Should Local Businesses Invest in Social Media?

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Should local businesses invest in social media?

The answer to this question is why not! Your social media is your network that has the power to make your brand stronger every day. All you need to do is harness its potential and make the most of it. These platforms are a whole new world to convert leads into loyal customers.

Read: Benefits of Social Media Marketing for Local Businesses

Importance of Social Media Marketing for Local Businesses

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1. Helps to Show Your Business Presence

Most of your potential customers are present on social media platforms. All you need to do is sign up for free and start engaging with them. Make your brand visible and reach out to users, making them aware of your brand.

Here are some tips to keep in mind:

1. The more they see you, the more trust is built in your customers.

2. You should create accounts on all social media platforms and stay active. Initially, you can take care of it, but as your business grows, you can hire a professional specifically for that.

3. Focus on being consistent so that once you have a lot of followers, your opinions will matter to your audience.

You can also use social media management tools like Sprout Social, as shown below, to schedule and manage your social posts as you scale your local business.

2. Enhances the Footfall to Your Website or Store

Whenever someone thinks of starting a business, they build a website. Once the website is ready, and the products are listed, the next step is to traffic. You can add the link and the address to your offline store on social media platforms.

Here are some tips:

1. On Instagram: Add the link in the bio, or if your business already has more than 10K followers, you can add a swipe-up link to take them to your website.

2. On LinkedIn: You can directly add the link to your website and share some relative media on a post.

3. On Twitter: You can tweet about your website or newly launched products and ask your followers to visit it and explore more products that you have to offer.

Have a look at how this Dallas based tattoo studio has added their website link on their Instagram profile

3. Aids in Reaching the Local Audience

Social media is an excellent way to reach your local audience. Focus on using the right hashtags according to the region. 

Do not stress yourself about using longer hashtags, as they often help you reach your potential customers in the region. Specific hashtags help you stand apart from the crowd and don't let you get lost in the noise.

There are tools that you can use:

1. Hashtagify: This tool helps you understand the strength of one hashtag and its relationship with others. You can pick and choose what suits you the best.

2. TweetDeck: It can help you analyze multiple hashtags simultaneously. Moreover, it has a user-friendly interface.

3. Hashtags.org: Gives you a scope to explore the trending hashtags and learn about them. So, you can use the relevant ones for your brand and post.

Here’s a screenshot from Hashtags.org that gives you a detailed analysis of your desired hashtags and the best ways to leverage them for your social media campaigns

4. Announce Walk-in Offers to Your Store

If you wish to bring more people to your local store or announce that your store is opening in a nearby locality, social media is the best way to say it aloud.

Here are some tips that you can cater to:

1. Just spend a little time on Canva to choose a template and create a post. Canva helps you design a template and is extremely user-friendly with its drag and drop options.

2. Announce a discount that you are offering for customers walking in. You can post about it on all platforms, including Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.

3. Leave them on a curious edge by telling them that there are crazy deals or cashback on every purchase they make in the store.

You can check out multiple templates on Canva for announcing the opening of your new store and choose the one that fits best. 

5. Builds a Bond with Your Community

Local businesses are all about being human. Give your brand a human touch because that's what your users will connect with.

Because each business is trying to close a sale, emotions need to drive it. You won't make any sales just by showcasing your products on your platform. Show the people working hard behind it.

To do so, here are some tips:

1. Brand face: Your brand face is what people connect with, not the products. Your brand face is a medium to talk to your customers.

2. Employees working: Try to showcase team effort through your post because that's what makes your brand reach your customers' hearts.

3. Include your customers in the family: Make sure you tell your customers that they are a part of the family. The cycle is not complete without them.

Notice how this Fort Worth-based restaurant showcases its employees on their Instagram posts on the employee appreciation day. 

6. Engage with Your Customers Through Social Media

Your social media platforms are a great way to build trust within your customers. 

Posting is not enough, and you need to talk to them just like you do it with your friends. You can do it easily through social media. 

Stay active and attend to your customers' queries as soon as possible. This builds credibility for your brand.

Here are tips that you can use for your social media platforms:

1. Comments, stories, polls, AMA are great ways to engage with the audience on Instagram.

2. Retweets, mentions, and hashtags are the right way to go about on Twitter. One right hit, and your tweet can go viral in seconds.

3. Writing on engaging topics, sharing knowledge, increasing your network, using relevant hashtags, engaging in comments with your followers can be a way for LinkedIn.

7. Educates Your Audience and Bridges the Gap

There is a gap between what you are trying to sell and what the user wishes to have. It can be due to a lack of awareness. Your brand can fill the gap by educating the audience in the right direction.

Here are a few examples:

1. Your business can grow through any social media platform. Let's say YouTube can be a channel to educate your audience, and comments can be a section for your customer queries. You can learn and grow with those queries.

2. Add value to their time. Give maximum information in minimum time. You can achieve this through reels on Instagram and shorts on YouTube. 

3. You can use different storytelling formats. You can make your customer the hero or even use a false start to initially throw the customer off track.

8. Helps to Advertise Your Business

In the beginning, you don't need to spend much, and you can start with little and let the results drive you. You can advertise on social media platforms, including Instagram, LinkedIn, or Facebook.

For example, you can run paid advertisements on Facebook:

1. There, you can design a template, place an image or even go ahead with a carousel.

2. Heading has to be within 25 characters. The description has to be within 30 characters. Your primary text has to be within 125 characters, and then you are good to run your ads.

3. Then, you can add your call to the action button. You could be asking your customers to explore your website or shop your products.

In addition to that, you can also think of Google Display ads where you showcase your brand and products.

Have a look at how you can get started with Facebook ads by starting with a small budget and scaling up as per your requirements 

9. Opens Opportunities for Collaborations with Other Local Businesses

Social Media platforms give you this amazing opportunity to collaborate to maximize the gains with a single-handed effort. Two or three small businesses, not competitors, can cross-promote each other.

To give some examples:

1. Let's say one business has a strong presence on Twitter while the other one has on Instagram. So, each of the businesses can share a post regarding brand awareness or a coupon code to buy products from the other brand.

2. A few businesses can organize a contest where the gift can be a collection of products from all the brands.

3. All the businesses can post about each other and ask the audience to tag three to four people from their contact list and build a chain reaction similarly.

You can find local businesses to collaborate with using Yelp. 

E.g., if you’re a fitness supplies store based out of San Antonio, you can find local gyms in your area to collaborate with using Yelp, as shown below.

10. Aids in Analyzing Your Efforts and Reach

Staying consistent on social media platforms is good for your business but not the only thing. 

Making efforts is not enough. You need to track them, too, and some tools can help you dig deeper to improvise your insights.

Here are some tools that can help you analyze your outputs:

1. Sprout Social is your go-to tool to track your social media presence across different platforms, be it Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, or Instagram. Track impressions, clicks, engagement, and whatnot. 

2. Google Analytics: Whenever you think of running campaigns across social media, this tool will come in handy.

3. Hubspot presents the data in a visual format such as graphs and charts to help you understand all parameters in detail: the audience, their session time, clicks, etc.

Have a look at how you can analyze and dig deeper into your social media campaign performance using Sprout Social 

Key Takeaways

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• Educate your audience through social media platforms. You can directly get to know their queries and be proactive in solving them.

• Collaborate with other local businesses to get better results and reach the masses.

• Notify your audience about your local store opening or new launch offers through social media.

• Humanize your brand to gain the trust of your customers to improvise your business targets.

• Increase traffic to your website or local store through social media platforms.

• Track the performance of your social media campaigns with the help of tools. Optimize your inputs and get desired outputs.