Can Social Media Drive Small Business Growth?

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August 4

Can social media drive small business growth?

Probably not, unless…

It’s part of a clear strategy. Let me explain…

You Need a Social Media Strategy

Just getting likes on a Facebook page is unlikely to help you grow your business – on its own. The key is for it to to be part of a clear and measurable process.

At a high level, most business social media strategies should contain the following path:

Your social media activity should generate traffic to your blog.
Your blog should offer something to an interested reader to download. The reader would need to ‘pay’ for this something with their email address.
You should have a low cost logical next step for them to try you out.
The next logical step should be to buy your core product.

To understand how this works let’s look at an example.

Let’s assume I am an independent financial advisor. What I want is for people to book me on a retainer to give them advice. But, as we know, people buy from people they know, like and trust.

There is a gap here between someone buying my services and someone who may benefit from my services. To close this gap let’s work backwards and identify the logical next steps.

How To Close the Gap Between Strangers and Customers

To do this you need to ask yourself a series of questions. The answers will reveal the pathway that a stranger will need to follow in order to become your client.

What question should we ask?

What smaller thing could I offer or do that would help people get to know, like and trust me?

In this case the next thing may be a one-off low-cost financial health check.

And for those who still aren’t familiar enough with you, what smaller thing could I offer?

The next thing could be an in depth ‘How to’ downloadable PDF guide. This guide may reveal how to do the health check for yourself, which could intice someone who maybe wasn’t ready to commit to your service.

But still, there will be some people who might still hesitate. So we ask again, what smaller thing could I offer?

You could write an article explaining techniques and ideas for maintaining financial health. This is a great way to show your new readers the value and knowledge you can provide them.

Of course, how do you get someone to read the article in the first place? This is where social media can be very helpful to your business.

It isn’t enough to know that you provide a valuable service or product and to write about it. There are so many people doing that. Your audience won’t magically flock to you.

You need to use social media to reach out to them. Engage your prospective customers and let them get to know you better. This is how you get strangers to become your loyal customers.

This is what closing the gap looks like:

Someone sees an interesting post on Facebook promising to reveal a clever way to save money.
They read your article.
They download your free health check guide.
The reader decides it’s something they need to do. But it’s too complicated or time consuming for them to do, so…
They book your health check.
The health check was great and they see your value first-hand. Next, they upgrade to your full service.

This is a Sales Funnel. One of the most powerful growth tools for any business to master.

A lot of people don’t realise that social media plays a huge part in this process. But now that you do, you can use social media to really boost your business.

Measuring Social Media Metrics Can Explode Business Growth

Do clicks and shares really matter??

Yes! They are real metrics that you can and should be measuring for every social media post.

Tracking clicks and shares is how you learn what your audience responds well to. Over time, you’ll get better at crafting the right post to attract your target audience. This will bring more traffic to your article.

With more traffic, you can track how effective your article is. Do people want the free guide? What is the conversion rate? You can use the data to experiment with the copy and try things which may increase the conversion rate.

You can then track how well the guide performs. How many people get in contact with you off the back of it. You can experiment adding a more prominent telephone number or website address where they can apply. All this is measurable and can you can adjust it to improve performance.

So don’t ignore your social media clicks and likes. They actually mean a lot to your business. Understand how they help you and your sales funnel will streamline strangers into customers in no time.

Use Social Media To Drive Your Business Growth

The sales funnel is an under-used and little-understood tool for explosive business growth. Even less known, is the role that social media plays in driving your business sales.

Master it and you will be able to close that gap and skyrocket your business.

We’d love to help you design a killer custom sales funnel for your business. Send us a quick message today and we can get started right away!

About the Author

I'm a marketing entrepreneur who loves to work with small business owners and helping them get their message out there.

I cut my teeth in working for a financial startup in the city of London, and have built and run many websites and marketing campaigns for a wide range of clients. I love everything about marketing - from copywriting to developing websites, email newsletters to search engine optimisation.

Daniel

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