Asset-Based Lending Atlanta: Small Business Marketing Tips, Part 2

In our previous blog post, the Atlanta asset-based lending team at The Commercial Finance Group discussed small business marketing strategies that can help you drive traffic to your business in a cost-effective manner. While the last blog focused more on business websites, this blog will focus on the world of social media. Get your tweeting thumbs and your emojis ready—it’s time to discover the role of social media in business growth and development.

Social Media Marketing

While small business websites are about driving traffic that leads to sales, social media has other, equally important purposes. According to the State of Social 2016 report, the large majority of business owners list “brand awareness” as the number one reason for marketing their business on social media—and “sales and lead generation” was the fourth most important reason for social marketing on the list.

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So how do businesses build brand awareness, engage communities, and grow through social media? How does the strategy change across social media platforms? Let’s take a look.

Facebook

By sheer volume, Facebook is king when it comes to social media marketing. The social media giant has over 2 billion monthly users in a variety of demographics—even a growing number of older folks are heading to Facebook for quality content and connections to their favorite brands and local communities.

If you’re looking make the first move on social media marketing for your business, this is the place to start—and there are plenty of ways to engage potential customers that are likely to purchase your products or services.

Facebook Content

First, you’ll need a business page where you can post links to quality content from your blog, reputable websites, YouTube, and the like. This is also a place to provide information and updates about your business—whether it’s about sales and promotions, the store closing early, new arrivals, or anything else that helps your customers.

It’s important to strike a solid balance between content that’s for informational/entertainment purposes and content that’s for advertising/sales purposes. Your followers would ultimate get tired of your page if you were only posting ads about your products, and they’d also get tired of your page if they only saw content that didn’t relate to your business. Find the perfect blend of content that sells and content that provides value, and you’ll have happier customers and better brand awareness.

Facebook Advertising

Even with the greatest Facebook content and steady posting, there will still be plenty of potential customers that won’t be able to find your business page—which is why Facebook advertising can be an excellent marketing asset. Whether it’s through boosted and sponsored posts or more traditional web advertisements, Facebook ads (and help from the Audience Insights Tool) helps you learn more about particular demographics that might be interested in your business, and allows you to create ad campaigns that reach the people who matter the most to you. Target people by age, geographic location, interests, Facebook behaviors, birthdays, and 939593822 other categories and subcategories so you can created the most customized and relevant ads for your potential customers. If you can master the art of demographics and Facebook campaigns, you can maximize the cost-effectiveness of your Facebook marketing and reach the people who need your products and services the most.

Oh, LinkedIn—you might be a dusty and sleepy place on the internet where people desperately seek “connections” and mindlessly promote their professional selves. But you’re also an excellent place for certain forms of digital marketing and advertising, especially in the business to business (B2B) realm. If your business offers products or services that can benefit larger companies as a whole—like if you sell office supplies that could benefit large offices, or provide sales training services or OSHA training—LinkedIn would be a great venue for your marketing efforts.

LinkedIn ad campaigns don’t just allow you to target by age and geographic location—you can target companies of a certain size or LinkedIn users with certain job titles to find the exact types of businesses (and employees) that would take advantage of what you offer. A salesmen is probably not going to be interested in your sales training workshops—but a VP of sales in charge of a 30-person sales team? Your workshops might be the exact thing he needs to improve his profits and educate his salespeople.

Digital marketing, in any sense, isn’t about putting your business in front of as many eyeballs as possible—it’s about putting your business is front of the right eyeballs. If those eyeballs are the eyeballs of business leaders and administrators, you might be better off using LinkedIn as an advertising avenue than other social media platforms.

Instagram

A picture is worth a thousand words—or 998, if you’re really keeping count. That’s why Instagram is becoming increasingly popular year over year, especially with younger crowds. There’s just something great and memorable about excellent images—and you can use that to your advantage as a promotional tool for your business. Instagram is less about ad campaigns and more about quality visual content—so if your products or services are fun, exciting, food-related, or just easy on the eyes, it’s time to pull out your iPhone camera and starting taking some photos. These images can be useful on your business website and other social media platforms, and they’ll engage a younger and visually-driven audience.

The Case For Automation

In this blog and the previous blog, we’ve talked a lot about the various methods by which you can market your business on the internet and social media. In truth, none of these solutions will drive traffic and bring business success alone—it’ll take a healthy blend of different content creation strategies and advertising campaigns to build your brand and increase conversions and sales. That’s a lot of work!

As a small business owner, you have a 24-hour workday whether you like it or not. You’re constantly in your store helping customers, slaving away in the back trying to manage inventory, analyzing and strategizing in the world of finance, and making sure your employees are happy and well-trained. When you’re not actually at work, you’re probably thinking about it, developing business strategies and refining your vision for how to make your business better. So where’s the time to create all of those social media posts, write all those blogs, and make sure your website and social profiles are visually appealing and up to date?

In times like these, it’s best to automate—to leave the fate of your marketing in someone else’s hands—so you can focus on running your business day in and day out. Great marketing is run by people with creativity, focus, and technical marketing skills, so spending a little bit of money on someone with content creation and digital marketing experience will give you more satisfying marketing results and open up time for you to focus on other aspects of your business—both of which will ultimately improve your business and its financial standing.

Sometimes, you have to spend money to make money—so spend some money on quality marketing services, and watch your business bank account grow larger year over year.

Asset-Based Lending with The Commercial Finance Group

Yes, you have to spend money to make money—but what if you don’t have the money to spend to begin with? You need plenty of capital to start a small business and grow it into something successful and sustainable—that’s where The Commercial Finance Group can help. Our asset-based loans allow you to avoid cash flow problems that cripple so many businesses, take on more clients, and grow your business with ease. Get started with us today!