How to Use Social Media to Market Your Business, Without “Marketing”

Social media allows businesses to reach millions of potential customers all over the world. However, most people don't want to be 'marketed' to. Moreover, they have various methods to tune out your message and your business from their Facebook feed. Take a moment to learn how to use social media to create leads without giving the impression you're 'marketing.'

Marketing Your business in the Digital Landscape

You have to market your business despite the reasons or excuses you have for not doing it. Simply put, if you don’t market your business, no one will know you exist or how your services can help them. Even now during the pandemic, you have to market your business. Yet despite the need to market your business services, the reality is that most people don't want to be marketed to. 

Unlike previous generations, this generation of consumers have a greater ability to ignore your advertising, making it difficult for your message to break through. Due to this, it's fair to say that digital marketing can be a double-edged sword. While the digital marketplace can allow you to reach hundreds, thousands, even millions of people, these same people have the means to block your advertising from reaching them. 

The ability to install ad blockers or block unwanted visitors to a social media account can make it very difficult for your message to break through. Here are three tips for using social media to market your business to an audience that doesn't want to be marketed to.

Three Tips To Use Social Media to Market Your business without 'Marketing'

Make it Local

The majority of your customers will be from your community, and the best way to show that you're part of the community is to discuss issues that matter to your neighbors. A great way to use social media is to bring awareness to a local problem and your opinions and solutions to address it. 

Keep in mind, Google treats most queries as local and that criteria when deciding which business to serve up as a search result. This is why it is essential to pay attention to local issues and provide content related to your community.

Give Them a Reason to Click 

You'll be amazed at how many leads can be generated by a sweepstakes or a survey with a reward of a gift card to a local business. Not only are you encouraging your audience to provide you their contact information (so you can contact them later), you are building relationships (and backlinks) with other local businesses. This is a critical step to developing your authority because the more connections you have to your local community, the greater your opportunity to establish social proof and gain the trust needed to attract leads.

Ideally, you would try to post your sweepstakes on the social media of the company whose gift card you're offering, as well as your own. The result would be to reach people who may not know about you but do now because you have entered their sphere of influence—furthering your connection to the community and expanding your audience. 

Share Your Personality

It may seem intuitive to use social media to discuss your services since you're a business, but don't be afraid to go above and beyond. You and your team have other interests beyond the 'job,' and social media is designed to share interests.

“Off-topic” or “off-brand” social media posts can attract people who may not know they can benefit from managed IT, let alone that such a service even exists. Off-brand posts can generate leads because it often does the one thing you want your business marketing to do; gain an audience's attention.

While your audience may not be interested in a service (yet), they may be interested in office pet pictures (who isn't?), and that's your hook to get their attention. Off-branding posting isn't a theory we're tossing out there; at Directive, we post recipes, photos, and videos from our weekly team lunch called Crockpot Thursday. 

As expected, it generates a large amount of social media traffic, but more importantly, it also developed an audience who followed our social media posts. This, in turn, means they also received information about our marketing services every time we make a post while they were waiting for another Thursday to come around.

Your business's successful marketing requires constant contact with your audience to break through and become top of mind; this is called the Rule of Seven in marketing. In our case, we post every day, which means that if a person subscribed to follow our Crockpot Thursday content, they are also receiving six other posts about our services as an IT service provider.

When it comes to marketing your business, you need to reach your audience where they are and never know what content or topic will resonate with them. Posting about various topics will allow you to reach the widest audience, but remember the content must be of value and give people a reason to want to learn more.

Your business Can be Successful When it Comes to Using Social Media

Social media is currently one of the most potent sources of leads available for your business. If you're still on the fence about its value as a marketing tool, now is the time to stop making excuses about social media and embrace it.

Today's business environment has pushed digital communication even further ahead, making getting noticed online a critical part of lead generation. As a turnkey solution, social media is well-suited to gain your business an audience where your potential leads are communicating. Sooner or later, your word of mouth marketing will run out of mouths; so now is the time to evolve how you use word of mouth to find leads.