Large businesses have a competitive advantage over their smaller rivals that makes it easier for them to build their brands. Most have generous marketing budgets to support their branding efforts. Launching new products is also easier because they benefit from their name recognition and existing reputation.
Social Media is Full of Pitfalls for Inexperienced and Part-Time Marketers
Small business owners often turn to posting on social media to gain recognition for their companies and products. Owners of small companies often feel pressured to handle all of their marketing on their own to conserve their cash and other scarce resources.
While social media is a must for brand building, owners that don’t have a lot of free time to spend on social media, and that lack experience in content creation and marketing, usually find their efforts too time-consuming and ineffective. Creating a strategy that actually works to build a brand takes more than posting a few images and ads on various social media channels.
If small business owners want their companies to grow, they have to get serious about their marketing efforts.
Expert Advice Makes it Easier to Compete with Larger, Established Companies
Small companies can use social media to level the playing field by using experts to guide their social media marketing. Rather than creating an in-house professional marketing team, outsourcing can help owners create a strong brand image and connect with their target audience on an efficient, cost-effective basis.
SEO consultants at companies like Searchbloom.com use social media to build and market brands as part of a comprehensive digital strategy. With this approach, website design, audience targeting, A-B testing, analytics and other tools all work together to increase results.
The following are a few ways that small business brands benefit when marketing is turned over to the pros:
Avoid Penalties
Search engine algorithms that affect the way that search results are ranked are constantly being revised and updated. While Google updates receive the most attention, other major search engine providers constantly tweak search.
Failing to keep up with the changes easily damages brands. Google posts some improvements to search in its blog, but many updates go unannounced.
The goal of updates is to ensure that users can easily find content that is relevant. To accomplish this, many updates penalize websites that don’t use SEO best practices. Small business owners usually don’t have the time and expertise necessary to keep up with these changes and make simple errors.
Common mistakes that can result in penalties include using a keyword or phrase too many times and adding the wrong type of backlinks within the content. Using an image that is too large or too small slows down the loading of pages and can result in penalties that affect rank. As rank decreases, it becomes more difficult, if not impossible, for small businesses to increase awareness about their brand.
Increase Your Results
It’s not enough to create unique, helpful content and to post interesting images. To build a strong brand, messaging should be consistent in all content that is created and posted, regardless of which marketing channel is used.
Tools should be used to identify top ranking keywords and keyword phrases that can be used to improve search rank. Additional tools should be used to target specific audiences for the content based on relevant demographics.
Analytics should be applied to test messaging and measure results. This makes it possible for adjustments to be made to social media and other marketing campaigns to ensure peak results.
Like content creation, analytics takes skill and time to be effective. Professionals can easily identify small mistakes in targeting, keyword placement and messaging that dramatically affect brand image, site traffic, engagement and conversion rates.
Sharpen Your Strategic Focus
Delegating marketing to a professional improves brand development. It also gives owners more time to concentrate on aspects of the business that truly need their attention.
Business owners need to be able to focus on developing their vision for their company and creating an environment that supports constant improvement and creativity.
Without this focus, it becomes impossible to improve the company’s current products and services, and equally impossible to invent new creations, which is the life’s blood of any successful business.
In addition to helping create a stronger brand image, social media marketing experts lower costs and help owners narrow their focus. These benefits give owners a strategic flexibility that makes it easier for the company to survive and grow over the long term.
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