In today’s social media obsessed world, it’s both easier and more complicated than ever to build consumer trust. The simple solution, of course, is to get active on social media — an approach used by 81 percent of SMBs, according to a 2014 LinkedIn study. But merely establishing a presence on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn is not good enough; your social media presence must be tackled in a strategic way, while maintaining approachability . Additionally, your pages must be promotional (in the sense that followers understand what your business does), but never spammy. Above all else, social media content must be engaging.

Looking to build brand awareness and consumer trust via social engagement, but not sure where to start? These tactics will take your social media for small business efforts to the next level:

Focus on Informative Content

Social media users do not follow accounts that constantly send them spammy links and videos. Self-promotion is acceptable, and at times, necessary, but it should be infused into an overarching strategy that focuses primarily on informative, useful, and engaging content. Even promotional content should teach readers something. The goal should always be to establish yourself as an authority in your industry, without coming across as overly self-promotional.

Buffer, a social media scheduling tool, does a great job of adding value to their audience without pushing a hard-sell. For instance, in this post they share a guide to help marketers create more engaging video content. Instead of pushing their product, they build trust and goodwill by sharing useful content on a hot topic that matters to their core audience (marketers).

Keep Your Voice and Content Consistent

Although some variety of content is good, consumers following your social media page should have a basic idea of what they will find when they browse your account. Arguably more important than the range of content, however, is the voice you use to present that content. Your social media voice should appeal to your target audience — and it should be consistent. Social media posts should not alternate between being formal and lighthearted. Choose one approach and stick to it.

Larry Kim, founder of Wordstream, is a perfect example of owning his social voice. He knows exactly what his Twitter followers are looking for — a lot of emojis and unicorns but also really relevant, educational content.  

Transparency and Responding to Consumer Concerns

These days, brand promotion is about more than showing off the best of your business. Consumers view your social media pages not only as a place to learn about new services and great deals, but also as a platform to sound off about their concerns. The sooner you address those concerns and the more helpful your answers are, the better your customer service reputation will be. Resist the urge to delete unfavorable posts, as this will not lend credence to the reputation for transparency that you’re trying to build.

Zappos owner, Tony Hsieh, wrote the book on delivering amazing customer service. Zappos does a phenomenal job of addressing customer concerns wherever their customers are – on the phone, over email, and on social media.

Highlight Social Outreach Efforts

Few things create goodwill among customers quite like corporate philanthropy. Customers will be quickly turned off if you constantly boast about your company’s charitable efforts, but they do like to see the occasional post about the good your business is doing in the world — particularly if their purchases have assisted in this do-gooder behavior. Be sure to highlight charitable projects that directly benefit the local community, as these will resonate more powerfully with local customers.

This UPS team gets a social boost from showcasing their volunteer efforts. It’s a great way to show their men and women out of uniform and in a different element.  In addition, highlighting members of your team is always a solid way to get in front of your employees’ network.

Social media is a powerful tool that can be used to strengthen your brand reputation – leaving a love mark on your prospects and customers. It’s key to enhancing your marketing efforts while building much-needed trust among your consumer base. Keep the focus on offering value to your consumers. Traffic and social media engagement will naturally follow if it’s clear that you want to provide your followers with useful content and a stellar online experience.

Since the onset of social media in 2007, brands have known there is value to be extracted from sites such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest.  At the same time, they’ve struggled to measure the return on investment of their social marketing efforts and justify their spend in these channels.

Even still in 2016, proving social media ROI remains the number one challenge for brand marketers, according to Social Media Examiner’s 2016 Social Media Marketing Industry Report.

During my 12+ years working as a brand marketer, I have worked for large Fortune 500 companies who used light metrics to measure social media efforts – such as followers and the total reach of a campaign. I have also worked for high-growth startups who wanted to drive accounts using social media, utilizing social media as more of an acquisition channel.

Which approach is correct? The truth is, they both are. Social media should be seen as both a brand awareness and acquisition channel, and metrics should be associated accordingly. Here’s how to use and track social media within these two important marketing metrics:

Social Media As A Brand Awareness Channel

If I had to pick between using social media as a brand awareness or acquisition channel, I would say brand awareness is more closely aligned with social media’s true function.

Social media at its core is truly at the top of the marketing funnel — it is a place to begin and build relationships. It is the face of your brand online and a great way for prospective customers to interact with your brand for the first time. Here are some ways that social media works best to build awareness of your brand online:

Social Media Campaigns: Large scale social media campaigns are best when tied to brand awareness goals and metrics. Brands usually hold campaigns for giveaways or an incentive, which reaches a large amount of people online who interact with the brand to win something. A successful social campaign creates awareness about your company story and mission with people who might not have used or interacted with your brand before. Two examples of effective brand awareness campaigns this year are #EsuranceSweepstakes during Super Bowl Sunday or PwC’s #BallotBriefcase campaign, which won the Shorty Award for best use of social media in B2B marketing.

Social Content: When brands create content and share it out through social media accounts using hashtags, this content is discoverable by people searching hashtags or keywords online. This is a great example of how a consumer would become aware of a company by finding and reading content through social media.

Influencer Content: When brands work with popular bloggers and influencers online to have them endorse or talk about a product, this is an example of how a brand is utilizing social media as a brand awareness channel by reaching an influencer’s massive network.

Metrics Associated with Brand Awareness: Most of the metrics tied to social media are truly brand awareness metrics, which proves social media is best in this channel. Common metrics associated with social media brand awareness are hashtag use, share of voice, volume of posts, total reach, community size, traffic from social media sites, and engagement metrics such as likes, shares and retweets. Figure out which metrics are most meaningful to your small business, and constantly optimize and test strategies to improve those metrics.

Social Media As An Acquisition Channel

Social media can certainly be used as an acquisition channel, but it should not be the focus of launching a social media strategy and engaging with people online. Any acquisitions from social media channels should be seen as a bonus. Often, social media will assist within the conversion funnel and act as touches within a multi-touch marketing strategy. It takes many marketing touches from a brand before someone becomes a lead and converts to a customer. These touches take the form of social media posts, blog posts, online advertising, calls from a sales rep and more. To fully understand the impact of social media within a marketing strategy, you should use multi-touch tracking of your marketing channels. Here are some ways brands use social media as an acquisition channel:

Instagram Posts with Double Tap to Buy: This acquisition strategy works only for lifestyle clothing brands. Thanks to technology such as LiketoKnow.it, users can double tap an image on Instagram, get an email with the links to the products featured, and make an immediate purchase.

Social Media Sales: Some brands will post sales on social media, using a custom redemption code only associated to the social channels. If consumers see a 24-hour or holiday sale via a social media post and convert using this code, sales can be tied directly back to the post.

Metrics Associated with Acquisition: The only way to measure social media as an acquisition channel is to track leads that came from social media, either through an internal database tracking system or Google Analytics.

Social Media As A Customer Service Channel

To throw another spin into the trick question in the title of this blog post, social media is actually also a customer service channel, in addition to brand awareness and acquisition. A number of consumers turn to social media channels to ask questions or complain about subpar service and products.

This behavior has become the norm for a lot of consumers because they know they’re going to get a quicker response, and it’s easier to shoot off a Tweet to a branded Twitter handle than spend twenty minutes waiting on the phone after pressing one, three and six to find the right department. 

Your brand should be there to intercept complaints and questions quickly, and shut down any incorrect claims. Metrics associated with using social media as a customer service channel usually include things like customer service rep time/calls saved, tickets closed online and more.

Whether focusing on brand awareness, acquisition or customer service, social media is an essential part of any smart marketing strategy today. Pinpointing the goals of your social media strategy can help ensure you’re measuring the right outcomes, making it a lot easier to prove your efforts are worth your time.

We don’t mean to beat a dead horse here, but today it’s more true than ever that content is king. When it comes to online lead generation for your small business, content marketing still ranks as one of the most effective (and cheapest tools) to build brand credibility and drive traffic to your site. So if your online traffic has been waning, now is the time to start looking at how you can boost your online presence by revamping your content strategy. Here are a few ideas to get you started.

1. Add visual content to your content marketing strategy.

Often when business owners think about content marketing, strictly text-based content is what comes to mind. However, video and images play a huge role in generating more leads.

Studies show that by the year 2017, as much as 69 percent of web traffic will be attributed to video content. Not only does visual content help get your message across quickly on your website, but it generates high engagement on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.  Not to mention image-centric platforms like Instagram, Pinterest and Snapchat are becoming social media staples as well.

To work visual content into your content marketing strategy, test different types of video and images on your website and on social media. Whether it’s video product reviews or a quick tutorial video, implementing video content and visuals into your website and social platforms is sure to have a positive impact on your audience engagement.

2. Leverage email to share your content.

The key to getting noticed as a small business and staying top of mind with potential customers is to keep in touch – and email makes it easy and inexpensive to do just that.

We’ve said it before, but we’ll say it again: email marketing is more relevant today than ever. Make sure you’re not only optimizing your site to capture contact information, but that you have a solid email strategy in place to use that contact information.

That’s where email nurturing comes in. With a solid email nurturing strategy, you can send relevant, well-timed content to your list.  Sharing content through email provides value and builds trust with your audience. It also drives engaged prospects back to your website, where – if your website is well-optimized – they’ll convert to a customer.

A well-planned email nurturing strategy paired with your content marketing strategy will help to keep your company top of mind, grow customer loyalty for your brand and generate more leads in the long term.

3. Build a blog (and keep it updated).

You can’t mention content marketing for lead generation without the mention of a blog. A blog is essential to helping your website rank in organic search on popular search engines like Google and Bing, driving top-of-funnel leads to your site.

But you can’t just create a “Blog” tab on your site and forget about it. Like all the tools we’ve listed in this post, you need to have a solid content calendar in place to maintain a regular cadence of new posts. First, a site that is updated with good content on a regular basis gives search engines a reason to crawl your website – and improve your ranking for the search terms that are important to your business.  In addition, fresh new content on your blog means you have something new to share with your audience, whether you’re building a new email campaign or schedule posts for social medial.

At Hatchbuck, we’ve seen incredible success with our blog (duh – we’ve got you reading it!). We strive to create content that not only educates our prospects and current customers on all things marketing, leadership and small business, but also allows visitors to learn more about all of Hatchbuck’s capabilities for small businesses.

4. Take advantage of social media with your content marketing strategies.

Social media makes it easy to get the word out about your business; that’s is no secret. But on top of that, the most popular social media outlets like Facebook and Twitter can be an excellent way to elevate your lead generation strategy. By sharing blog posts, newly uploaded videos, and webcast announcements via social media, you’re not only educating your followers but driving relevant, engaged traffic to your site.

Adding a social element to your content marketing is a must. At Hatchbuck, we’re big fans of curating outside content from partners and other stellar brands through our social platforms. We do a lot of reading in the small business space, and we feel that our social channels should be a fantastic go-to resource for small business owners. There’s so much killer content out there that it’s often hard to sift through the noise – our goal is to do that for small business owners who don’t have the time.

In the end, the effectiveness with which you handle your content marketing can be the secret to lead generation success for your small business – so don’t let strategy fall by the wayside. The time is now to build your small business content strategy.