Growing your business in 2016 won’t be a walk in the park. After all, more and more businesses are popping out literally every second. Make that 3 startups born every second!

Competition will surely be stiffer this year. You’re going to have to exert a lot more effort just to get noticed by potential customers.

It’s going to be an uphill climb just to increase foot traffic to your restaurant. After all, what’s stopping your target customer from checking out your competitor’s profile on Zomato (for restaurants) and choosing them instead?

But today, we’ll do our best to help you learn how you can beat out your competition and drive more sales with ZERO marketing budget.

Yes, you read that right! We’ll be teaching you tips and tricks to boost your sales this 2016 without having to spend a dime on ads.

Let’s begin!

Social Media Marketing

What You Need: 

• Facebook, Instagram, Twitter Account
• Time
• Canva account (it’s free!)

How it Works:

Assuming you already have an account on these social media platforms, (if not, go ahead and make one now!), the first thing you have to do is optimize your profile.

Fill in the important details such as company info, a short bio, Operating Hours (for Facebook), and a link to your website.

Here’s a look at well-optimized Social Media pages of restaurants in the Philippines:

Niner Ichi Nana’s Facebook page has everything filled up right: Profile Picture, Cover Photo, Contact Number, and official website.

Consumers nowadays want to know EVERYTHING about what you offer before they buy, so it’s best to have a link to your website so your potential customer can view your menu beforehand and get a better feel of what you have to offer.

It also helps that they know your operating hours and contact details.

Here’s a look at Chili’s Philippines Instagram Account:

Nice looking posts, and as you can see up top, they have a link back to their website.

On Instagram, the Bio / Profile Description is the only place where you can place a link, so it’s a must to have a link back to your website in that section.

Once you’ve fixed up your Social Media Accounts, you can now post updates, and engage with your followers.

It doesn’t matter if you have 30 followers or 30,000; answering questions and providing valuable updates to your followers will go a long way.

Make sure you are posting good quality content on your Social Media pages. Invest on creating nice visuals as it has been proven that posts with images convert higher on Social Media than ones without. Humans are naturally visual creatures, so take advantage of that.

But of course, we did tell you at the start of this post that this guide will allow you to grow your business in 2016 without having to spend. Yet producing great social media posts with nice visuals will require hiring a Graphic Designer…

Not quite!

Thanks to Canva, you don’t need elite photoshop skills or a Graphic Designer on your payroll to produce high quality and visually appealing images.

As you can see in the image above, there are lots of free templates to choose from. You can also upload your own image, and add your own caption with tons of fonts to choose from.

Here’s me adding a caption to an image I uploaded. It’s simple and easy, you can do it in less than 5 minutes!

And the best part is that all of that is 100% FREE. Canva does offer a paid business version if you want to take things up a notch, so do check out their website for more details.

Now that you have your Social Media Accounts ready, and an awesome tool to do your visuals, now what?

Next step would be to post consistently, and keep growing your following. A good way to do this is to cross-promote your other Social Media profiles.

Here’s how Philippine fashion retail giant Penshoppe does it:

On Facebook:

and Twitter:

The brand is consistently cross-promoting their Social Media profiles which allows them to target and market to different kind of consumers. Do the same and you will be able to grow your fanbase faster.

Pro-Tip: Eventually, as you continue to post, you’ll be able to see when your customers are most active on Social Media. By using Facebook and Twitter’s in-house analytics system and your own experiments and tests, you’ll be able to maximize the reach of your posts even without spending on Social Media ads!

What’s the ROI?

So what’s the ROI of Social Media Marketing?

While there’s no concrete answer to that, it’s not a secret that consumers love to do background checks before they even spend a single peso on your product.

This means that interested customers will be checking your website, Facebook, Instagram, and maybe even your Twitter account. And whatever impression they get from your online presence will dictate whether they want to buy from you.

So you may not be able to circle in a concrete number in terms of ROI, but social media marketing is crucial to growing your business.

You can literally gain customers or lose them just because of your online / social media presence. 

By taking these important measures, you can grow your restaurant or retail business in the Philippines this 2016 easily. Now start opening your accounts and get to work! 🙂

P.S. Watch out for our upcoming post on how you can use Zomato to market and drive customers to your restaurant in the Philippines.