The usual dilemma of most startups is prioritizing which comes first: the money or the marketing. And there’s no easy answer to this. Startups need customers to make money and vice versa. But without a solid marketing strategy, the small business might just as well be non-existent to most customers. Here is where turning to social media helps tremendously.
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| Image source: marketinghub.today |
Social media is increasingly being seen as a promising and effective marketing tool for big business leaders and startups managers alike. To maximize its use, one should first develop a marketing plan. Without which, all social media activity will fall flat. Establish a goal and supporting metrics to measure whether what you’re doing is successful is not. Before that first Facebook post or Twitter tweet, know the outcome you have in mind and possible humps on your way there.
Secondly, take advantage of team play. You are in a good position as a startup to have your employees contribute to your marketing efforts via social media. It empowers them, too. Having brainstorming sessions with the entire team can lead to grand ideas for blog posts, tweets, and status updates. Consider this: 70 percent of customer brand perception is based on experiences with people. Startups that encourage their employees to publicly engage customers on social media will edge the competition in terms of reputation-building.
Finally, startups should harness consumer-to-consumer recommendations. This can be done in a handful of ways, like directly asking for referrals among your most-satisfied customers, building a highly visible community through webinars and crowd-sourced content, and offering incentives for referrals such as rewards points or percentage discounts. This can even be the beginning place of future influencer marketing.
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| Image source: yostartups.com |
Steven Rindner is a business and corporate development executive with experience in different fields. Drop by thisblog for more similar reads.
