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Marketing Your Local Business on Social Media: City Beat News Shows How to Generate Good Content Without Breaking Your Budget

Jamie Cartwright

When it comes to the world of online marketing, ideas and technology are constantly evolving. Today, social media is paving the way for a business to become known with their own unique brand voice. The digital space has given companies the opportunity to be heard quickly and effectively.

Social media and online advertising are overtaking traditional outbound marketing tactics such as TV advertisements, direct mail, and cold calls. While these outbound marketing initiatives still have their place in marketing strategies, they are no longer the dominant force they once were.

How can you take advantage of the digital era to grow your local business? For starters, creating a content marketing strategy that is up-to-date, innovative, and engaging is key. After all, you’ve got more competition than ever as companies from around the world are also using the same advertising space, so now is the time to start generating captivating content.

Need some help? City Beat News is a research and publication company based in Lapeer, Michigan. The company is behind the City Beat News Spectrum Award, a national award given to small businesses that excel in customer service and satisfaction and has 4 tips to help your business adapt to the new age of marketing.

  1. Start with your content calendar. It’s never too late (or too early) to strategize, so start building your content calendar today. Providing thoughtful and engaging content for your audience takes time, so plotting it all down in one, organized calendar will help you grasp just how much time you need.

In your content calendar, think of different things your business can do to keep the interest of its audience. Blogs, infographics, video content, and third-party recognition are all great examples of high-quality content that you can present to your consumers that have the potential to create discussion about the company.

  1. Grow your social media following organically. Success on social media requires more than just content – you also need to engage with your community. Although you may have heard about people or other businesses that gained thousands of followers in just a few days, it’s not something you should model your strategy or success after. The sad truth is that not all those followers are real – many will buy followers or use automated processes to exaggerate their influence to get a jump start on their competition. The bottom line is – if you’re using social media to market your local business, fake followers won’t help you, as they do not guarantee an increase in customers.

To grow your business with social media, it’s important to build a following organically so that your followers are real people with interests that are genuinely connected to your business. By giving people a reason to follow you, i.e. by being in the press as an award-winning business, or presenting appealing multimedia content via your social media channels, you’ll become a brand that people are interested in.

  1. Build positive relationships with your followers. Nurturing your followers through social media will help improve your bottom line. As a business owner, it’s important to understand how to build lasting relationships with your followers – and this doesn’t mean selling them your product/service at every chance you get. Rather, City Beat News recommends creating a conversation through social media and interacting with customers to keep your clientele engaged.

  2. Review your content and improve if needed. By conducting a social media audit, you’ll find that your audience will gravitate towards certain platforms over others. You’ll also notice that certain social media platforms perform better than others depending on the time of day or the demographics of your customers. Once you’ve decided which social media channels resonate best with your audience, you can begin to distribute appropriately targeted content and interact with them on a more personal level.

To determine how customers interact with your content, City Beat News suggests using an analytics tool such as Google Analytics to track engagement through your social media channels to make changes as needed.