A question we see from people running a small business is how to get the word out about who they are and what they do. Our answer is digital marketing – digital is everywhere, and it’s easy to get started.
As for where to start, that’s also easy: use the social media services freely available to you. You don’t even need to sign up for a business account with any of them to start – just start saying what you think will get your business the most attention, follow the accounts you think might be interested in what you have to say, and see what happens.
Using free social media accounts is also cheaper than paying for newspaper spreads, TV and radio ads, and outdoor billboards since you have free options like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, with paid options on those platforms for when it’s time to get really serious.
The most important question, though, is what sort of content you should be posting. In this article, we’ll share five different types of content that are relatively easy to put together for the purpose of boosting your business’s online profile.
Create Social Posts
Let’s get the easiest one out of the way – create content for your social media accounts (you have social media accounts for your business, right?) and post regularly. Since you’re a business, you’ll want to focus on LinkedIn as it tends to already have a business-focused audience, but if you’re trying to reach a wider audience, then Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter/X are good platforms to post on as well.
Best practices for social media posts:
- Follow accounts you think are relevant to your interests
- Tag those accounts in posts you think they might like
- Retweet/repost content from other players in your industry
- Use each platform’s paid-for options if you want to target a particular audience with your content
- Post regularly to keep your audience’s interest up
Write Blogs
Blogs are short-ish written articles that explore topics of interest to you, your industry, and your customers. Putting them together is a simple matter of coming up with a topic (which you shouldn’t have any trouble doing since you know your business and industry inside and out), and then writing something you think someone might be interested in.
And don’t worry if you’re a terrible writer. The important thing to do is cover the most important aspects of the topic you’re writing about – the meat of the article, so to speak – and then let someone who’s better at English proofread your article. Or, failing that, you could shell out approximately R240 a month ($12) for Grammarly, an awesome service that will check your copy for you and suggest improvements.
Best practices for blogs:
- Keep them short – between 300 and 600 words
- Try not to waffle – Get to the point and make it interesting
- Use words associated with your industry or the topic as much as possible in your copy
- Include links to your products and services if they are relevant to the text
- Host your blogs in a dedicated “Blogs” section on your company website
- Post blogs regularly, as this helps your Google rankings. The higher you rank, the more people will read your content.
Make Video
The internet loves video content even more than it likes blogs. Videos are more engaging – people are more likely to watch a video than they are to read your articles – so you should really consider putting a few together.
You can do it the old-fashioned way and plan, script, shoot, title, and edit your video with professional equipment, or you can just use any of the short-form video content platforms (TikTok, YouTube Shorts, Instagram etc.) to shoot short clips about your business with your phone and post them to your social media accounts.
Just be aware, social media is a two-way platform, and if what you shoot is boring, lame, or trying too hard to sell things, you’re going to catch flak from online commenters.
Best practices for video content:
- Keep it short if you can – nobody wants to watch a 30-minute video from you… yet.
- Funny videos attract a lot of engagement
- Don’t waffle – audiences tune out very quickly if they are not immediately engaged
Produce Infographics
An infographic is, contrary to what we’ve seen some accounts putting out, easy-to-digest information presented in a visually engaging manner. Essentially, facts and figures arranged on a page so the reader can immediately see what you’re trying to convey.
For example, if you’re a bakery trying to share interesting facts about your business with your customers, and if your financial reports have revealed that 50% of your customers prefer blue waffles, 40% of your total annual sales in 2022 were donuts, and that your top-selling croissants have chocolate in them, use that information to put a nice graphic-rich document together with the numbers prominently displayed.
You may need to pay a designer to do this for you, but the increased interest that nicely-presented infographics could bring your business will be worth the cost if you get enough eyes on it when you post it to your socials.
Best practices for infographics
- More numbers, less words – let your stats do the talking
- Pretty designs are eye-catching and inspire clicks
- Host them on your company website to boost incoming traffic
- Use your data and visualisations to tell a story – people love stories
- Build your infographic in different sizes to suit each of the social platforms you’re using
Run Polls
One of the simplest things you can do on social media to engage with your audience is to ask them questions via polls.
Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram make it easy to create polls, so once you’ve figured out how to do it, put something together that you think your audience will enjoy participating in. Polls can make people think and inspire discussion, but they can also provide you with valuable insights into what your audience likes, wants, or doesn’t like, which you can use further down the line in your business to refine your product offerings.
A good start for small business
The above is a good start if you’re new to social media for business purposes. Over time, you’ll be building your audience and even launching online campaigns targeted at specific audiences, but that’s something you will probably need a digital agency to help you with, as it can be quite complicated and cumbersome to do on your own.
For now, give the above a try and see how you do. The trick to digital marketing is making a consistent and regular effort, as building audiences and reaching the right people takes time to get right. Don’t expect overnight results, in other words.
We wish you all the best with your digital marketing efforts!