How Start-Up Businesses Can Use Social Media to Help Them Conquer Their Market

There’s no escaping it; social media is an integral part of the business environment. Whether it’s used to get your name out there or for getting more sales, it’s an avenue your start-up must pursue.

If you run a start-up venture and you are looking to maximize your potential, then you simply have to employ a well-thought-out social media strategy, a failure to do so could prove fatal, and it’s not something you can afford to deal with in an unplanned manner.

In 2021 there’s no excuse for not making the most of social media channels to push your brand and to increase your sales activity. Even if your company doesn’t exactly fit the e-commerce ecosystem, you should still be using social media for much-needed exposure.

The size of the audience available on social media channels is massive (approx 5 billion people regularly use one channel or another), and if you can generate strong pages with large followings that are made of ‘real’ users and operate an organic approach, you should be able to see the fruits of your labor in a matter of weeks and months.

Employ a Dedicated Social Media Team, or Look to Outsource

Don’t think that you can run a social media campaign or strategy within your current team. You may feel that because you trawl through your Facebook feed, that you have what it takes to act as a social media marketer, but it’s far more complex than you may think.

Don’t skimp in this area; bring in a dedicated team or outsource it to an agency with proven demonstrable success in niches similar to the one your company occupies.

Build a Strategy

Your business model will, of course, already have an overall strategy, and this should be used as a starting point when it comes to adopting it to social media usage. Consider the demographics of your ideal audience and address these accordingly, whether that means focusing efforts on one particular branch of social media or a specific group.

Work out where your goods and services fit into the overall sales perspective and when it comes to pinpointing paid advertising, be sure to consider potential new markets that may be amenable to what you have to offer.

Interact With Your Audience

Be sure to maintain a good relationship with your audience as they could well end up as potential customers. React and respond in a timely fashion and try to communicate regularly with those who comment or share your content; this will help foster and build a community that will be useful to you in more ways than just financially.

Exposure

One great way of using social media channels is to secure exposure for a relatively low spend. If you have the right team in place, you can give your start-up business a real shot in the arm with directed exposure aimed at a relevant demographic. This could prove invaluable in helping your business gain traction and could be especially useful when heading into funding cycles.

Advertising

Don’t waste your time with print media and TV advertising, not when you can run a far more effective and data-driven advertising campaign on social media. Put together some great assets, again don’t do this in-house. Get a team to shoot a great ad, consider using royalty-free sound effects to save money and hassle, adopt stock footage to add scale, and then push on relevant channels.

Advertising on social media channels is so much more efficient than traditional ad campaigns because you can track literally all the data you need. See where your sales are coming from, see how they converted, and then copy, paste and repeat.

Maximize Your Sales Potential

Social media channels are not just places where people meet, chat and post pictures; a great amount of sales activity now takes place in these areas. Some networks are more effective when it comes to generating sales, but all are ideal for generating leads and building up a list of interested parties, which a CRM can then handle.

Your team should be aware that each social media channel works in different ways and has vastly different audiences; in other words, you shouldn’t apply a ‘one-size fits all’ approach as doing so could lead to you missing out on opportunities.

Identify which channels work best and then push those prominently while adopting a less intensive but meaningful approach on other networks.

Simplify and Track Your Sales Funnel

When it comes to developing a sales funnel running from your social media accounts, keep things simple, not just for the user but also for the purposes of the analytics that you will produce and then use as a barometer of its success.

Start small when it comes to any paid advertising you run on these pages and track and manage the relevant performance. Again, this is ideally a job for a proven individual or team that has experience in the field.

Be Patient

Don’t expect your social media pages to buzz with excitement instantly and resist the urge to generate fake interaction with paid likes or followers; this is never a good strategy. Make sure that any content you post is of use to your users and relevant to your business interests as a whole.

Again, this will be far more effective when run by people who know how the market works, and trying to run such projects without the relevant experience will almost always result in a waste of resources (be that time or money).