How to effectively promote your business using these social media tips

While there’s multiple ways to advertise your business, you have no idea what will be the most effective. Plus, you don’t have an endless budget for marketing tests and learning what works best.

So what are the best ways to promote your business online to attract more clients, customers and opportunities without spending a lot of money on advertising?

For most business owners it’s very challenging to keep up with the current trends in social media and advertising, let alone knowing how to use this to your advantage to advertise your business.

We get scared to promote our own business, we worry people will unfollow us, or we feel we’re pushing our businesses too much that we appear salesy. When in fact, there’s a lot of businesses who don’t promote their business enough — which is equally ineffective.

Here are some tips you can implement into your social marketing strategy straight away, to help you promote your business in an effective way.

And, it doesn’t matter if you’re in health and fitness, childcare, real estate or hospitality because all of the tactics we’ll be discussing can be applied across multiple industries.

Let’s begin.

Focus on (max) two social channels

It’s highly likely you’re managing your social channels by yourself, or you don’t have a full social team to rely on. Focus your efforts on one or two social channels first.

If you want to use two channels, a good way to approach it is by using one platform to focus on your long-form, in-depth content through blogs, podcasts and YouTube videos. Then, pairing it with a short-form type platform, such as Instagram, Twitter or Facebook. The first promotes high value and the latter promotes high engagement with your followers.

Your business doesn’t need to be on every single social channel, but it does have to be on the right ones for your business.

Start with looking at the core demographics of each channel and comparing them to your demographics. For example, Tik Tok is a new shiny platform that is demonstrating some incredible results for many brands but when you consider its global audience is under the age of 34 with 26% between 18 and 24 — this would be an unlikely match for industries such as real estate and childcare.

Promote your business using a variety of content formats

There’s plenty of best practice advice out there on how to choose the right social media channel for your business. We recommend thinking about how you’re going to use the platform.

As a result of COVID-19, many businesses have had to adapt how they promote their businesses, and social media has been a helpful tool to support this change.

Here’s some examples of a few industries we work with and how they could be utilising social media to promote their business.

Real Estate

Channels to consider: Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest

• Live-streaming auctions and conducting virtual inspections using Facebook and Instagram Live

• Video walk-throughs of homes

• Using Facebook to post new listings

• Building relationships on LinkedIn and sharing industry insights

• Another one that may surprise you is the opportunity to promote your business via Pinterest

• Webinars to discuss authoritative topics, such as ‘property market trends,’ ‘how to prepare your home for a sale,’ or ‘how to improve your home’s value.’

Health & Fitness

Channels to consider: Facebook, Instagram and YouTube

• Live-streaming virtual bootcamps and conducting personal training sessions using Facebook and Instagram Live

• Promoting healthy recipes and workout inspiration

• Free workout uploads

Childcare

Channels to consider: Facebook

• Keeping your community of parents up-to-date with announcements and important information

• Facebook reviews

• Promoting your values and showing off the facilities and activities

Mixing soft promotion with hard promotion

Everyone who uses social media is marketed to in some way every time they scroll, so you can relate to what your personal experience is like. It’s about finding a good balance in your social promotions where you’re not always asking for a sale, but finding ways to infuse subtle promotion into your content.

In other words, it’s about showing off your products or services without always blatantly calling out the hard-sell. What does this soft sell look like?

• A fitness business posts a free 7-day workout challenge (the soft sell) that is actually part of a paid eight week challenge

• A restaurant might post some live food demonstrations of their menu, which gets people interested in wanting to visit and taste the food for themselves

• Property managers focus on honing in on the lifestyle that surrounds certain homes or developments by taking footage of the cafes or restaurants nearby, parks, or other amenities

Capitalise on micro-influencers

Influencers can give your business an incredible boost of exposure when done well. Even with limited budgets, you can still try it out. The trick to keep costs down is finding micro-influencers with ~5-10k followers or less.

Use hashtags, search on YouTube and scan Pinterest boards to find influencers who are the right niche for your business. When you catch them in the phase of starting out, you can grow with them and it has the potential to become an extremely lucrative partnership especially if they have a trusting and engaged audience that’s the perfect fit for your business.

This could be a great time to consider promotional events or offering a discount, which you can do with or without a micro-influencer.

Consider promotional events or offering discounts

While your followers may not necessarily be the people buying your products right away, they have shown an initial interest, and that is a good start. Consider using promotional events or offering discounts to the people following you online.

Followers to your social media accounts are like having people browsing in your shop; they may ultimately walk out without buying anything, but you will be able to attract them into a purchase more easily while they are there – and in the future, too.

To recap

As a business owner, one of your most valuable assets is your time — so you need to be making sure you balance your time doing the things that matter most. We hope you’ve been able to take away some new learnings and approaches to help you promote your business in the most effective way possible.