Social media, especially in times of crisis, has become more important than ever to connect with ex customers, current customers and potential customers! It is extremely important to keep talking to your customers – to empathize with them, offer them helpful ideas on how your products can serve them during this stay at home economy, and let them know how your business is engaged in helping your local community. Below I will outline 5 tips for marketing on social media for small business, and yes applicable now during COVID-19!
1. Give Back – Cause Marketing
During the pandemic, it is extremely important to show your customers what your brand is doing for the community. And a small deed goes a long way! An example of cause marketing, and giving back, is donating 10% of sale proceeds of a particular product to a charity that has been stricken by COVID-19. If you need help with strategy, consider hiring a social media marketing agency or at least professional – you can cap each the amount of hours per week or per month you want them working on a cause marketing campaign.
2. Provide Helpful Ideas During Crisis
Your customer feels isolated and uncertain during these unprecedented times. Therefore, think of useful ideas that revolve around your product to help them cope through quarantine and lock downs. For example, if you are a food brand, provide stay at home recipes with your product, e.g., acai bowls made with your trail mix or a salad made with your trail mix.
3. Customize Content For Each Social Media Platform
Each social media platform has a specific tone and addresses, by and large, a specific target demographic. For example, TikTok is mostly made of Gen Z, teens and up to 25 year olds while Facebook has countless of baby boomers socializing and joining various groups. Also, Twitter encourages short announcements, which is perfect for company news, while LinkedIn is targeted towards a professional community. Customizing content does not have to take an enormous amount of time but tweaking one single post for every different platform will do the trick!
4. Know Your Target Demographic
Study your customer database or think what other customer target group could be a potential target. For example, if you are a health and wellness brand that sells collagen powders for smoothies and other drinks, you may be a perfect solution to some more vanity-oriented fashionistas. Your target group may extend beyond athletes and gym junkies, what about the health conscious women, including young millennial moms and single professionals? This brand did a really good job of blending in the two target groups – health conscious customers plus image conscious women.
5. Define Your Brand Persona
It’s extremely important to create a unified brand persona that is discernable from competitors, i.e., when a customer looks at your brand, they know it is you. There must be some theme that becomes recognizable. For example, Ralph Lauren did a superb job of having a very distinct brand, it all ties in beautifully together.
Again, you may want to find a digital marketing agency, which specializes in branding, or at least a professional to help you craft our your brand identity. Go the extra mile as this becomes the cornerstone of your marketing technique, and it could be as simple as designing a memorable logo with very distinct color palette that speak to what your brand stands for!