Small-scale businesses are privately owned enterprises with a lower level of employees, relatively low sales volume, and profits from the owner amongst all stakeholders. Such businesses face lower staff turnover compared to well-established corporations. Small businesses are essential because they offer possibilities for enterprises and set up important jobs with greater job contentment than positions with larger, traditional companies.

The social media presence of small-scale businesses refers to their visibility on social media and how it appears to allow businesses to make connections and increase their reach with the community before forming a connection beyond their marketing channel. Most entrepreneurs step into the world of social media, make a strong presence, influence the audience and launch their startups after having powerful social media appearances.

No metrics are associated with social media presence for businesses, but analysts can translate the analysis into good social media presence, positive brand identity, and a high engagement rate.

Small businesses struggle to manage funds and costs, maintain profitability, and increase productivity. Amidst all this struggle an entrepreneur faces, social media plays a vital role in improving the business situation by being the best way for a brand monitoring in its business.

How to build a social media presence?

1. Intelligently use Intelligence (Artificial Intelligence)

Businesses need to be smart and set realistic goals using artificial intelligence, i.e., social media. It is a fast-paced technological world and competition is high. Hence, knowing your target audience, business information, and clarity is necessary.

2. Identify your audience

Research is the most basic and important level of any business to continue entering and trying various levels of markets. Hence, it is mandatory to know your audience and the audience’s demographic factors that attract them.

3. Right platform 

Your audience and media department should know they’re on the right platform to promote your brand. If your product/service is related to youth, platforms like TikTok and Instagram should be the platform to exhibit your business. If your business is technology or finance-related, then the website or LinkedIn promotes your business and social media presence.

4. Consistency is a key factor.

Social media can change your business in 24 hours. It depends on luck, the kind of algorithm you’re following, your business theme, the colors, the intrinsic details, anything that only works when you keep posting: stories, reels, youtube videos, blogs. Something related to your business that hits your audience at the right spot is a trigger. Sooner or later, they buy that product and become your loyal customer. Your online presence should resonate with your audience.

5. A two-way communication.

Many online businesses and businesses with social media presence only post about their business and tend to not cater to any customers by not replying to them. Maintaining a positive social media presence, so your audience knows you are there for them is crucial. If you want your social media audience to become your potential customers, a thank you, solving any query, and replying to their comments should be part of the criteria. A sense of belonging will be created which will help people know bots are not operating your social media and you are putting effort into increasing reach.

6. Research

Small businesses’ main focus should be research before entering the market because they have taken the risk to compete with businesses that offer niche products to customers and have set higher standards. When it comes to social media presence, small-scale businesses should incorporate tools in their research while carrying out intent or sentient analysis and also learn how to evaluate. Search for free tools so business costs don’t rise and affect profitability.

7. Optimize

Use SEO (search engine optimization) to see what key terms are popular amongst various search engines. Optimize your profile frequently, as it is important to update profiles with correct information and continue rebranding. Brand monitoring, updating, and rebranding should be mandated for any business wanting higher growth in social media and increasing social media presence through it.

Growing social media platforms for small businesses

ever since a global pandemic has hit the world (Covid-19) and countries facing constant lockdowns have caused a lot of businesses to face an economic crunch and survive the shortcomings. Statistically, there was a drastic change for small businesses to emerge in the market. Many businesses switched to social media to take orders and deliver to customers. B2C ( businesses to consumers ) and B2B( business to business) have adopted the idea of social media presence to promote their brands and marketize their businesses.

Around 77.6% of small-scale businesses use social media platforms. The most common are Facebook, Reddit, Instagram, and Tiktok. Social media is now a vital aspect of digital promotion, closely tied with the most substantial, if not all – digital campaigns. However, social media is ever-evolving, and what worked a few months ago may not get you the same excellent results. Habits change, platforms grow, and new media comes into existence. It influences how businesses use and react to social media marketing and how marketers can reach their audience using various digital marketing instruments.

Tips to increase social media presence effectively.

• Link your blogs, websites, sites, and portfolios.
• Engage
• Don’t flood your increasing social media presence with pictures
• Frequent but quality-based content
• Limited promotions so that audiences don’t think it is completely sponsored content.
• Market!
• Customer-driven content
• Optimize
• Give-aways lead to an increased following
• Show you work space and staff but with consent.
• Generate buzz
• Join connected groups
• Build your group comprising of your competitors and customers
• Use hashtags
• It should not be political
• Thumbnail SEO optimized
• Convince your audience to notify
• Boost Organic Visibility
• Customer Feedback

Conclusion:

Conclusively, businesses can flourish by adopting these strategies, but integrating other aspects of business is also required. Social media platforms may appeal to the future and grow your social media presence through ways like trending hashtags are increasing on social media platforms, and companies are jumping at hashtags to endorse their products. It can be daunting, but it’s a great opportunity to participate in global conversations and show your brand’s personality.

New believers who may be interested in your business know your name there. Consider presenting yourself to specific viewers using specific popular hashtags, such as #CharityTuesday and #WorldMentalHealthDay.

Be careful not to create hashtags or use the wrong ones. Not only can you not reach the right audience, but it may be a little strange.

With the world evolving at a very fast pace, newly developed approaches are incorporated into the tech world. Similarly, approaches to website designing are also taken into consideration. With that being said, let’s go through the two most widely used approaches:

1) Growth-driven design; and

2) Conversion rate optimization

Then we will compare what generates more revenue for the business by going through their differences.

Growth-driven design

Have you ever thought of what is growth-driven design?

Well, it is a modern approach to website designs. The risks associated with traditional web design are successfully reduced by the growth-driven design (GDD) method, which is effective and efficient for building, developing, and maintaining websites. By using real data and ongoing learning and development, this methodical methodology reduces the launch time. The process of website design and development is made more agile and data-driven.

Through learning and continual development, a website created with GDD develops into a measurable, high-performing website.

Success statistics of the GDD approach

The term “growth-driven website design” (GDD) is new, yet it has so far been successful. It is a more effective and clever way to create and maintain a website, unlike the time-consuming traditional website redesign process, which may take three to five months or even more. But by concentrating on the 20% of the website that generates 80% of the results, GDD is able to deploy more quickly. By creating ongoing changes through the analysis of actual data, testing, and observation, its guiding principles assist in minimizing risks for every project.

For a concrete illustration, we might look at the State of growth-driven design study. That survey claims that websites launched using the GDD approach experienced a 14 percent boost in traffic and a 44 percent increase in leads over the course of six months compared to websites launched using the typical redesign approach. When we analyze the results, these measures amply demonstrate the contribution that GDD can make to enhancing your online visibility as well as achieving your overall business goals.

GDD over the traditional web design process

Growth-driven design approach takes over traditional methods due to the benefits it provides over traditional methods.

Traditional website design processes require more time and large amounts of investment. Even then, the results are unpredictable, and the budget can go more than the estimated cost. In addition to this, this method is entirely based on opinions, and the results are deduced. Whereas GDD terminology is a smarter approach to designing a website, it is quick to launch and improve. The plus point is that the expense of the project is spread over time. With this approach, the project is deployed on time and within the estimated budget. The outcomes are data-driven and encourage monthly maintenance of the product.

Benefits of GDD

Let’s go through the benefits of content-driven design to know about it better.

It is a method that does not consider a website as a finished product that must be 100% operational and fixed as soon as it is put online.

In this alternative and agile approach, marketing, and web design work together to achieve common objectives and rapid growth in results. The site will be built through successive learning that feeds a progressive and continuous development process aimed at engaging interactions with visitors and generating qualified leads as we do in an agile methodology – iterative approach.

The most obvious ones are listed below:

1. Continuous Improvement

The biggest benefit of GDD is the opportunity to continuously improve your website as we do in agile methodology. It enhances your overall marketing and sales strategies, too, by providing invaluable data on what resonates with your target users and which offerings get the most attention. They’re constantly adapting to what the user wants, resulting in better performance.

1. Budget-friendly

GDD is more of a cost-effective approach because it focuses on developing websites that are fit for purpose. You don’t have to pay for the entire website like we usually do in traditional methods. It lets you divide the costs over time and allocate them to areas that have the most impact on business goals.

1. Data-driven

Everything about GDD is data-driven. Every decision and every new feature is built on the data collected by analyzing how users interact with the website and identifying the areas that need improvement.

1. Risks are minimized

When you work with a traditional website design, you carry a lot of risk with the final product. There are hefty costs to the design itself, substantial time requirements, and complicated day-to-day procedures. But because of the iterative nature of this design method, the risks can be minimized.

1. Boosts UX

GDD helps ensure your website is always delivering the best possible user experience, and the statistics show it, by continuously gathering user data and merging it with creativity. An optimized UX design can yield better conversion rates up to 400%.

Now let’s go through our second method, CRO.

Conversion rate optimization

Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is the systematic practice of increasing the percentage of website visitors who perform the desired action on a website. The goal is to convert website visitors to customers. Desired actions can include purchasing a product, clicking ‘add to cart, signing up for a service, filling out a form, becoming customers, or clicking on a link. Understanding how visitors navigate your site, what actions they take, and what keeps them from achieving your goals are part of the CRO process.

Success statistics of CRO approach

Even the smallest difference in your website conversion rate can make a big difference to your bottom line. Your revenue would double if you were to raise your conversion rate from 1% to 2% by one percentage point.

Here are the statistics of the top 5 industries evolving with the use of conversion rate optimization. Legal services raised up to 7.4%, Point of Sale (POS) Services up to 7%, and Staffing Services – by 5.1%. IT Staffing & Services and HVAC Services around 3%.

Benefits of CRO

The benefits of CRO to website conversion and web flow are elaborated below.

1. Get customer insights

You’ll need to have a deep understanding of your customers. The aim is to know who your targeted audience is and what is preventing them from converting. CRO helps you to create conversion-friendly segmentations based on your customer and potential customers’ actions, lifecycle stage, and purchases.

2. Data-driven decision making

You can use CRO to base judgments more on statistics and facts than on feelings. You’ll be able to make better decisions in the future by using A/B tests and analyzing the findings because you’ll have the evidence you need to support your claims. Similar things happen when you use the information from CRO testing to decide what adjustments to make to your website.

3. Lower your cost per acquisition

CRO is all about making it easier for customers to find what they want while also hastening and streamlining the purchasing process. You’ve worked hard to attract visitors to your website; CRO should be a key focus to ensure that more of that traffic turns into paying customers. More customers will come from the same quantity of traffic if the customer experience is improved.

4. Boost your SEO efforts

It is possible to combine CRO and SEO. Google has stated that user behavior is now taken into account when ranking pages as searches become more intelligent. The efforts you put into improving the customer journey will, therefore, not only result in improved conversion rates but may also help your online business rank higher in search engine results, which would increase website traffic.

Difference between growth-driven design and conversion rate optimization

Going through the deep analysis of both GDD and CRO and their benefits. We can conclude that growth-driven design is a way of thinking, and conversion rate optimization is the step-by-step process of putting that thinking into action. Conversion rate optimization is only about optimizing your existing website pages, whereas growth-driven design is only about building new pages onto the website.

The usage of GDD to strategically respond to your consumers’ wants and requirements can surely raise your conversion rate, but there’s much more to this design process than just conversion rate optimization when you comprehend the overall advantages of the growth-driven design. GDD is all about strategy; it’s about ensuring that your website consistently adheres to your long-term objectives to avoid wasting time or resources. You can eventually raise your rate of optimization from conversion by using GDD.