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How to use social media content marketing to promote your small business

There are three steps you must take to successfully promote your small business through social media – devise a social media marketing strategy, create quality content and publish it on a regular, long-term basis.

Yes, it really is that simple.

Simple, though, is not the same as easy. After all, the process behind completing a marathon is simple – just put one foot after another for 42 kilometres – but we all know it’s not easy to run that far.

With that in mind, let’s discuss those three steps in detail, so you know exactly what you need to do to use social media content marketing to promote your small business.

1. Devise a social media marketing strategy

It’s great that you recognise the power of social media to generate leads for your business. But that will happen only if you pursue your goal in the right way. After all, as Harvard professor Lee Bolman once said: “A vision without a strategy remains an illusion.”

So here’s what you need to do:

First, choose your audience, and be as specific as possible. For example, if you’re a mortgage broker, don’t choose something vague like ‘Consumers’. Instead, go with something like:

People who live in Melbourne
Who have a household income of at least $300,000
And who want to upgrade their home or buy an investment property

Second, decide what messages you want to deliver your audience. For our hypothetical mortgage broker, that might be:

It’s important for business professionals to understand what’s going on in the mortgage market, the property market and the economy
Melbourne has a vibrant property market
Property is a great way to build long-term wealth
Most Australians choose mortgage brokers over banks because brokers deliver greater value
I’m an expert mortgage broker

Third, decide how you want to deliver those messages. Our mortgage broker might decide that financial content for social media is best presented in the form of written posts (rather than videos or infographics), as it provides the best opportunity to present and analyse data.

Fourth, decide where you want to publish this content. For our broker, that would be LinkedIn, as most people with large household incomes are business professionals, and most business professionals are on LinkedIn.

Fifth, decide what type of content you want to publish. For our broker, that would be news; but for someone else, it might be educational tips or a mix of news and education.

Sixth, decide what topics you want to cover. Our broker might decide to report news about:

The Australian mortgage market – e.g. interest rates, credit policies, lending regulations
The Melbourne property market – e.g. prices, rents, vacancy rates
The Australian economy – e.g. unemployment, inflation, wages

By the way, Hunter & Scribe specialise in content writing for financial services professionals, such as mortgage brokers, commercial finance brokers, asset finance brokers, accountants and financial advisers.

2. Create Quality Social Media Content

Once you’ve devised a smart social media marketing strategy, the next step is social media content creation.

This content needs to:

Fit your strategy
Be relevant to your target audience
Interest your target audience
Be clear, concise and easy to read
Make your business look like an expert

By all means, you can write these social media posts yourself. However, if you don’t have the time and/or skill to do the writing in-house, you should outsource it to a company like Hunter & Scribe, which creates property content and financial content for social media.

3. Publish Your Social Media Content On A Regular, Long-Term Basis

“In reality, strategy is actually very straightforward. You pick a general direction and implement like hell,” legendary CEO Jack Welch once said.

As Welch was alluding to, a surprisingly large number of businesses fail at the final step – implementing.

They’re able to devise a good strategy and create good content; but they’re unable to put in place a system to publish this social media content marketing on a regular, long-term basis.

The reason that’s vital is because, as every social media content agency will tell you, social media doesn’t work if you do it every now and then. It works only if you publish content regularly and over the long-term. That’s because:

The key to succeeding with social media is to become a trusted authority figure in the eyes of clients and referrers
… and the only way to achieve that is for a lot of people to see a lot of your content
… and the only way to achieve that is to accumulate a large catalogue of content
… and the only way to achieve that is to publish content on a regular, long-term basis

If you’re doing social media content creation internally, create a publishing schedule (e.g. posts get published at Monday 9am, Wednesday 9am and Friday 9am), and either use project management software (like Trello) or a social media scheduling tool (like Buffer) to make sure you stick to it.

Alternatively, you could outsource the whole process to a property and finance copywriting agency like Hunter & Scribe, which writes and publishes social media content for small businesses.

Choose wisely, because if you don’t nail this third step, you won’t succeed with social media.

Social Media Management Australia

Hunter & Scribe is a social media content agency that specialises in writing property and financial content for social media. We do social media content creation for:

Mortgage brokers
Finance brokers
Buyer’s agents
Real estate agents
Financial advisers
Accountants
Conveyancers
Lenders
Credit repair agencies
Builders
Debt collection agencies

Social media content marketing is a great way to generate leads, because while the vast majority of your potential clients and referral partners are on social media, only a small minority of your rivals regularly publish content. (Most businesses publish something every now and then, but few publish regularly.) So this is still a relatively untapped market.

If you work in property or finance and you want to attract more clients, Hunter & Scribe can help you create and implement a winning social media marketing strategy. Click here to make an inquiry or get started.