platforms are developed and gain users. Pintrest, for example, is a good platform to capture both search and referral traffic. This is important to understand because search traffic from a SERP is likely a consumer higher up in the sales funnel (in the awareness stage), whereas referral traffic (from another blog linking to your site) is probably a user who is in the comparison stage – almost ready to make a decision. So analyzing data from Pinterest, it would be important for you to know how much of that traffic is referral, and from which source, so that you can double-down on those most likely ready to purchase or engage your services in the near future.
Professional services are probably the most flexible in their usage of social media. Medical practitioners, chiropractors, attorneys, and accountants for example can use multiple platforms to capture traffic. This is especially true if their service area is fairly large like an entire state or multiple practices in a large metropolis. In addition to maintaining tailored PPC campaigns, blogging on their website, posting articles to LinkedIn, curating relevant content to a FlipBoard magazine, and running ads on Facebook targeted to their market area are ALL good ideas!
Flipboard is a great platform for capturing users further down the sales funnel since the articles are targeted to narrow interest groups.
Users captured from sources like LinkedIn and Flipboard are typically much further down the sales funnel, so knowing the sources of these referrals is very important to your marketing strategy and determining performances of campaigns.
If you want help understanding how to set up solid, tailored marketing strategies on social media, and how to tactically execute good social media marketing, give us a call. 727-742-6473. We have 10 minutes! We Will Help YOU!
