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Social media has made it easier than ever to “market” our business, but it’s important to remember it’s not our only option.

We live in exciting times, with new technologies making it so easy to grow your dream business by providing low-cost and powerful ways to connect with your audience—often without having to leave the comfort of your office or dining table.

No longer do we have to rely on expensive broadcast advertising—nor make those dreaded cold calls. The rise of social media as a marketing solution can also lure the innocent business owner into a trap of relying solely on these platforms to create the vital connections that help them build a healthy business.

Offering a low-cost, highly targeted marketing solution, social media has become a key focus in the majority of today’s business marketing plans, although not without risk. Not only is there potential affect on your productivity, most platforms have sophisticated algorithms designed to maximise their profits and keep you coming back.

Analysing your data to optimise your reach, navigating the latest changes to their ad platform, and creating a gazillion different forms of content to keep up with new algorithm preferences is a full-time job in itself.

So, what should you do instead? Here are few marketing basics that will ensure your business has a strong foundation for growth, no matter what our beloved social media platforms throw at us.

Love your referral network

Word-of-mouth marketing is still the most effective form of marketing there is. Tell everyone you know what you do, even if it’s just a basic outline.

Some of my best referrals have come from personal friends, not just my business network.

Always look after your existing customers. Follow up their enquiries promptly and be kind and courteous when dealing with any challenges that arise. If appropriate, include them in your process of developing new products or services.

Let them know if you can help them with other products or solutions that they are not currently buying from you, and if you would like them to write a testimonial, abandonment of employment give them a helping hand by letting them know what areas you would like them to highlight. In short, love them to bits— it’s much easier to keep an existing customer than find a new one.

Create great content and use it to drive traffic to your website

People buy from brands they know, like and trust. A great way to cover all these bases is to provide your community with useful and relevant content—an answer to their most basic problems, a new way to experience your product, or something that brightens their day. If you’re active on social media marketing, you are probably already doing this.

However, it’s very easy for people to scroll through Instagram liking the pretty pictures, watch a video or live post, or throw in a few comments on Facebook, but it’s fairly low involvement.

If you’re spending all this time and energy creating quality content, you want to get a return on your investment. If you’re not linking your content back to your website, you are missing out on giving people the opportunity to get to know you better, find out what you do, abandonment of employment and more importantly, buy from you!

So whenever possible include a call to action on your posts, whether that be a “read more” link to a blog post on the subject, a button at the end of your video, an invitation to find out more about your product or service, or a promotion for your opt-in offer. You won’t always get a response, but it will be far more likely if you ask.

Own your list

Building your social media following and communicating with them in a closed group is a perfect way to build a strong connection with your audience, but this data doesn’t belong to you—the platform has all the control and you are their product.

So, it’s important to make sure that you regularly invite your followers to join your mailing list, perhaps enticing them with a suitable opt-in freebie, competition or an exclusive offer with a traceable discount code.

Ensure you keep good records of your existing and potential customers, so that you can contact them on your terms. You don’t have to set up a complex Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool, at least not to start with. Often a simple spreadsheet will do, so long as you have the information you need stored where it is easily accessible.

Remember that even if someone agrees to be added to your list, this is not permission to constantly blast him or her with promotional messages. Email marketing is a great way to build trust, abandonment of employment so it needs to be relevant, helpful and considerate of your audience’s time.

We are fortunate today that there are many ways to connect with our audiences. In fact there so many options, they can feel overwhelming. This is often the reason small business owners spend all their marketing energy on only one or two options, but it’s important to not put all your eggs in one basket.