Top Web and Social Media Marketing Tips for Small Businesses  

Small business owners are expected to be experts, without any formal training in social media, in a field that most of us did not see coming and one that is constantly evolving. While you may feel as though you have been forced into this social marketing arena against your will, you do have the choice to become educated and remain competitive.

Social Selling Begins With Your Website

Your website is the hub and the the landing page for all of your social media communications. Selling your products and services and driving traffic to your website if the goal for your social media and web strategy, so below are a few tips to make sure your website is the best it can be for your small business.

Building a Successful Website
A good website meets the needs of customers. When building your website, think first about what your customers’ needs are and how you can meet them. Do you have a product they would benefit from using? Do you provide a service that could help them? Do you have information they need?

Next, determine if your website and online goals match your customers’ needs. In order to do this, you first need to know what your goals are. How do you determine the online goals for your brand?

If you have a product to sell, your main goal is conversion to sales. If you have a service, your goal could be sales, but it could also be leads. If you have information, your goal may be engagement.

Knowing and naming your online goals and your customers’ needs will help you build web content that matches those goals and needs. It will also help you know what to measure.

Use the measurement tools available within your content management system. If you are getting a lot of engagement such as likes and shares, you are probably increasing your audience, which is good. However, if your goal is sales, and your engagement is not converting, then you are not meeting your goals and need to rethink your strategy.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Once you have built your website and are making sure the content agrees with your goals and your customers’ needs, you must make sure your site loads quickly and easily. You can check your site speed and optimization using Google site checker. This will give you information for both mobile and desktop, as well as offer suggestions for improvement.

You also need to decide which keywords will trigger hits on searches. Answering the following questions will help you choose the right keywords.

• What is your business?
• What types of searches do you want to come up in?
• How will your business be found by accident?

Use these keywords frequently in all of your web and social media content.

Optimizing Your Online Checkout
If your website goals include sales of any kind, make sure your online checkout is clean, easy, and secure. If your customers feel insecure about your checkout process, they will back out, and you will lose the sale.

PayPal is highly recommended and widely accepted as a safe portal for easy and secure checkout. For a very small fee, you can provide your customers with a one-click option they will feel good about using.

Using Social Media for Business

How you use social media for your business is very different from how you use it for your personal use. Here are a few tips for our to build a social strategy that’s right for your small business.

Finding the Right Social Media Platform for Your Brand
If you are in business, you need to be on social media, but you do not need to be on every social media channel available. In fact, some platforms are the wrong place for you.

Every social media platform has a different and distinct profile and personality. Choose two or three platforms that are right for your business, and then really focus on one or two of those.

Facebook
Facebook has the most users of any social media platform. It provides the largest audience, which means the competition is also greater, making it more difficult for your posts to be seen.

Facebook is great for content-heavy sites. You can post an article, with meta description and image, and people can click straight to the article, information, or website without having to go to your intro page. It is also great for posting videos and now offers a “Stories” feature that is similar to Instagram. Another big plus is that your Facebook posts are sharable.

The biggest caution with Facebook is that it is personal. Be careful about being all business on Facebook. Content here needs to match the audience, or the audience will tune you out.

Instagram
Instagram is all about the image. Photographers, lifestyle bloggers, fashion, jewelry, products, and service providers such as designers are all business models that might benefit from this platform.

Post high-quality, beautiful photos and utilize both the tag and the hashtag. Instagram Stories are also a great feature for impromptu marketing.

One downside to Instagram is that users cannot click straight to your site from the image; it is a multiple-click process. Additionally, content here is proprietary, so it is not sharable except through add-on apps.

Pinterest
Pinterest is an interesting platform that takes good features of several other platforms and combines them. Like Instagram, Pinterest is image heavy. The images must be high quality and eye catching. Like Facebook, however, customers can click straight through to a site, so conversions are fewer clicks away.

The downside to Pinterest is there are not as many active users. However, the users here are extremely loyal. Once you gain a following, you know your content is likely to be seen.

Twitter
If your goal is to generate engagement, Twitter is a great place to do it. If you have information to share or ideas to discuss, this is the platform. Twitter also drives traffic to your site with the direct click-through link.

Twitter is a good for sharing videos, commenting on other tweets, and engaging in conversations. Live Tweeting is a useful tool if you host or attend events for your business. Twitter also has a feature called Twitter Chat, which utilizes a specific hashtag to draw a group of people into a conversation about a particular topic.

LinkedIn
You may not think about LinkedIn as a way to promote your business; however, it may just be the perfect place to promote your business. LinkedIn is NOT a social platform. It is not personal. It is very much about business. It is a great place for networking, and for tech-savvy and professional sectors, it is the place to be.

Social Media Calendar
Each platform has its own personality. Choose the right ones for your brand, and learn best practices—best times to post, best kinds of post, best ways to post—then jump in and do it. The good news is, social media news is fresh every day.

Put together a Social Media Calendar. There are free templates you can download, free applications you can use, and fabulously equipped subscription apps such as HootSuite and Sprout Social, depending on your need.

Remember to use the actual calendar when planning out your content. What holidays are coming up, when are people traveling, when are they spending money, or looking for services? While I don’t recommend exploiting this, as your customers will pick up on it, definitely keep it in mind when planning.

Pro-Tip
Do not be afraid to call in professional help when and where you need it. Content writers, developers, photographers, and social media consultants—many of these people are small business owners, too. They are great to have in your network and can help when you are first starting out or when you get in over your head.