Starting entrepreneurs need help to progress at the beginning of their journey. Business owners look for ways to promote their brands in the most convenient way possible. 

With a limited budget and resources, how can a small business cope with ROI?

This is where digital technology becomes a solution that can leverage your business. Today, social media has become a medium for promoting brands quickly since everyone uses social media platforms every day.

Moreover, using the proper social media marketing tools is an excellent way to navigate accounts easier. These tools allow users to monitor, publish, and manage all their socials in one dashboard. 

But first, you need to understand what is social media management software. Once you learn about it, you will better understand its importance for your small business.

Leveling up your marketing strategy is essential now that more brands are competing. Social media opens up various opportunities to raise brand awareness and boost organic leads that can become a sale. 

As you go through this blog, you will learn the different ways how to drive your business growth by:

• Utilizing social media management tools for social listening 
• Creating and managing content effectively 
• Tracking and analyzing social media metrics 
• Building and managing a strong social media community
• Integrating social media management tools into overall business strategy

Utilizing social media management tools for social listening

Learning how your brand is performing can take time and effort. You can use the social listening technique to make things easier for you. 

But what is social listening?

Social listening can help us obtain insights and take advantage of possibilities by monitoring your brand’s social media platforms for:

• any customer feedback, 
• direct brand mentions, and 
• discussions about particular keywords, subjects, competitors, or sectors.

For small businesses, it poses different benefits for brand growth:

• Discover new opportunities – Seeing how your audience responds to your brand can make you realize if there’s a unique opportunity you can work on.
• Increase customer acquisition – Once your brand has garnered a solid number of loyal customers, it is easier to make a sale.
• Increase customer retention – Your audience appreciates it when businesses take the time to listen to them on social media. 
• Keep track of brand reputation – Monitoring your brand’s performance can lessen the possibility of getting negative feedback.

Social media management tools for social listening

There are different social media management software available online that you can use for social listening:

• Brandwatch Consumer Intelligence – A social media listening, advertising, publishing, measurement, and customer data platform. 
• Digimind – Offers two products: social listening and market intelligence, both special tools with a wide range of features.
• AgoraPulse – Quickly set up relevant brand listening parameters to listen to apt conversations about your brand.

Tips for effective social listening

Follow these tips to achieve effective social listening:

1. Learn the pain points

It is best to understand which areas of the industry or product create a fuss for your audience.

2. Pick strategic keywords and topics for monitoring

Social listening is much easier when you focus on keywords and topics to monitor. Usually, these must be related to your business to get the most relevant information.

3. Use it for brand improvements

Listen to what the customer feedbacks say to your brand and use it to improve your process further.

4. Get more leads by following the recommendations

Engaging with your audience is possible with social listening. For instance, follow “recommendations” posts in your business and answer with advice and product recommendations when appropriate.

Creating and managing content effectively

As a small business, you must build a strategy to leave an impression on your target market. Otherwise, you’re only slowing down potential sales progress. 

Creating relationships with your audience and encouraging customer loyalty is possible through engaging content by creating material that appeals to your target audience that is educational, engaging, and current. 

You may promote customer engagement by fostering community around your business. 

Social media management tools for content creation

Check out these social media automated posting tools that you can use to speed up content creation/publishing:

• Practina – A complete digital marketing tool that creates and publishes content consistently.
• Buffer – Made especially for small businesses that can help schedule and publish content.
• SocialPilot – A tool for scheduling and creating content for SMBs, agencies, and enterprises.
• HootSuite – Made for scheduling and planning for brands of all sizes.

Tips for effective content creation and management

Read these tips for effective content creation and management:

1. Strategize using a content plan

Everything you create must start with a plan. Curate a content plan with these in mind: “Who am I creating content for? What do I want them to do after seeing it?” Having this mindset will get you straight to your goal and be aligned with the right target market. 

Remember to be flexible because different factors, such as timing, tool malfunction, and lack of resources, can affect your content plans.

2. Try other formats

Never limit yourself to social media posts. While it is prevalent and easier to execute, other types of content can further promote brand awareness, like blogs, podcasts, and infographics. Be creative as possible to get more engagements and leads.

3. Be organized

The initial stage is to create content. Its success depends on your ability to handle, arrange, and reuse it. Your content production and management strategy must include selecting tools that uphold these standards.

Tracking and analyzing social media metrics

Understanding how social media metrics work is essential to know which areas need improvement. It has several advantages:

1. Competitor’s insight

What you can do to improve your marketing strategies is to check how your competitors execute theirs. Tracking their online performance will help you gain insights into your process. You’ll get to incorporate techniques that may work for your brand too.

2. Understand your audience

Social media metrics can disclose information about users’ preferences for certain types of material, as well as their most frequent online times and topics of conversation. With the help of this knowledge, you can create more timely, high-caliber content.

3. Improve marketing strategy

These metrics can reveal whether you are meeting your marketing goals. Use this to your advantage by adjusting your plan. This fine-tuning can help you create a consistently robust marketing strategy.

Social media management tools for tracking metrics

Monitor how your metrics are doing by using these specialized tools:

* Practina – See if your strategy is heading to your goal with Practina’s social media analyzer. It helps you analyze trends and modify your marketing plan accordingly.

* Sprout Social – This tool covers whether you want to rapidly compare results across numerous networks at once or dig deeply into your performance on a single network.

* Snaplytics – Although specifically for Snapchat and Instagram stories, this platform checks open and completion rates metrics.

While we’re at it, here are the key metrics you must check for your socials:

• Engagement – Your audience’s interaction with your content
• Awareness – How far your brand reaches
• Bounce Rate – Measures the rate of your social media page visitors and leave shortly after
• Followers – The number of people who follow your page
• Page Reach – A metric to measure how many people saw your content during a specific period.

There are still other metrics, but for new businesses, you can start with these.

Tips for effective tracking and analysis:

Check out these tips for effective metrics tracking and analysis:

1. Separate metrics by platform and post:

Monitoring the progress of each metric is much easier if they are all separated accordingly. During reports, it will be easier to know which areas are improving and which are not. 

2. Include monthly comparisons:

Seeing comparisons of monthly growth is an excellent motivation to see if there’s a need to improve your marketing strategies. Make it a habit to include monthly comparisons when you track your metrics.

3. Explain each KPI/metric:

Not everyone will easily understand what each metrics mean. Add an explanation to each metric to better communicate your thoughts about the analytics.

Building and managing a strong social media community

This 2023 Statista report shows the global Facebook demographics that will help you understand the number of daily users that watches different brands on social media:

Having a solid community that follows and supports your brand is an advantage. You can have more leads and possible sales. 

Here, you’ll see the benefits of building and managing a robust social media community:

• Increase brand visibility on your platform.
• Create a welcoming and engaging community.
• Fosters trust. More people will engage since many people trust your brand.
• It promotes more engagement.
• Attracts more followers and earns higher customer retention.

Social media management tools for building a community

Build a robust social media community using these social media management tools:

* NapoleonCat – An excellent community management tool to easily handle online conversations surrounding your brand.

* Keyhole – Gives users access to social mentions across various channels.

* Social Bakers – Has a single social inbox to manage all incoming and outgoing messages and mentions, automation capabilities, analytics, and more.

Tips for effective community building and management

Here are a few tips for having a practical building and managing a community:

1. Always be honest with your community

In the community you’re building, fostering trust among the people is essential. Please do not treat them like any other marketing and sales channel. Build a safe space where they can provide feedback.

2. Encourage the community to converse

Make your brand more visible by encouraging your community to leave reviews and share your product/service with others. You can incentivize it to be more encouraging too.

3. Target the right people

Ensure that the people you surround your brand with are the right target. Otherwise, your marketing efforts will go to waste.

Integrating social media management tools into overall business strategy

While several marketing strategy options are available, social media still holds the most effective way of promoting a brand. Almost everyone has socials and does a lot of things through social media. 

Because people are embracing the digitization of marketing, using free social media management tools has become a norm. You need to know where your target market is, and they are all on social media. 

Social media can produce many leads, but it’s also where all your rivals with similar products are located, along with many other diversions. Using the best social media management tools can ease your marketing strategy as it has everything you need.

Tips for effective integration of social media management tools

Take a look at the different ways to use social media management software effectively for your business:

1. Monitor your activities on your social media accounts

Using a social media management tool, you get to examine your viral footprints across numerous channels. For instance, you may keep track of every conversation and engagement you have with clients while concentrating on creating posts.

Even if you only have a few minutes daily to devote to the overview, you can still gain from it. You can still benefit from shaping your social media marketing efforts to improve your online visibility steadily.

2. Maintain regular publishing

Manual posting can be arduous. You have to do it for every social media account. Using a social media management tool can make things more efficient by scheduling it instead while you focus on managing the accounts.

3. Analyze social media presence on different networks

See how your accounts are performing by using social media management software. It has all the data you need from the metrics you want to measure. You can see which areas need improvements and are presented in the tool.

Datareportal here summarised the importance of social media today and how, through social media management tools, people are now more inclined to use social media.  

Leverage your social media strategy and watch your business grow

Growing the brand takes work for start-ups. You need to learn effective strategies and even check on tools that will work on growing your business. You should check out marketing automation trends 2023 for additional techniques you can use. 

Integrating all these tips and strategies can be a good starting point for the brand. When you know how to use social listening, you will understand better how your product appeals to your community, which makes it just as essential to foster a trusting community within your brand. 

Creating and managing content effectively is a surefire way of gathering leads. Ensure you have the proper resources and an organized process using the right tools. Observe your social media metrics grow when you master creating content and always make a monthly comparison.

All in all, your small business will grow exponentially with the appropriate tools and strategies you use for marketing.