The Ultimate Guide to Social Media Marketing for Local Businesses
The Ultimate Guide to Social Media Marketing for Local Businesses
Numerous small businesses use social media to repeatedly shove their sales pitch right into the faces of their customers.
Then, they complain that their social media campaign is too noisy, expensive and time-consuming. They claim that it doesn’t bring sales and thus doesn’t produce a good ROI for any business. They say there’s no point in such a marketing campaign.
That’s a big fat lie.
In a survey of 500 small business owners by Vertical Response, 43% said they spend six or more hours weekly on social media.
Consumers prefer to avoid getting bombarded with consistent sales messages. You need to invest time in building a relationship with your target audience on their choice of social media platform. That involves engaging with them by posting high-quality content and asking their opinions.
Let me share some stats to show why you could miss out on a golden opportunity to engage with your target audience and reach more than one potential customer by abandoning social media.
- Social Media has 3.5 billion active users worldwide as of December 2019.
- 79% of the US population has a social profile.
- 97% of consumers aged 18-34 read online reviews to judge a local business.
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So, where do you start….Facebook, right?
Your target audience will likely hang out there since Facebook is the biggest social media platform.
Nope. Not necessarily.
Because there’s more than one central social media channel out there.
Meet Kate Bryan – a North Carolina-based hair stylist. She didn’t rely on Facebook in her social media campaign because hair styling involves creative visual content. So, she turned to publish her hair tutorials on YouTube, embedding them on her blog and offering the blog visitors a ‘Pin It button.
The result?
161,000 Pinterest followers, 85 million views on her YouTube videos, and 517k YouTube subscribers. How’s the for hooking one’s potential customer?
When creating your social media campaign, you need to find out the websites and platforms where your customers hang out (instead of assuming them). I talk about this strategy in detail in step #1.
Are you ready to gain social media mileage for your small business, boost your search engine rankings, and drive sales?
Let’s roll.
Analyze your competitors and map social networks to your target audience demographic to choose your social network(s).
You can start with the five most extensive social networks. Your customers might hang out on a smaller social media site.
Surveying your existing customers to find out which social media site they favour is a great way to understand your audience preferences and appeal to a new potential customer or more.
You can also glance through the audience demographic of various social networks and match them with your prospects. This compilation, by Sprout Social, of primary social network demographics should help.
Or, you can scout your competition and analyze where and how they perform their social media marketing.
For instance, GrubHub uses Snapchat to surprise its audience, announcing it through a series of snaps.
PureOm Hot Yoga uses Instagram to promote its services in Fairfax, VA.
Before we move on to the next step, I want to share three tools that will help you uncover social media insights about your competitors.
1. Ubersuggest – Enter your competitor’s domain and tap search. From there, click “top pages” in the left sidebar for results that look something like this:
Since we’re focused on social media, it’s the last two columns that you’re interested in. This shows each page’s Facebook and Pinterest engagement and gives a clear idea of how your competitor performs on these social platforms, along with the content with the most attention.
2. Mention – Local businesses might not publish content on their blog. But, they might get mentions from other blogs, videos and social networks.
That’s where the social monitoring tool, Mention, can help. You can enter your (or your competitor’s) brand name or an industry keyword.
Also, input the sources where you want the tool to search and index your entered keywords.
As soon as you tap the “Create my alert” button, the tool starts its search and returns with your typed keyword mentions.
If you want, you can also get daily email summary alerts.
3. BuzzSumo – This is one of my favourite tools for gathering social media insights.
It’s straightforward to use. You need to enter your competitor’s domain or an industry keyword and tap the search button. The tool does its magic and finds the most shared content for your entered keyword.
Let’s give a spin to some local keywords with the tool. Let me explain with an example.
Suppose you’re a pizza shop based in Los Angeles. Instead of searching for a competitor directly, search for the keyword’ pizza Los Angeles.
The Ultimate Guide to Social Media Marketing for Local Businesses
You’ll get the most shared content from various domains and its popularity on various social networks.
Here are three actionable strategies that you can implement from the above results.
- See how you can get published at lamag.com, eater.com and the other websites that pop up in the results. These websites already have an excellent social presence consisting of your target audience and an interest in your business.
- Create a similar or higher-quality piece of content on the above subjects. It has proven demand. And using the tool’s ‘View Sharers’ option, you can find out who the people interested in sharing the content are.
- Build a social following on the social media site that has generated the most social shares (Facebook in the above case).
You can also share the above popular content on your social networks. They are relevant and interesting to your target audience and can help you earn a few new followers.
- Conduct contests and offer special discounts to your social media followers
Getting promos/special offers is among the top 5 reasons users follow brands on social media. So, you can directly offer discounts to your social media followers.
For instance, Yo Yogurt in Marlboro, NJ, used to run “Let’s YO! Name Fame,” offering a 50% discount for a name every day on their Facebook page.
Engaging your prospects in a contest by having fun and deepening your bond with them is a better way.
I’ve already shown you how to conduct contests on Snapchat.
1. Pinterest – You can run “Pin It to Win It” promotions on the visual platform. The user-generated content can increase your engagement.
You can create contest hashtags to identify your entrants and increase your brand exposure. For example – Ergobaby’s My Ideal Mother’s Day contest relied on the following three hashtags – #idealmothersday, #babywearing and #ergobaby.
If you want to engage with your true fans, put in some extra effort and create a small team to judge entries (instead of counting the number of pins and repins). Country Living’s Dream Bedroom Pinterest Contest did something along these lines.
2. Twitter – On the microblogging network, you can ask your customers to develop a 140-character creative story centred around your brand.
Dunkin’ Donuts asked its customers to create creative stories around how the famous Dunkin’ coffee fits into their lives. After receiving an overwhelming response, the company chose several winners and asked them to star in their Dunkin’ commercial.
3. Instagram – The photo-sharing app/social media site has seen a massive surge in popularity, reaching over 1.5 billion users worldwide as of December 2019.
Translation? Include this social media channel in your marketing campaign.
Contests are a great vehicle to up your engagement. Buffalo Jordan used to see 50 likes/posts. After conducting a series of like giveaways, they now see 200 likes/posts.
The Ultimate Guide to Social Media Marketing for Local Businesses
Explore the different types of Instagram contests, along with ten examples, in this Wishpond post.
4. Facebook – The best part about conducting a contest on the social giant is the targeting options for connecting with its monstrous user base. There are an average of 1,500 data points if you run Facebook Ads.
A great example of a successful contest was the “Into the Mind” sweepstakes by Sherpas Cinema. Based out of Whistler BC, the television production company offers a 7-day heliski trip and a winter kit to users who like their page.
They ended up getting 50,000 new followers on their page.
By checking this infographic, I recommend that you comply with Facebook’s rules for conducting contests.
- Post-high-quality content that educates and entertains your customer but, most importantly, shows your personality
Your customers want to follow the latest updates about your business. That’s why they follow you on social media.
But, ultimately, they want to avoid getting updates from a robot or seeing a stream of promotional content on any given social media channel.
So, be humorous in your updates. Show pictures of real people running your business and behind the scene photos of how you make your products.
Kuma’s Corner (a Chicago bar) occasionally uses slang in its tweets that engages its target audience.
They have also done a great job at using their bio to show their personality.
They could do a better job posting value-add, non-promotional posts, though.
It’s advisable that:
You should publish four value-adding posts for every promotional social media post to engage your audience.
These posts can be popular posts from other websites that interest your audience. I already showed you how to use BuzzSumo to find them in step 1.
Element Wellness will show you how to do this. They post content about health that will be useful and interesting to their customers.
If you have the resources, you can create original blog content. Start with publishing once a week and see how your audience responds on social media.
You can write about the things to do in your locality or granular details about local sports teams/celebrities.
BuzzFeed-style lists about a city can work wonders. Movoto publishes such local content on its blog and has successfully driven a lot of traffic. For example, the post below, “10 Boise Stereotypes that are completely accurate”, ended up getting 60k shares.
They have even created video content on local pronunciation and food. Such videos are inherently entertaining and get a lot of eyeballs.
The Ultimate Guide to Social Media Marketing for Local Businesses
The Ultimate Guide to Social Media Marketing for Local Businesses
Once you get traction through social media and build social proof, you can conduct an outreach campaign to earn some backlinks and get a lift in your local search rankings.
- Encourage foot traffic at your offline stores to connect with you on Social Media.
If you’re a small business owner just starting with social media (and pulling it into your marketing campaign), know that you don’t need to pay to find your first few followers.
Your regular customers will be more than happy to connect with you. Use window decals and signage to create awareness about your social media presence.
Using a QR code will make it easier for the customer to land directly on your social media page by scanning the code through their smartphone.
You can also print the QR code to your social media presence on your business card. Mashable lists 12 creative examples of social-media-friendly business cards.
Brownie points if you can reward the customer for helping your social media efforts. For example – you can offer special discounts or free coffee to the customers that check in to your store on Facebook. It gives you free real estate in the news feed and helps your organic reach.
You can also use digital displays at offline stores to show your most adored products on social media.
In Brazil, Retailer C&A embedded Facebook likes on their cloth hangars. Isn’t it an excellent way for the customer to get real-time fashion feedback?
If you’re conducting a live event, you can install a live Twitter wall and encourage the participants to tweet. Create a relevant hashtag for the event to leave your brand’s imprint and expand your reach.
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The Ultimate Guide to Social Media Marketing for Local Businesses
