Small and midsized businesses with fewer resources and smaller social marketing teams usually allocate their resources carefully, which likely means focusing on fewer sites with larger audiences. With less overhead for social campaigns, small businesses could be more agile and take more chances. Yet most seem reluctant to take a chance on a non-core social network.
Marketing platform provider Manta polled 1,402 SMB owners about their use of Instagram, and 76 percent responded that they did not use Instagram to market their businesses. This is a major oversight, as Instagram could easily work wonders for small business by catering to the potential niche appeal of their marketing.
A total of 80 percent of those surveyed also indicated that they did not pay for ads or promoted posts on Instagram, and their reasons are quite easily overcome. Also, 39 percent responded that they don?t know how to use Instagram, 33 percent said they don?t use social media to market at all and 21 percent said their customers don?t use Instagram. Other complaints were a perceived lack of value and a shortage of time. One way to address a number of these problems is to look into influencer marketing. Influencers already have the audiences, they know the landscape and they will free up your time. Influencers can provide almost seven times their investment cost in value, and there are many ways to track this return on investment.
Perhaps a more key problem is that 51 percent of small businesses sur...