Your brand is ready to take your small to medium-sized business to the next level, and now it’s time to begin promoting your brand on your blog and social media accounts and get noticed! Before you begin, it’s important to market your digital brand the right way – you don’t want to get noticed for the wrong reasons or waste your limited resources. It’s important to use the right platforms and tools to get the word out and collaborate with friends, partners and new contacts!
Choosing The Right Platforms and Tools
So what platforms, tools and strategies should you use to appropriately communicate your brand’s voice? Some choices are easy – most every business should have a blog, Facebook Page and/or Twitter account, but should your business be on Instagram or LinkedIn? Also, should you use a social media “dashboard” service, such as Hootsuite?
Maintaining Your Accounts
Although there are many social media services that you can utilize to market your business or organization, it is important to understand that updating and maintaining a social media account requires an ongoing investment of time and resources, even if the service itself is free to use. Not only should you regularly update your social media accounts, but you also must monitor and respond to user comments and messages about your business. If you choose to engage a social media audience outside of your target market, you risk wasting your time and resources.
Niche Social Media Services
Deciding whether or not to engage a social media audience depends heavily on the demographics of said audience – specifically age. The largest social media services such as Facebook and Twitter have a diverse user base of users from all ages and walks of life, but smaller, more niche social media services often have a more singular audience. If your target market primary consists of teens and young adults, your business will make a larger impact on a social media network that appeals to a younger demographic, such as Instagram. If your business primarily markets to professionals, you should consider using LinkedIn, where many professionals and businesses have accounts.
Social Media Dashboards
Choosing whether or not to use a social media dashboard such as Hootsuite and Cyfe primarily depends on how many social media services you decide to utilize. Social media dashboards provide a handy tool for managing multiple social media accounts and even WordPress blogs, allowing users to post updates to multiple services at the same time and tracking analytics. However, these services often offer premium services for a monthly subscription, and some of these premium services are offered by WordPress and many social media services themselves for free. If you aren’t feeling overwhelmed updating and monitoring multiple services at once, a dashboard might be unnecessary.
Networking And Collaborating Benefits Everyone Involved!
Setting up your business on a blog and social media accounts is the easy part. It’s more difficult to create content and monitor your accounts, but the hardest part of successfully promoting your digital brand is building relationships online, including building your subscriber, friend and follower numbers and forging partnerships with other businesses and organizations. The internet and social media networks are overflowing with individuals and businesses trying to promote their products and services, and it is becoming increasingly difficult to be heard and noticed online. There are two legitimate solutions to solving this problem – (1) your business can choose to spend money on advertisements through search engines and social media networks, or (2) you can choose to market your brand organically. While the former may be easier, the latter is more feasible for small businesses with limited budgets and resources.
Organic Leverage
In order to begin building your digital brand organically, leverage the relationships you already have with friends, partners and neighboring businesses. Chances are you know many individuals and businesses that have the same digital marketing needs you do, and it’s easy to develop a plan to mutually promote and boost each other’s blogs and social media services. If you have a physical storefront, consider forming a partnership with neighboring businesses and organizations. By forming these partnerships and working together, you can potentially reach a larger audience than you could by sticking it out on your own.