In recent years, social media marketing and influencers have become exceptionally popular with marketers of various businesses.
As consumers use social media networks in their everyday life to search for information about products. Social media and influencer marketing have become crucial strategies to promote the growth of your business.
The big question now is who can take advantage of social media marketing and influencers.
To answer your question, pretty much every business with a social media account and the time to run it properly.
Even the smallest business can use influencers to get the word of their product out there and increase their brand awareness effectively.
For small to medium-sized enterprises with stricter budgets, taking advantage of social media and influencer marketing can be your smartest move to rock your business and compete even with your greatest competitors.
To give your business a head start, we are going to see the best tactics your SME needs to establish itself among bigger brands and increase its profit beyond measure.
But before delving into the best marketing tactics, let’s take a look at how your business can power up its digital marketing efforts and increase brand awareness with public relations.
Increase Brand Awareness with Public Relations and Digital Marketing
While digital marketing and public relations have different approaches and goals they can give you amazing results if you manage to combine them effectively.
We can easily identify their key difference if we take a look at their points of focus.
PR is a force that can change the public’s opinion and help you increase your brand awareness.
Digital marketing, on the other hand, helps businesses target and convert a specific audience.
Despite having different outcomes, when combined correctly PR and digital marketing can turn into a powerful weapon that will give you better results across different channels.
To see how PR and digital marketing work together let’s see an example.
Let’s say that we have a company that just started its marketing journey.
Creating a solid PR strategy might seem far away right now but there is one thing that can help you increase your visibility: social media.
To amplify your presence you should choose the right social network and create a campaign that will attract social media users.
This campaign should focus on shaping your brand image, give promises you’ll be able to fulfill and slowly turn your company into a trustworthy brand.
As you gain more experience, you will be able to expand your PR efforts and aim at appearing on various expert niche blogs and media companies that will establish you as a credible brand that has a lot to give to the world.
Now Let’s See 5 Social Media and Influencer Marketing Tactics to Step Up Your Game
1. Use Organic and Paid Search to Increase Brand Awareness
One of the challenges of running a small business is how to get more visitors to see your website and take your call-to-action.
While social media gives you access to an engaged audience that constantly searches about new products and brands, you have to find a way to channel their focus on your company.
The easiest way to increase traffic is to use paid ads to target specific users and familiarize them with your brand.
While the cost of paid ads might be prohibitive for smaller businesses, using it in combination with your organic strategies can give you a unique opportunity to increase your reach.
Depending on your niche, you can choose the right social media network and craft an amazing ad to reinforce your social media presence.
For instance, you can keep boosting your organic traffic through posts with exceptional content and at the same time run a brand awareness campaign to target specific users with the right message and boost their purchase intent.
Here’s a fun paid ad on Facebook from the clothing brand Sassyspud that speaks to its target audience perfectly.
Now, here are some things you should also consider:
Research Every Social Media Advertising Service
Before rolling out your paid ads, you need to select the best advertising service to increase their efficiency
From Facebook ads to Instagram ads, you have a variety of choices to get your targeted messages across.
While Facebook will give you an amazing opportunity to increase your reach and drive more traffic to your website, it can be quite expensive for smaller businesses with stricter budgets. You can use a VPN for Facebook to ensure safety of your account.
Doing any research necessary before investing in a paid advertising service will help you save money and find the most optimal solution to increase your brand visibility.
Here’s the average social media advertising cost by CPM on some of the most popular social media platforms from Falcon.io:
Plan Your Social Media Landing Pages for Greater Conversions
After finding the best service, it’s time to plan the ultimate post-click conversion tool.
Well-crafted social landing pages are the means to convince your social media followers that they have to take your amazing CTA.
The first thing to create effective landing pages is to find a great landing page builder to save valuable time.
Then you can equip them with amazing elements that will boost your CTA and lead your visitor to click on it.
Since social media users can be easily distracted, your social landing pages must attract users’ attention and lead them to your website.
Even a few minutes on your landing page can make a huge difference that will power up your lead generation efforts and increase your traffic beyond measure.
2. Engage with your audience
One of the most important things you have to figure out when you open your business to the world of social media marketing is your engagement with your followers.
Simple interactions like an answer to a comment, a thank you or an emoji to your users’ comments can help you build a friendly and more approachable brand.
One of the advantages of this simple yet effective tactic is that you can implement it on every social media network.
Be careful, though, because each platform has a unique character that will affect the success of your engagement.
For instance, if you have a SaaS B2B business that reaches your audience through LinkedIn, then your engagement should be more sophisticated targeting every user and their comment in a way that will demonstrate your value.
On the other hand, a food chain or confectionary store reaching its customers on Twitter can be creative and engage with its followers in a fun and unexpected way that will highlight its unique character.
For instance, Moonpie uses humor and social laughter to engage with their followers, offering an entertaining twist that’s hard to miss:
After posting that, Moonpie’s post received numerous comments about the chess game.
Their Twitter followers accepted Moonpie’s challenge and the brand responded to their comments accordingly:
Since smaller businesses have a smaller number of followers compared to big enterprises, you can take advantage of replying to your followers’ comments to make your brand less impersonal and win your audience with your amazing brand personality.
3. Find the Right Influencers to Promote Your Brand
Influencers play a major role in social media users’ purchase intention and trend adoption.
If you don’t believe me, take a look at all those social media users adopting Unistella’s lipstick nails or Kylie Jenner’s athleisure trend.
Influencers have become major trendsetters who can influence their followers to try new things. Buy products, share them with their friends or even boycott brands.
To get the hang of influencer marketing, SMEs need to learn how to find influencers. Who will promote their brand effectively without costing them a fortune.
The first step to approach influencer marketing is to plan ahead. Set your influencer goals and then search for the most suitable person to promote your products.
Reaching the right people can be a difficult task but you have to be patient. Reach multiple people until you find the one who will be great for the job.
Remember that the right influencer for your brand can be someone who isn’t necessarily a big celebrity endorser but a fan of your brand and your products.
As experience has shown us, mainstream celebrities can make mistakes, too.
As an SME that doesn’t have the luxury to hire an army of influencers. You should find people who have a connection with your brand and are related to your field.
Despite the fact that celebrities are the biggest influencers out there favoring quality over quantity. It can give your business better exposure and more engagement than expected.
4. Leverage Micro- and Nano-influencers
Influencers come in different sizes and shapes, from big celebrities and bloggers to micro- and nano-influencers with significantly smaller audiences.
When it comes to implementing an influencer marketing strategy. Marketers usually target influencers with millions of followers to maximize brand visibility.
However, if you want to get the most out of influencer marketing your brand shouldn’t focus on the numbers but on the qualitative exchange between brand, influencer, and follower.
For SMEs with fewer options, micro- and nano-influencers are your ultimate weapon to build solid relationships with your audience and motivate them to take your CTA.
Also, one of the benefits of leveraging the power of micro-influencers is that they are not only cheaper. They can also promote your brand in a casual and less sales-y fashion.
Nano-influencers, on the other hand, might have fewer followers than micro-influencers. But they have stronger bonds with their audience and are usually fans of specific brands and products.
Targeting nano-influencers who love you will give your business credibility. Since the nano-influencer will have already expressed their love for you and give an authentic testimony that won’t be the result of a paid ad.
Here’s an example from Alexis Baker’s Instagram profile, a nano-influencer with 3,290 followers:
5. Woo Your Followers with Exceptional Giveaways
One of the best tactics to increase your follower count, engagement. Ultimately, your conversion rate is to give something amazing back to your audience.
Giveaways, in this case, are the perfect tactic to show how much you appreciate your audience and attract attention to your brand.
Planning the perfect giveaway is a task that requires not only creativity but also deliverability.
Here’s a great giveaway from Kopari:
“Hyped” users will follow, comment and tag one of their friends to have a chance to win your amazing product.
They might also share your giveaway with their peers giving you the perfect opportunity to double your follower count and visibility in an instant.
Now, it’s your time to announce the winner and deliver the prize to the lucky follower.
Keep in mind, though, that if you make promises you can’t keep them. You should either plan something more feasible or drop the giveaway until you can fulfill it properly.
Takeaway
The world of social media and influencers is growing rapidly.
As a brand that wants to enjoy the benefits of both social media and influencer marketing, you have to come up with tactics that will help you increase your brand awareness. Build a brand image that sticks, expand your followers and promote your everlasting growth.
Since finding the best tactics to power up your SME can be a time-consuming task. We put together some of the most important ones to give you a head start and help you succeed faster.
Now it’s your turn. Which social media and influencer marketing did you like most?
Let us know in the comments below.
Author bio
Marilia is a Creative Writer working for email marketing software Moosend. Her passion for writing has made her find new ways to combine the art of Creative Writing with SEO Copywriting. When she’s not writing articles, you’ll find her spending time on her Drabbles.