Don't let SEO mistakes hinder your business's online success. Download our FREE guide today and unlock the strategies to optimise your visibility and avoid common pitfalls. Take charge and get your guide now!
Social media marketing has become an everyday tool for big and small businesses looking to reach their audience online.
In 2022, there were 4.2 billion active social media users, almost double compared to 2017. The time spent daily by these users on social channels was an average of 2 hours and 25 minutes, enough to learn about and purchase your products.
Social media is the right place to promote your business, given that 71% of small-to-mid-sized businesses are already doing it. In this article, we explore social media marketing strategies for small businesses.
What is Social Media Marketing?
Social media marketing uses social media channels like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, and TikTok to promote products and services, increase website traffic, interact with target audiences, develop awareness and achieve various objectives related to specific audiences.
Social media marketing consists of advertising, engaging with the audience by replying to their comments and messages, publishing content on the social media page and measuring the relevant metrics.
Social media marketing is used intensively by companies of different sizes because it enables them to communicate with their audience where they are and build organic visibility through educational content and meaningful discussions.
Because small businesses don’t have the budgets and resources of big companies to promote their brand and products online, they need to find creative solutions to reach their target audience.
What are the Best Social Media Marketing Strategies?
A social media marketing strategy is essential for your small business’s marketing and advertising efforts, and you need to define and implement one that helps build a reliable brand image. Such a strategy is a remarketing or retargeting strategy that reminds a user interested in your products to buy.
Defining and implementing the best social media marketing strategy means you must:
Understand your target audience
Understanding your target audience enables you to identify what they want, need and seek and how you can deliver them that. Use social media analytics to understand your potential customers and to develop solutions to exceed their expectations.
Define clear objectives
Every process promoting your brand and products must contain clear objectives like increasing brand awareness, conversions or brand reputation. SMART objectives enable you to identify the objectives relevant to you and maintain your drive to achieve them.
Draw a plan
A plan helps you identify the resources, potential challenges and persons in charge of achieving your objectives. Including reviews and internal communication regarding their progress helps adjust to any changes that come along the way.
Research and know your competitors
This research allows you to know their weaknesses and strengths and enables you to improve aspects of your business or brand communication faulty at your competitors. It can also point to opportunities for unexplored topics that your target audience might seek and not find at your competitors.
Conduct an audit of your social media page
If you already have a social media page, check what part of it is most engaging for your audience, whether regular posts, questions about the qualities they search for in a product like yours or giveaways.
Team up with an influencer
Partnering with a social media influencer who shares your brand’s values and genuinely appreciates your products is a highly efficient method to increase the visibility and reputation of your brand, leading to more leads.
Attract a new audience
You can grow your business by exploring new segments of your audience, whether related or opposite to your current one. You must have the boldness and creativity to enter new social media platforms or position your brand in a way that speaks to new audiences.
Create customised communication
Today, customers no longer want to be “statistics” but to be recognised as individuals with particular needs and expectations. You can meet this requirement by communicating with them through channels and in ways that resonate with their personality, needs and desires by email marketing, for example.
Deliver quality content
Nothing can defeat high quality – this applies to products, services and content. By sharing high-quality, relevant and relatable content on your social media page, you build the reputation of a business that provides insightful and engaging content for its established audience and draws new ones.
Focus on SEO
SEO helps attract an organic audience and helps build brand credibility.
To determine the keywords that will help your business rank high in motor engine search results, you need to identify them and include them in all the content on your social media page. SEO can directly impact conversions, so ensure you grant this tool its appropriate importance.
Build a community
The followers of your social media accounts have various backgrounds and come from different countries and cultures, but they all share a common interest: your products or services. To give your brand a “human face”, you must build a community around it by interacting with your audience. Encourage them to answer your surveys to understand their opinions on different topics, address their questions regarding the brand, business or products and publish posts that require more than “yes” or “no” answers.
Building a community is one of the most impactful ways to increase your brand’s awareness, reputation and credibility.
How to Create a Social Media Strategy for Your Small Business?
Choose the right social platforms
To ensure you engage your audience, you must go where they are most present. It makes no sense to have an active presence on Facebook if your potential customers stay more on Linkedin, for example. To see which social platform is right for your business, publish for a determined period regular posts on the ones you think are most relevant for your audience. Based on the results of this experiment, intensify your presence on the platforms where you have the highest audience engagement and focus all your marketing efforts there.
Define your KPIs
Defining Key Performance Indicators is critical for social media marketing strategy for small businesses. With these metrics in place, you will be able to evaluate the impact of your strategies and the growth of your brand.
The most frequent KPIs used to measure the success of social media strategies are:
- Clicks – How many people clicked your posts
- Reach or Impressions -How many people saw the content you posted
- Engagement – How many of the people who saw your post engaged with it
- Comments – How many people commented on your post, and how many were quality comments?
- Saves – How many viewers saved your post to check it later
- Shares or reposts – How many people shared your post
- Followers – How many people start to follow your social media account
- Video views – How many viewers watched the video you posted
- Mentions or tags – How many people mention or tag you in the posts on their page
From these metrics, you can choose the most relevant for you and your marketing objectives.
For example, if your main objective is to increase the perception of your brand on social platforms, quality comments and shares can help you measure the success of your social media marketing strategy and activity.
What Type of Social Media Advertising is Most Effective?
Many types of social media advertising are available, and each has different benefits.
For example:
Pay-per-click (or PPC) ads are targeted;
you pay only when an Internet user clicks through your website. Google provides ads that can be defined to reach specific target audiences based on indicators like keywords typed by users in their searches or information such as age or location.
Display Ads are the most used type of social media ads
They are displayed as sponsored posts or banners on different social media channels, determining user engagement and increasing brand awareness.
Video Ads are often in-stream ads displayed between clips on platforms like YouTube. Although they can be more expensive than other types of social media advertising, they can deliver your message to your target audience with optimum results.
What are the 4 Pillars of Social Media Marketing?
Content
Everything you share on your social media account is content from photos, stories, posts and videos. Creating and delivering engaging and relevant content requires understanding the target audience, planning, defining strategies and implementing them accordingly. Your strategy plan must indicate what and how often you will post on your business social media page. This ensures your audience will revisit the page to check what is new.
Community
A community helps promote engagement and increase your brand awareness. You can choose the platform that fits your purpose and use a business page or a group to build your community. This process entails thorough planning and execution included in a strategy that will specify the creation of the community and its maintenance to ensure reliable growth.
Consistency
Consistency is vital for any social media marketing strategy for small businesses. It involves sharing content regularly and checking it multiple times to engage with the audience that shows interest in what you post. It sometimes entails adding inquiries or providing answers to your followers’ questions.
Conversion
Conversions are the proof that your strategy works. Leads, comments, clicks to your website or shares, and each element of content posted on your page must have a correspondent performance indicator, as this is the best indicator to tell you that you are on the right path.
What are the 5 Key Components of Social Media Advertising?
Strategy
It stipulates what, where, why and how often your business will post on your social media page. It comprises your target audience, objective, platforms where the media campaign will run and the metrics you will use to measure your efforts.
Publishing
It refers to how you create and deliver your content to your target audience, how often you post, the time of day when you post and the publishing and scheduling tools required in this process.
Advertising
Paid or free advertising helps you extend your base of followers, reach new target audiences and increase your customer base, leading to more leads.
Community management
Managing a community built around your brand, products, or business is an endeavour which requires engaging the audience by responding or reacting to comments about your posts and managing messages sent by your followers.
Analytics
Social media analytics entails indicators like views, reach, clicks or mentions designed to determine the effectiveness of your business’s social media campaigns.
When properly implemented, social media marketing is an effective method to drive traffic to your website, increase brand visibility, generate leads and grow your business by creating a powerful presence on social media platforms.
Share this Article
Janet Podham
Janet Podham is the owner of Openbox Marketing Limited. She has a post-graduate diploma from the University of Otago, majoring in Data Science. She has spent two years studying website design and SEO in the Champions Masters Program at the eBusiness Institute in Australia. She loves helping people and knits for local foster children in her spare time.
