A Social Media Approach Every Small Business Should Be Using

Are you a small business owner looking to expand your online presence?

Would you like to know how to use social media to connect with your target market?

While the effective use of social media continues to elude many small business owners, there are proven benefits to establishing a solid online presence.

Sure you know that social media can create relationships, establish trust and earn a client for life. However, dominating your niche or market requires a strategic approach.

So, how can your small business benefit from social media?

Below is a 7-step social media approach that every small business should be using. Put these pieces in place to increase reach and grow your business!

Social Media Approach Every Small Business Should Be Using

1. Build a Credible Reputation

If you want to build authority in your industry, social media can establish a name and reputation.

From content to conversation, getting involved is a great way to get started. For many, it’s taking an established offline reputation and transitioning it into online currency.

Sound overwhelming? It doesn’t have to be.

There are many ways you can do this.

• Pay attention to what your fans, followers and clients are saying about you or your company. Now inject yourself into the conversation.
• Respond with helpful comments or timely information. Tools like Mention make it easy to track real-time conversation around your brand.

• Solve problems on a daily basis and always put your best foot forward. Be a giver first  – give of your knowledge, expertise and experience.

“The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good.” ~ Samuel Johnson

How to Make This Work in Your Business

DAVIDsTEA has built a reputation through their social channels as lively, engaging, and always entertaining.

One look at Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook or Twitter and see why a consistent presence matters.

Create an easy checklist that you can follow daily to maintain consistency. Spell out  each step you’ll take, which social channels will support your goals and what objectives you look to achieve.

I love to do this with mind-mapping software. It makes visualization so much easier and all of a sudden the task now becomes manageable.

Here’s an example of what this might look like.

2. Attract Potential Clients

In a fast paced online world, the competition for attention is tremendous.  In order to stand out and attract potential clients, you must combine strategy with creativity.

Social media marketing is a perfect tool to assist with that.

Make use of social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest andInstagram to share your company story. Tell it in a way that motivates and inspires potential clients to connect and engage.

Where do you get started?

How to Make This Work in Your Business

To begin attracting your perfect client across various social networks, consider these tips:

• Spend time identifying where your target market spends their time. Is it Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or Pinterest? Once you know where they want to receive your message, then begin to craft it.
• Take time to determine what you will talk about. This is not a time or place to be spammy or promotional. You want to offer insight and give away your knowledge freely to begin earning trust and building rapport.
• Like, circle or follow competitors and other local businesses. Pay attention to what they’re doing well and where there’s opportunity to do better. Pay attention to who they’re interacting with and how they’re engaging their community.
• Ask questions! This is a quick and easy way to find out what matters most to those connecting with you online.
• Be the solution! Once you ask the question, it’s time to solve it like Tiny Buddha does in this tweet.

3. Connect With Like-Minded Business Professionals

Connecting with other business professionals might be counter-intuitive to how you’ve done business offline. But in the online world, relationships are everything.

Social media is an excellent way to connect with like-minded business professionals and build a mutually beneficial relationship.

However,  there are right ways and wrong ways to connect.

The right way? Strategically reaching out to people within your industry, niche or community.

The wrong way? Randomly sending out requests or long DM’s (with no prior relationship) to simply “add to your numbers.”

How to Make This Work in Your Business

Join LinkedIn Groups, Google Plus Communities and Blog Tribes to connect with others talking about and sharing similar content to your own.

Take the time to comment on their latest post or offer feedback on an interesting tweet. Have a Facebook Page? Your newsfeed is a great way to do this!

From your page, go to your page by clicking on the “View Pages Feed” link directly under your cover photo. Now scroll through and begin to share their content and actively engage.

Networking with professionals within your industry and then sharing their content creates goodwill and reciprocity.

It also stretches your reach beyond your network, tapping into their established following.

4. Diversify Your Marketing Efforts

In traditional marketing, would you limit yourself to only one outlet? I can’t imagine the answer is yes.

Likewise, don’t box yourself into a corner with social media. Spread your wings, try something new and determine what works best for your business.

By mixing social media with online advertising and PR efforts, you will be able to expand your business further than you ever imagined.

How to Make This Work in Your Business

Don’t reinvent the wheel. Repurpose evergreen content into new media.

Test an Infographic, video, podcast or graphic quote on different social channels.

Keep your content fresh and your social networks alive and interactive through a variety of media types.

Test, test, test to identify what’s working and what’s not.

5. Make Your Time and Money Count

Do you find yourself hopping from one social network to the next?

Do you often get sucked into Facebook, only to realize you’ve lost hours out of your day?

You’re not alone.

Creating a solid social media strategy can streamline your efforts and simplify your daily to-do’s. It gives life to your mission, vision and values and provides a roadmap towards success.

Stop wasting time and money on one-off tactics and get clear on why you’re using social media. Once you know your why, it’s much easier to understand the how.

How to Make This Work in Your Business

Get clear on how you can tackle social media in a productive and meaningful way. Take time to map out the keys to your success.

Your 6-Step Action Plan

• Define Your Goals
• Stand Out Online
• Research
• Create an Integrated Strategy
• Translate Your Established Brand
• Track and Measure Your Success

6. Drive Traffic to Your Website/Blog

As a small business owner, your website and the content on your blog are the backbone of your online presence.

Not convinced that blogging is the right marketing solution for your business?

As Neil Patel with QuickSprout points out,

“Blogging generates the most traffic for companies, and when you’re consistent at it, blogging leads to more search traffic. In fact, blogging is the #1 traffic-increasing factor, while SEO is #2.”

So beyond the benefits mentioned above, what else can a blog do for your business and personal brand?

• Establishes you/your business as an industry leader
• Builds credibility through the know, like and trust factor
• Decreases marketing costs through an integrated strategy
• Allows potential customers to self-select and move through your sales funnel
• Generates the right kind of leads, bringing your perfect customer to your doorstep

Where do you begin? Identify your WIN.

How to Make This Work in Your Business

If you want to build a successful blog, you need to know who you’re talking with, what problems you solve, and the opportunity within each of those.

WIN: Who, Issues, and Needs

• Who: Who will you be talking with on your blog? List your target market. Mine for example is small business owners, entrepreneurs, and marketers.
• Issues: What issues is your target market dealing with? Mine would be finding enough time to manage social media, juggling a business online and offline, budget, conversion, results.
• Needs: What are the needs of your target market? This is where you’ll start to identify opportunity. What problems can you solve and what solutions will you provide?

7. Nurture Relationships

Social media is extremely useful when it comes to keeping in touch with your past and current clients.

By connecting with them on Facebook and other social networks, you can build a bridge that can prove extremely beneficial in the future. Not only will you stay top of mind, but you’re creating relevance.

With consumers attention spans hovering around 8 seconds, the more brain cells you can earn, the better off you will be once they’re ready to make a purchase or connect with your business.

How to Make This Work in Your Business

Sharing an experience is important, but crafting it and having a purpose is even more important. Focus on the “telling” of the story.

The goal is to help your audience and potential clients relate – whether it’s to you and your business or to a past client through a positive testimonial.

Start creating your own stories and watch how people react. You’ll be surprised at how easy it is to draw in a client when you allow them to understand who you are and connect with you on a much deeper level.

Final Thoughts

There are many benefits to your small business getting active on social media.

How can you better position your business across social media to welcome new customers? And how can you use social media to endear customers to your small business?

Answer those questions and unlock the benefits and power of social media in your small business.
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How to Choose the Best Domain Name

Naming things can be quite fun, and at the same time frustrating and daunting. Babies, pets, your business, your Wi-Fi router, and yes, your domain name.

Whether it’s for your business or your personal brand, it’s definitely worth it to spend some time thinking about your online brand. And what better way to start having a solid presence by having a strong domain name? After all, it’s what people will be typing to get to your website, among a whole load of other things.

It can mean the difference between appearing spammy or out-of-date and authentic or modern. Or, simply put, it can mean the difference between having or losing a client. When was the last time you went to a site with four hyphens in their domain name and thought, “Wow! I should check these guys out,” and then checked their site to find it in pristine condition?

It’s very rare, if not impossible, to see that combination, and most potential clients or customers know this. But it’s more than just making your domain name look good. It’s about having it perform well, as there are other factors to consider as well due to it being a big part of your online brand.

SEO

It may seem to be an attractive strategy for SEO purposes to have an Exact Match Domain (EMD) such as www.buycashewnutsonline.com. Given that the domain name usually has a strong association with the information on the website, it could make sense for search engines to push these sites further up the SERPs when people search for these keywords. However, this isn’t the case these days.

Since 2010, trends have shown these domains to be in decline in terms of its SEO effect. It makes better sense for it to be this way since it doesn’t really work well in favor of users. It still definitely is a factor in SEO, as it should be, but given how quality content should be the primary deliverable for SERPs, this shouldn’t be as much of a factor as it was in the past.

Generic Names

So let’s say you’ve decided against www.buycashewnutsonline.com and decided on something more generic, such as maybe, nuts.com. As you know, four-character domains under the .com TLD are expensive to acquire as all of them are sold out. Having the four characters mean something could push it into the range of a few hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Well, one company did exactly that. In 2009, a company that was known as NutsOnline.com and formerly as the Newark Nut Company, purchased the domain and then rebranded their company to the new domain. However, revenue dropped immediately as a direct result of less traffic.

There are a lot of different alternative reasons as to why this could have happened, but I think we can generally agree that this probably wouldn’t have happened if the company did a redirect from the new domain to their old one instead and thus keeping all of the “juice” that existed. Today, however, the company is doing quite well, so the investment may have paid off.

Does this mean we should all switch to these generic domain names? Well, if you or your client have millions of dollars in profits per year while somehow having a brand that isn’t so recognizable or having one that the company wants to change, it might be worth looking into this option.

If you’re just starting out, though, this might be an option, but do take it with caution. A wide collection of studies shows that while it can be a viable option, the effectiveness is dropping quite a bit. For example, EMD correlation with ranking seems to have dropped from 0.34 in 2010 to 0.18 in 2012. This quite interestingly matches up with how it worked in the “real world”. Things were very generic early on, but eventually brands caught up and generic products dropped in popularity overall. However, just like in the “real world”, generic products still exist, and in some industries like the pharmaceutical industry, are actually regaining traction.

Brand Names

If the company has a recognizable and well-known brand name, however, it might make the most sense to have a pure branded domain name. After all, people will probably be typing the name of the company into the URL field and just entering “.com” afterwards anyways. However, if you’re reading this far, you probably aren’t in the situation where almost everyone in the country has heard of your brand or of your clients.

It still may be the best option, however, and is definitely something that all companies should seriously consider when choosing a domain name.

Deciding Factors

While these are three of the most common options when choosing a domain name, they certainly aren’t the only ones. They also have variations, which open up a huge range of options for you. However, there are two big factors that you should always take into consideration when buying a domain name.

Brand Power

As I mentioned earlier, it’s quite important to measure the power of your brand. This not only means the ability for it to be recognized and remembered, but also the history of the company and the direction of where the company is going.

Unless you just add a hyphen or the name of the city the company is in, you’ll most likely be changing the brand of the company if you choose a domain name that’s quite different from the current name. So, I recommend that you consider this option in light of it being a significant business decision and not just a web marketing one. However, the brand name of the company should definitely not be changed just for the sake of getting a cheap domain name.

Growth

Since it’s completely legal in the US to have a registered business that has the same name as another in a different state, it’s quite possible that your brand name is already taken. Like the brand power factor, this decision also goes beyond web marketing and takes the growth plans of the company into consideration.

Does the company plan on expanding beyond the city it’s in? Or are their services and products offered outside the area already? While it certainly is possible to create a different domain for each city or region the business maintains a certain level of presence, it’s not advisable to have multiple domains. The compounding SEO effects, as well as the fact that you won’t be going crazy managing 20 or so domains, make it sensible to just have one domain. After all, it is possible to have subdomains or subdirectories.

If you’ve said yes to either one of the two questions I presented, it may be worth reaching out to the other business if they’re open to selling their domain name. Otherwise, you may have to consider other options or even maybe slightly modifying the brand name in order to make yours unique, especially if you’re planning to expand into areas that already have businesses registered with the same name as yours.

Getting Around the Limitations

So, let’s say you’re keeping the brand name as it is but are hindered from getting a domain name that directly matches your brand name. If you’ve determined that it’s best to keep the current brand name, here’s some options for you to consider.

To Hyphenate or Not to Hyphenate

Hyphenating is a common way to get a branded domain without having to shell out a lot of money to buy an existing site. However, it unfortunately has a certain amount of negative stigma from the spam-heavy days of the early 2000’s. It also may have a negative effect on one’s SEO, though some sources state otherwise. However, given that the only arguably positive side to this option is lower costs, it generally is a good idea for businesses to invest in a hyphen-less domain name.

Associating your brand with these negative traits as well as the potential slight annoyance of using a key that isn’t really used too often is not something you want.

Adding a Small Generic Descriptor

Another option businesses can consider is adding a small generic descriptor, such as “foodcart”, to the domain name, ideally at the end. You’d want to pick something as short as possible to add though as long domain names generally aren’t user-friendly.

Country Domain Extension

If you’re outside the US, it may make sense to register a domain with a country domain extension such as .fj for Fiji and .at for Austria. Going for this instead of a domain that ends with “.com” opens up quite a discussion SEO-wise, but generally speaking, it shouldn’t negatively affect your SEO or how your customers view your domain. Chances are, they’re already used to typing your country TLD so it wouldn’t be out of the ordinary to have them do the same for yours.

Dot Net

While going “.net” can be a viable option as it is still a common alternative to a “.com” registration if you’re unable to acquire it, it isn’t really a viable option. I mean, when was the last time you went to a site with this TLD? Or more importantly, do you ever type “.com” instead? Given that 50% of  all domains have the latter TLD, we can assume that a good amount of people do that. What’s worse is if your competitor owns the “.com” and you end up redirecting your potential customers to them.

New TLDs

One of the biggest issues with “.net” is that it is in people’s minds but not enough to make it stand out. A great way around this is with a new TLD such as “.soy” if your company sells soy-based products. It’s unique enough that customers would probably be more likely to not accidentally type “.com” but relevant enough that it would make sense for your business.

Moving Forward

As I mentioned at the beginning, it’s not just about making your domain name look good, it’s about having it perform well. Of course, looking good is one of those factors, but it isn’t the only factor one should consider. It means taking into consideration multiple factors such as the current state of one’s brand and budget then trying to find that sweet spot that, in the end, gives you the best ROI. It is an important business decision and should not be made casually.

What other things do you think businesses should consider when making this decision, and what other options do you think are available to them? Let me know in the comments below!

Image Credits

Featured Image: Oleksiy Mark/Shutterstock.com
In-post Photo #1: Syda Productions/Shutterstock.com

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