That’s no surprise that small businesses are most exposed to the economic storm that happened to our planet this year. According to recent studies, 69% of U.S. small businesses had already experienced a substantial drop in demand caused by the lockdown. From the loss of business to remote work, things are now fast-changing, and companies are forced to adapt.
In these turbulent times, SMBs should rethink their approaches to management and promotion in order to stay competitive. In this article, we are considering both business pitfalls and solutions that will help you overcome them. Let’s take a look at what can fuel your company’s success today.
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Challenges Faced By Small Businesses Today
Small business management and marketing are now experiencing more transformations and challenges than ever before. Let’s consider them under the magnifying glass.
Generating Leads
Finding customers is a challenging task for all businesses, not only small ones. However, for small ventures, it’s especially difficult. Spraying and praying don’t work for anybody — you must know whom you’re spreading the word about your brand to. It would be helpful if you create a customer persona. It’s an image of your ideal customer, including their behavior patterns, interests, preferences, and even favorite brands.
This information will help you represent your brand in a way that resonates with your target audience. You can also use these insights in order to adjust your digital advertising or social media content to the needs and expectations of your target audience.
Dropping Customer Engagement And Brand Awareness
Small businesses that don’t have a powerful online presence and get used to running only offline promotions may experience a decrease in brand awareness and customer engagement. The crucial step is now to move a business into digital immediately and start building an online brand image.
The critical elements of a digital business presence include a website and social media profiles. In case, if you don’t have an opportunity to create a website in short terms, we recommend starting with social media marketing. Today, social media have become one of the most versatile sales and promotion mediums.
You can register a business profile and introduce your brand to a target audience by posting engaging and relevant content, running advertising, and publishing important announcements and updates on social networks. By growing your online presence, you will also raise your brand awareness and customer engagement.
Online Customer Service
Many people feel more stressed than before due to a challenging economic situation. It may pour fuel on the fire, provoking negative customer experience and sparking negative brand-related online discussions. During the crisis, it’s particularly important to stay connected with your customers online and provide timely support and assistance to them. You should be ready to answer all of your customer questions at no time to prevent negative customer experience.
Social media may become an additional source of support for your customers. You can publish all your company’s updates, essential information, and answers to frequently asked questions right on your business profile.
The Importance Of Digital Marketing And A Robust Social Media Presence
Recent studies show that around 70-80% of people research a brand online before visiting the small business and making a purchase. While only 25% of small businesses invest in online marketing, being insufficiently informed about the importance of having a powerful digital business presence in this situation. Digital marketing, and especially, a social media presence, are crucial for small business survival today.
With a great online marketing strategy, you can help your business continue operating and converting sales even during the recession. By investing in the local search engine optimization, building a robust website, content marketing, and particularly in social media management, you will protect your business growth and profitability.
Don’t underestimate the power of social media. It can add a lot of value to your business in the eyes of your target audience. By constantly publishing eye-catching, relevant, and non-promotional content on your social media profile, you can get much more customer engagement than from any other kind of promotion. Persistence is key. With a firm understanding of the importance of social media marketing and a detailed strategy, you’ll soon harness the power of social media for your small business.
Personal Branding – The Latest Social Media Marketing Trend For Small Business
Personal branding is one of the latest and most significant trends in social media marketing for small businesses. It is a practice of marketing a person, his/her career, reputation, and ideas as a separate brand. We know these people as influencers or thought leaders. They share content based on their industry knowledge, experience, reputation, and their specific style. By building your personal brand, you can either do both to promote your small business and create a powerful individual reputation as an influencer.
Today, an audience is more interested in connecting with real people standing behind a brand name. They want to know in the face those who are creating an amazing history of a specific company. They are inspired and empowered by these creators. Following a personality on social media makes people feel closer to a brand itself too. Personal branding is perceived rather as sharing of your individual story as a human and entrepreneur than brand promotion. However, it’s an unobtrusive way to introduce your company to a target audience and increase brand awareness.
How To Manage Your Personal Brand On Social Media?
To manage your social media profile on a regular basis and without having the necessary marketing expertise might be a challenging task. You need to arm yourself with a handy social media management tool that will help you save time and market a personal brand more effectively. There are a lot of helpful tools for scheduling posts, user engagement analytics, and creating content.
Usually, companies providing these tools publish helpful courses to educate their users about social media marketing. We would particularly recommend Social Media Marketing Academy by PromoRepublic. Besides SMM fundamentals, it also covers topics related to small business marketing, crisis management, and personal branding, which are extremely important for your business during a recession. Moreover, it gives free access to a few handy social media management tools that can help you level up your social media marketing.
Closing Thoughts
Today requires us to adopt new rules and continually adjust our businesses to a fast-changing marketing landscape. As the most powerful informational engine, social media can help your brand be more flexible and meet new customer needs. Effective social media marketing is a vital part of the online small business presence and will help you increase brand awareness, audience engagement, customer retention, and sales.
To stay competitive both online and offline, you should keep abreast of the latest digital marketing trends and apply them timely. Personal branding is the number one trend in small business marketing today. By building your personal brand, you let your target audience connect with you and your company at a more personal level which helps grow customer trust and loyalty.
If you are interested in even more business-related articles and information from us here at Bit Rebels, then we have a lot to choose from.
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