SMBs often have more limited resources, both personnel and budgets, than large companies, so they're looking to build more cost-effective sales streams. With the goals of raising awareness, expanding market share, and improving customer loyalty, it's critical to be creative in how your business engages and participates in the social media arena.

9 Questions to Ask When Developing a Social Media Marketing Strategy

Small and medium-sized businesses tend to be so focused on keeping their businesses going that it can be difficult to brainstorm on ways to leverage the dynamic social media environment. Here are nine questions to help you think about your business in ways that enable you to maximize your social media marketing efforts.

  1. Does your business tap into people's passions and/or hobbies? With hobbies and special interests, customers may make different spending tradeoffs, particularly with "staycations," where customers look for local activities. From a social media marketing perspective, this translates to ways that people can share their hobbies and special interests using photographs, videos, and blogs. For example, I suggested that a tea purveyor in the SES audience create a Flickr account to show off unusual teapots people collect, and invite the public to participate in this community.

  2. Can your business show off its work? While this tends to focus on visual portrayals, like photographs and video, it can also include audio and text. Sharing photographs and videos helps businesses where prospects perceive there are high risks. For example, beauty salons and tailors can show before and after photographs. Remember to get patrons' permission or offer a free bonus to incent customers to participate. Flickr contains many bakeries showing off their finished product's visual beauty.

  3. Can you give prospects information they find useful? Think broadly to help customers use your product. For example, a food specialty shop's blog may describe new foods with recipes and menus to use them. A resale shop can use a blog to show how to make wardrobes and living areas snazzy using its current product.

  4. Can you extend your expertise to a broader audience? This can work very well for professionals like lawyers and accountants. Leverage videos, presentations, and Webinars giving how-to tips to explain wills or budgeting.

  5. Does your business provide reasons for people to gather? In a virtually connected world, give people a reason to congregate in person. This may drive additional revenues. Examples include wine tastings for local wine shops and cooking classes for food specialty shops and/or restaurants. Use Meetup.com to organize the community and post comments. Where appropriate, add a Flickr page to gather related photographs.

  6. Can your business disseminate fun or related information via social media? Think in terms of bite size chunks of content. This information doesn't need to be your business's main focus. For example, a massage therapist can create a Twitter stream and blog for meditations to put people in a more serene state of mind.

  7. Are there targeted or niche communities where your prospects and customers naturally congregate? If so, set up a group in this social media site. For example, yarn shops participate and socialize on Ravelry, a knitting community.

  8. Do major blogs cover your business's area of expertise? If so, actively comment and add to the conversation. Offer to create guest posts to share your knowledge and broaden your audience. This means adding real value to the conversation.

  9. Does your offering lend itself to creating a small online community and/or bulletin board? For example, many religious organizations leverage Yahoo Groups to communicate with members. These interactions can move online and offline.     Heidi Cohen

Nick Nicholls
www.InternetMarketingBestPractices.net

Posted via email from Nick Nicholls Thoughts…