The Power of Social Media For Small Businesses
Social media strategist Megan Garmers discusses how to establish a brand presence across your digital platforms, and the best ways to utilise each network.
In this digital age, social media is no longer a luxury, but a necessity. By leveraging these platforms, you have a cost-effective way to reach your target audience, build brand awareness, and engage with brides who want to have you help them with their wedding. Understanding why you need to be on social media platforms and how you can use them to boost your business is critical to driving sales and making your business easier to manage and more successful as the next wave of brides rolls in for 2024 and 2025.
Knowing the differences between the platforms and how you want to utilize them allows for you to create a fluid content strategy. Having the right sales funnel and making sure your 9-grid/3-pillar strategy incorporates your business goals will help to make sure that no matter where someone sees your content, if they stick around or go to your profile, they will be able to naturally be led into the sales funnel if they are your target audience.
If you feel a bit lost on where to start with your 9-grid/3-pillar strategy or your content creation schedule in general, I’d love to help you get started on the right path. Email me for a free workbook to help you create this: hello@thebridalmasterclass.com.
Remember, the key to successful social media marketing is understanding your audience and choosing the platforms that they are most likely to use. You need to use multiple platforms, as most people use more than one platform. For instance, almost every Instagram user uses it alongside other platforms such as Facebook (82.9%), YouTube (75.5%), and TikTok (52.2%). It’s also important to create content that is tailored to each platform’s unique features and audience.
When creating accounts for each of these platforms, make sure you try to use the same account name or handle. This allows for easy tagging and for people to recall your account quickly. Make sure your accounts are business or professional accounts and not your personal ones. It is important to keep your business and personal accounts separate to make sure your business has its own identity.
Let’s dive into the different platforms:
Instagram, with over 1 billion active users, is a visually-driven platform that allows businesses to showcase their products and services in a visually appealing way. This is particularly beneficial for wedding and fashion businesses as they are highly visual.
Instagram’s high levels of user engagement allows for businesses to build strong relationships with their audience. Creating posts that encourage engagement is important. Understanding the right hashtags, captions, post time and post type is key to making it easy for people to engage with you and your business. Reels garner the highest engagement, so taking the time to create a content calendar for these will allow you to best utilize this platform.
With almost 3 billion monthly active users as of April 2023, Facebook has the largest user base of any social media platform. This vast user base gives businesses the potential to reach a large number of potential customers from brides to mothers.
Facebook’s advertising platform allows you to target ads based on a variety of factors, including age, location, interests, and more. This is a great option for announcing sales, new designers and new inventory. With Facebook ads, you can also have your ads show on Instagram.
TikTok
TikTok, with its predominantly younger user base, is an ideal platform for businesses targeting Gen Z and younger millennials who make up most of those getting married. There were 1.4 billion monthly active users in 2022 and is expected to reach 1.8 billion by the end of 2023. Engagement rates are slightly higher for views versus engagement by followers, so it is important that you don’t focus solely on obtaining followers but instead on creating content that people are interested in watching.
TikTok is a platform where trends and viral content are born. Businesses can take advantage of these trends to reach a larger audience. The platform encourages creativity and innovation, allowing businesses to showcase their brand in unique and engaging ways. Thinking of ways to showcase different gowns, designers, silhouettes and fabrics can allow you to do similar types of videos showing different things so you have a template to use more than once. Examples could be:
-wedding dresses as Disney princesses
-wedding dresses side by side (sample sizes and curvy sizes)
-lace wedding dresses
-amazing sleeved wedding dresses
-non-white wedding dresses
-wedding dresses as reality tv show characters
LinkedIn is a great professional networking platform to connect with other businesses and potential employees. It is particularly effective for B2B marketing so if you are looking to find new sales staff, social media managers, seamstresses, and businesses that wholesale different items for your shop.
Generally, you would not want to use LinkedIn to try and target brides as users are not in a personal mindset when on it. They are thinking about business connections, so make sure your profile showcases this instead of showcasing what a bride would want to see.
YouTube
YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world and the largest video platform with 2.5 billion users. Because it is owned by Google, videos on the platform often appear in Google search results. This can help to improve your visibility and search engine optimization (SEO).
When you are creating YouTube content, think about videos longer than a minute for your channel and then 1-2 minute videos that are like your Reels or TikToks for YouTube Shorts. Repurposing your video content is the best way to get the most out of the time you spend recording videos. It is really important to do this natively though, so there is not a watermark from other platforms on your uploaded video. This can be done on 3rd party apps like CapCut, InShot, or Movavi. Then you can use that video and upload it to each platform and create in-app customizations.
I understand how difficult it can be to carve out the time to create a content strategy for each platform. If you would like help with this, let me know if you’d like my free workbook to help outline your content strategy. Email me for more information: hello@thebridalmasterclass.com
Megan Garmers is the founder and director of MG Hair and Makeup, as well as The Bridal Masterclass. With 25+ years’ experience in the beauty industry alongside 20 years in weddings, she now offers her two decades of knowledge in the form of business coaching. Megan also started The Bridal Masterclass Experience to offer online courses for those eager to upgrade their businesses.
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