Sme Research Brief

SME Research Brief

In today’s society, the use of social media is crucial for a business to be successful.  Social media channels offer a way for the business to communicate directly with the consumer.  The majority of businesses today take the use of social media seriously, but there are still businesses that don’t use social media correctly, or as often as they should.  

The SMEs that use social media use it because it offers a cost-effective marketing tool. Social media marketing helps to achieve traditional goals using non-traditional ways, through the use of creativity, community, and relationships instead of using a lot of money to achieve marketing objectives (Prenaj, Burim).  The benefits offered by social media marketing is increased brand exposure, increased targeted traffic, leads generation, which are defined as potential customers or sales prospects, market insights, customer interaction, and marketing effectiveness.  

There are a lot of best practices out there that will help a SME be successful with social media. Small businesses need to set measureable goals that are easier to achieve.  Social media will help build brand awareness, gain new customers, strengthen customer service, and increase engagement (Gregory, Sonia).  It is also helpful to choose the right social media networks.  Social media can be time consuming, so putting the right amount of effort into the social media channel that targets the right consumer will bring more successful results.  

Other best practices would include branding your social media profile pages, which makes it easy for consumers to recognize your business by maintaining consistency. Aside from branding, monitoring social media analytics is also very important.  Taking a look at social media analytics on a weekly basis will give you the data needed to support your goals and objectives (Gregory, Sonia).  

One example of a business that has increased customers by using the best practices is Jarvie Digital Photography.  Jarvie uses exceptional photos on his site and uses them on Facebook and Google+ to create personal engagement and promote his products and services (Mershon, Phil).  Jarvie demonstrates his expertise and generosity to photographers worldwide through sharing resources on his website and through his social sites.

Using social media as a marketing tool can also have challenges.  SMEs need to engage human and time resources to manage their Social Media presence (Prenaj, Burim).  An employee at the company needs to be able to communicate with customers and respond to feedback and complaints daily.  It is important for the employee that is doing this to be highly skilled and trained to respond correctly to the consumer.  For a lot of SMEs, they do not have trained employees doing this, and sometimes the owner of the small business is doing it and they may not be responding correctly.  

Measuring social media return on investment is also a big challenge for SMEs.  The impossibility to measure results of social media marketing disables them to know which channel is the best way to go, and they may implement a useless strategy, losing time and money without a real impact on improving their brand reputation and sales (Prenaj, Burim).

Morgan Zurmond, a social media intern at Rogan’s Shoes, said some of the biggest challenges she faced with social media were responding to customers who wrote bad reviews about Rogan’s Shoes.  Morgan explained that it is hard to find out what exactly went wrong with their visit and then has to find the right way to respond to the negative comment. When coming up with the right response to the unsatisfied customer, she makes sure to ask what they were unsatisfied with and then makes sure to apologize.  Morgan also said it is a challenge to create graphics only using free sites, like canva.com.