How to Do Social Media Marketing for Small Businesses

As a business owner looking to gain more traffic, make sales and grow your business, learning about social media marketing for small business can get you steps ahead of your competition.

You know why? According to a recent report, more than 91 percent of businesses are currently using social media marketing to drive their goals.

Also, with almost 5 billion users, the social media has set it self as one of the biggest market places where audiences of different kinds across different geographical regions can be reached, virtually.

So as it turns out, if you’re not using social media marketing as part of your marketing strategies, you’re not just missing out, you’re also losing potential customers.

Of course, this should not be happening. That’s why, in the following paragraphs, I’ll be sharing with you the key social media marketing tips for small businesses like yours and how you can use these tips to transform your business…

Get your Goals Right

The first step to do social media marketing for small business is to get your goals right.

Regardless of the potentials you have as a business, without getting your goals sorted clearly, it gets pretty much difficult to build and grow a successful business.

So, find out, what exactly do you want to achieve for your business with your social media marketing plan? Is it to build a brand, drive sales or position your business as a leading brand?

Whatever it is, be sure you’re very clear about your goals from the outset before getting started because your goals will influence your daily activities on social media.

It is also going to set out the parameters with which you’ll use in measuring your success in the long term.

Optimize your Profile

Now that you’ve sorted out your goals, one of the other key steps to do social media marketing for small businesses is to optimize your social media profile for better visibility.

So at this point, you want to get over to your social media profile and give it a touch that reflects the brand you want to project.

If you’re a corporate business brand, try as much as possible to separate your business brand from your personal brand, unless you’re both the person and the business. This is important.

As a business, instead of creating a personal profile on social media, create a business page. This sets your business apart from your person.

After that, get over and fix your social media profile display pictures and other images. Instead of using stock photos, go for branded pictures that represent your business.

Be sure you set up your business description in a captivating way, listing out your product or services as expected.

Add up your contact details as indicated in your branding materials, including your website URL and email address. This will help customers to reach you more easily.

Some social media platforms like Instagram, LinkedIn etc. allows you to optimize your profile with target keywords or hashtags frequently used by your target audience. Be sure you add this as part of your optimizations so your social media can be easily visible.

Done well, social media optimization can attract a bigger visibility and a more intent driven audience for your brand.

Choose your Audience

As far as social media marketing for small businesses is concerned, you don’t need any kind of audience, but audiences that can help you actualize your social media goals.

Considering that there are diverse kinds of audiences on each of the social media marketing platforms, you have to carefully select a social media platform with an audience that is interested in your brand and the kind of content you share.

Since you’re new and might not be too sure about the audience that can work for you, you can check up your competitors to find out what’s working for them.

This will give you a head start as you get set to handpick your audience.

It’ll guide you on the kind of audience you need, the content that works for them and the best way to reach them with your content.

Now, while trying to choose your audience and grow your followers, be wary of buying fake likes and followers. While these might temporarily give you some social clout, in the long run, it might not give you the needed returns on investment.

In this post, I have written a simple guide that can help you identify and grow your audience here.

Create a Content Strategy

As you step out to do social media marketing for small business, keep in mind that this kind of marketing is not complete without a content strategy.

In fact, content strategy is at the heart of marketing. So, you need a robust content strategy to drive your goals.

Now, the good thing is that you already have a goal set out in step one above and you also have identified your audience clearly.

Therefore, your next step is to find out based on your goals and your audience, the kind of content that will be great for your audience while still being able to deliver your outcomes.

Again, if this is too hard for you as a starter, get over and find out what your competition is doing. You don’t have to copy exactly what they are doing but they can actually give you clues on what works.

With this knowledge, build your own content strategy clearly. Identify the kind of content that matters to your audience and the kind that will attract your outcomes.

Find out the preferred content form that will work for your audience between text, video, audio and others, including the length and the preferred posting time.

PS: You don’t have to get your content strategy right at the first shot. Time and experience will shape your strategy as the more you create content and add more followers, you will get to understand what really works for your own audience and what you have to discard.

Share & Promote

Social media marketing for small business is an aspect of digital marketing that thrives on shares and promotion for widespread publicity.

The more people get to see your social media handles and content, the more they can interact, like, share or even patronize your business.

But this cannot be achieved by mere creation of a strategy or posting of content.

To make the most out of social media you need in place, beyond posting on social media, you need a robust promotion strategy if you plan to reap of the benefits of a widespread publicity for your posts.

Starting with organic promotion, do not only post on your page, share and distribute your social media posts on other groups and sub groups on your chosen social media platform, with a sizeable number of your target audience.

Engage with other people’s posts while encouraging them to do same with yours.

Collaborate and partner with other brands that complements yours or other thought leaders whose audience might benefit from your content.

Try Paid Promotions

One of the easiest ways to do social media marketing for small business and get almost instant result is by using paid promotions.

Paid promotion enables you to drive faster visibility, reach and often times, returns on investment for your marketing effort faster than organic promotion.

For businesses starting out without a decent audience, you can consider using the paid promotion option to build your visibility from the ground up, especially in the early days.

As your traffic and visibility continues to grow, you can then switch to organic promotion entirely.

And of course on the contrary, you can also run both organic and paid promotion concurrently, if you have the funds to do so.

I have written a detailed guide on how to promote your content in this article here.

Evaluate at Intervals

Building a robust social media marketing for small business is not a sprint, it’s a marathon so, to make impactful growth, there’s need to measure your effectiveness from time to time.

At certain intervals, identify the things you’ve achieved with your marketing strategy, and the ones you couldn’t achieve then find out the factors that were responsible for both.

Doing this gives you insights on where to make adjustments on your social media marketing plan where necessary and what to add or take out, in order to drive better results.

Additionally, in times where there are changes in your goals and expected business outcomes, you have to evaluate your social media strategy and adjust it accordingly, to reflect your new goals.

Conclusion

In a nutshell, building a strong social media marketing for small business is a journey that can take you a number of years to finally get a full grasp around but it’s completely worth it. And this journey will be completed much faster, if you can use the above steps as your guide.

Always keep in mind that even though you definitely need a social media platform to grow your business, you do not have to be on all the top social media platforms.

Focus on identifying and using only on the key platforms that drive the most growth for your business.

Also, while growing your platform on social media, avoid strategies that can get your accounts barred or deactivated. As much as possible, study and understand the posting policies of the platform you’re using before jumping on it.

At the end of the day, it is a proven fact that social media can transform your business. And you can achieve even better social media driven outcomes, if you book a session with our social media management experts here.

Finally, to get better equipped to drive consistent and improved results for your business using the social media, you can sign up for our social media marketing course here.

Now, it’s your turn! What’s your biggest social media marketing turn off? Drop your comments below.