Gone are the days when traditional marketing like print ads and television commercials is the only way to introduce and advertise your brand.

For any emerging business, your brand can now thrive even without spending a huge chunk of budget on traditional marketing. Thanks to popular social media networking sites like Facebook and Instagram, you can now reach your customers and even potential customers online.

So the question is: How to utilize social media for you to establish your business online?

Here are some of our social media marketing tips to help you get started:

1. Post consistently

Be consistent. Your content or what you are sharing on social media should be relevant and aligned with your brand.

Remember, whatever you post online will always reflect on your brand – it will either work for you or against you.

Here are some actionable steps to achieve this:

• Brainstorm with your team. Gather as many ideas as you can so you will never run out of content
• Create a monthly theme. After brainstorming, your team has to decide what ideas are worth pursuing for your brand. Set a theme for your content. For example, you can set Monday as topics for motivational or encouraging content.
• Streamline your process. Implementing a process can help you achieve consistency. There are a lot of social media automation tools that can help you navigate the online world more efficiently. Tools like Hootsuite can help you with your daily, weekly, and monthly schedules of content that you want to publish on your social media pages.

2. Know where your target audience is active

It’s not about being present to all social media platforms, but it’s about utilizing where your customers are.

Find out what social networking sites are best for your brand. Look at what platforms your customers are engaged with the most. Study their behavior and see what they are saying. In this way, you can position your business well and you can come up with engaging and catchy content that attracts your target audience.

Related: 5 ways to boost your online sales during the pandemic

3. Elevate your story

Your brand’s story matters.

What makes you unique? What sets you apart from the competition? What’s your mission? And why should they buy from your business?

These questions are worth exploring to examine your business. Leverage on your story and your unique offering when marketing your business on social media.

Remember, people don’t your product, they buy your story. 

 4. Test. Test. Test

Not because certain strategies work on other businesses doesn’t mean it will also work on your business. When it comes to social media marketing, you should never be afraid to experiment. If there are strategies that didn’t work well, try another approach. It’s all about testing.

Related: Online Marketing: 4 essential things you need to know

You have to find out what works best for your social media brand by experimenting and testing.  The only way to know what will keep the engagement going is to find out what makes your customers or audience stick to your brand. And you wouldn’t be able to do that without doing and figuring out the groundwork.

Using social media for your marketing is not only more cost-efficient than traditional advertisements, but also more accessible for budding entrepreneurs as well. Use it wisely and you’ll get ahead of your competition in no time.