How does a small business increase their engagement?

As a Director or Manager of a small business, your input into customer engagement is vital. This is also true when you engage with customers on social media.

You may have a team with different specialties, you may be running the company on your own or it may be that your team isn't experienced enough and you are feeding them the information. Whatever the case, people want your opinion, input and guidance. Scratch that. They NEED it!

It is crucial to engage with customers on your social posts

A lot of people get caught up in the actual managing of the business, and so you should! But something as simple as replying to google reviews and comments left on your social posts gives your business a credibility that customers desire. It puts your business in a desirable position where you know what your customer needs and wants while also portraying to customers that you are a credible business with a wealth of knowledge to share. Let’s be honest, you must believe in your product or service if you took the step to start your own business. There may be some negative comments as well and to a certain extent you should be replying to these too and finding out what went wrong. If it goes pear shaped and you know that the person is just there for a moan then on most social media platforms you can also hide these comments. However, if you are actively engaging and trying to find out the problem and rectify it, it may be more beneficial to leave the comments as is.

“Competitor Analysis is key”

As a Director or Manager, we fully believe that you should personally be active on Linkedin. Whether that is sharing content onto your Linkedin page and commenting on it or you have a whole strategy geared up solely for your own Linkedin profile as well. It doesn’t matter! What does matter is that you are engaging in some form with your content on Linkedin. When people search for you company, you will come up as a Director or Manager and you really don’t want to waste the opportunity of adding credibility to your business through this channel.

On the other hand, you can also get a better understanding of what your competitors are doing. Likely there will be at least some of your competitors that will already be harnessing the power of social media and you get to have a snoop at what they are doing! Most social media managers create a competitor analysis when first looking at your business. A competitor analysis identifies who your competitors are, what is working well for them and helps with identifying gaps in your strategy that YOU can then fill on social media.

Once you have completed your competitor analysis, you or your social media manager needs to then decide what the best social media platforms to use. For B2B businesses, I fully advise that Linkedin is definitely the best one to pour as much of your energy and money into at the start. Especially if you don’t have much of a budget and you are running everything on your own. (The good news is that Linkedin is rolling out a native scheduling tool as well!)

The power of Linkedin can’t be ignored for B2B Marketing

On Linkedin, you want to start expanding your network with decision makers in companies that fall within your target customer group. Linkedin has a brilliant search tool to look for Managers and Directors in different companies that you have already identified as being a potential customer. When you are adding them to your network, write out a couple of lines of why you think you should connect with them and this then opens the conversation of a potential new customer! It is also really important to not just send a template message out to everyone because they can tell and it doesn’t look too great to them! It only takes a couple of minutes to send out a wee message to a couple of different people every day and before you know it you have a network full of people that are all existing and potential customers. This is also something that a social media manager can take care of for you too. Allowing a social media manager access to your Linkedin may be scary but remember that they know who you need to be reaching out to too! They are an extension of your business!

It’s all about Google for Local SEO!

Some businesses forget to claim their Google My Business account and this is so crucial for your local SEO. By claiming this, updating your logo, adding photos of your business and ensuring that you have the right opening times and it is linked to your website increasingly helps your business rank higher on search engines. This also allows you to post events, important information and products or services. By utlising your Google My Business profile you can also encourage your customers to leave google reviews to show how amazing your business is! If you have more than one office or shop then don’t forget to create location pages too.

Ask your customers what they think…

We all know that social media is a powerful tool for any business but does your marketing plan include asking your customers questions? What do your customers want to know and how can you find out what to answer? In your email marketing strategy, we usually ask potential customers to click a button to find out more or watch a video or whatever the CTA is but what about if you try using your CTA as sending an email? We have seen many service based clients where this has worked really well and they have had several leads off the back of this rather than losing them to a contact us page. On your social media utilise polls to find out what customer think or on Instagram stories use the ‘ask me a question’ feature to then create content to address these questions. Also, never underestimate the power of FAQ’s, this is an easy web page to create but you just need to keep track of what people are asking you. THis also converts into really nice evergreen content for your social media platforms too.

Showcase your team, partners and customers

This should be such a crucial part of your marketing plan as this is who makes your business! Your team (or just you, if it is just you!) is such an important element of your business but these posts usually also do really, really well on social platforms as your customers are then putting a name and story to a face and it makes a massive difference in how customers react to your team. If you have regular customers or ones who buy a lot or those special customers then it is so important to showcase them too. When you run your next competition make sure to get a photo of the winners. Someone buys the first or last of something, get a photo of them too. A customer and a member of your team have an interesting interaction, get that too! Even as simple as turning your reviews into graphics and sharing this on social platforms is showcasing your customers. The possibility are endless, but makes a very positive impression on your socials. Don’t just take our word for it, go have a look at your competitors or other businesses in your industry, I bet you there are doing this too!

Don’t forget to tell your business story too. Where did you start? Why did you start? How did you start? How did you end up where you are now? What was your last big achievement? New member of team? Someone leaving for pastures new? New board member? These are all milestones that turn into brilliant pieces of evergreen content that you can rework into lots of different socials from blog posts to reels to long content Linkedin posts.

Are you interested in finding out more about how WAYR Marketing can level up your business on social media? We specialise in helping startups and small businesses reach more customers! We know that you are brilliant at what you do so why not allow us to join your team as social media experts! Then get in touch with us today to set up an online meeting or phonecall to discuss further.