How to promote a small business without giving up all your spare time

_{Collaborative feature}

We, as small businesses, can’t ignore the importance of social media in promoting our offerings. Facebook is used by 80% of all internet users and has now joined forces with Instagram – making it a huge marketing opportunity. While email lists are helpful for reaching out to already-interested customers, you can be discovered by a new audience by advertising on social platforms too, and quickly grow your following.

But you don’t need to spend hours in the evening posting, commenting, sharing etc if you make a promotional content plan and stick to it. Think of it as part of your overall marketing strategy and allocate time in your working day to really make it work for you, whether that’s writing an informative blog post or using an email newsletter tool to personally invite customers to your special event or sale. Here are some ideas:

MAKE YOUR CONTENT COUNT

If you’re going to be present on social media in order to attract your customers, you might as well make every post count! You can share the same content to multiple social accounts so reach more people – for example, my blog posts are automatically posted to my Facebook page, Twitter feed and contain a pinnable image to add to Pinterest. I’ve written one blog post but have shared it in a few places, and I can use different images from the article to re-share the post again in a few days time.

So, if you’ve created a fantastic product photo, an interesting how-to video or written an article, make sure you share it more than once! And make sure it displays well on a phone, as well as on a laptop screen – 50% of all internet users are viewing it on a smartphone. Make your content really stand out with dynamic elements such as moving text or add music to your videos.

ENGAGE YOUR AUDIENCE

It’s not enough to just put content out there and hope that someone sees it. You need to be reactive to your audience when they respond to your posts and articles. Make sure you read the comments regularly and always reply! After all, someone has been kind enough to interact with you, so it’s only polite to chat back.

Also, another way to drive real user engagement is by running giveaways. You’re giving your audience the chance to win something they want and, in return, you can ask them to share your content with their friends so that you can reach a wider audience – and perhaps even some people who haven’t ever heard of you before.

This can help you to boost your social following, grow your newsletter list and get more eyes on your website, making it a win-win idea for engaging your potential customers or audience. To make a giveaway extra-easy to run you can use a contest widget from Gleam, which captures all the entries, encourages viral sharing, lets you choose and announce a random winner, and can be embedded into your website or blog post.

CHECK OUT YOUR STATS

This is something I’m not great at but checking the performance of the content you put out there will help you to understand what works and where to focus your efforts in the future. Analytics helps you to track interactions, work out your audience demographics and therefore target your customers better. If you understand who your audience is, you can create more of the posts that you know they’ll enjoy and will want to engage with.

BE CONSISTENT

If you’re going to post interesting updates for your followers, you should aim to be consistent about how often you post to social accounts such as Facebook or your own blog. The more often your audience engages with your business, the more likely they are to think of you when they want to make a purchase or use your service, so keep in touch regularly – but not TOO often. Multiple posts each day can feel spammy and may cause you to lose followers – yikes.

What other tips do you have for promoting your business on social media or with Facebook page advertising? Let me know your ideas for creating and organising content in the comments below – I’d love to hear your time-saving hacks!

PIN IT FOR LATER

This article is a sponsored collaboration. The pink links in the content indicate a sponsored link or information source. The blog post reflects my own experience and the sponsor hasn’t had any control over my content 🙂