In today’s world, everyone is a brand. Whether you’re a lifestyle blogger, a fitness influencer, or even an ordinary person trying to make ends meet. The competitive space of the ever-evolving digital arena, demands that one market themselves or be doomed to obscurity. This is especially true for small businesses. The biggest companies in the world started out as a small business. What separates multi-million-dollar corporations from your small business is simply marketing. Marketing comes in many forms but with consumers constantly glued to their screens, social media marketing has become more important than ever. Below are the top ten social media marketing tips for small businesses that will help you turn your small business into a household name.
Tip #1: Understand Your Audience
Before you market your small business, you need to identify, define, and understand your target audience. Your products or services will help you identify your audiences’ demographics, interests, behaviours, and preferred platforms. You can obtain this data through research. One of the most effective forms of research, especially when it comes to understanding your target audience, is researching your competitors. Take the time to analyse which platforms they use, the content they post, and how they engage with their audience. Most importantly, review the data. What kind of content gets the most engagement? And how do they communicate with their audience?
This will simply help you understand your audience better and leverage your understanding of competitors’ strategies to not only keep up with them, but also to provide your audience with a unique experience. Standing out from the crowd is key in marketing. Especially online, because social media users have short attention spans. Through the sea of endless scrolling and swiping, your small business must capture the attention of your target audience within seconds.
Once you understand your target audience, you will be on your way to being able to create tailored, engaging, and relevant content that will resonate with the needs of your audience.
Tip #2: Set Clear Goals and Objectives
When you start putting together your social media marketing strategy for the first time, it can be tempting to want to cast a wide net. However, attempting to reach as many online users as possible will drain the resources of your small business and not be as effective as you might think. Setting clear goals and objectives is a much more sustainable approach to online marketing. This will be the guiding force behind every decision you and your team make to generate more awareness, conversions, and sales. It also serves as an outline for your social media marketing strategy.
SMART goals are a popular and effective goal-setting method. The SMART method is defined by establishing specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound goals. A key factor in goal setting when marketing a small business is being realistic. Realistic goals are easier to meet, boosting morale, and it even gives your small business the opportunity to exceed expectations. It is also important to note that when exceeding the expectations of your goals, to not move the goal post. Celebrate each goal achieved and maintain that consistency throughout your strategy. Do not get caught up in always trying to push the envelope. This is unsustainable, and a surefire way to burn yourself out.
Using spreadsheets to outline your SMART goals is a great way to keep track of deliverables and ensures you and your team are always on the same page. Try setting goals for each quarter of the year and break them down into monthly and weekly goals.
Track engagement rate, follower growth, conversions, and click-through rates consistently to measure the success of your goals and be willing to pivot your social media strategy when necessary.
Tip #3: Choose the Right Platforms
When it comes to social media marketing, choosing the right platforms is key to reaching your audience most effectively. Don’t try to use every platform available in your social media marketing strategy or you risk spreading yourself too thin and taking up valuable resources to develop specific content for every single platform out there.
Instead, monitor competitors, and find out which platforms they use and which platforms they gain the most traction from. Then, select your social media platforms accordingly. These will be the platforms that your target audience is the most active on. After selecting the social media platforms that your small business will have a presence on, keep in mind that you will have to tailor your content to each platform. For instance, short-form video content will work incredibly well on platforms like Instagram or TikTok, but on a platform like LinkedIn, long-form, quality written content is more suitable. You will have to research and analyse each format and its relative user behaviour to be able to create customised content for each platform.
Work smarter, not harder. Several types of content can be repurposed to be distributed on various platforms. For example, you could use your short-film video content and edit it in different ways to suit each platform. By simply changing the video hooks, captions, and hashtags, you can distribute one video on several platforms effectively.
Tip #4: Create Engaging and Consistent Content
In today’s world, attention is currency. Creating engaging and consistent content is important to catch the attention of your audience, and then keeping their attention on your small business. Standing out can be difficult with millions of social media content being posted online each day. This is why before you stand out as a small business on social media, you want to firstly, blend in.
This may sound counterintuitive. Shouldn’t my social media marketing strategy focus on being unique to stand out? Yes, being authentic is more important than ever when it comes to social media. Users are getting tired of the slick, highly edited, and over-curated content online. However, when you first start delving into the space of social media marketing for your small business, you want to start by creating content that is like what gains the most traction online. For example, if you are a company that sells fitness equipment, narrow down the top three hashtags for that niche and plug that into the search bar of one of the social media platforms you intend on using. Take note of which content received the most views and engagement, that should show up at the top of your screen. Based on this research, I would suggest that you create a spreadsheet to serve as a content calendar, detailing what you will post and when. Remember, it is your product or service and your brand identity that is the unique component. When it comes to social media marketing, stick to what works and be flexible and willing to pivot your content strategy as the algorithm changes. Even some of the biggest brands in the world fall flat on social media sometimes, because they fail to adapt their social media strategy to consumer behaviour. Prioritise targeted reach instead of standing out.
Tip #5: Utilise Hashtags and Keywords
To increase the visibility of your posts, it’s important to understand how hashtags and keywords work. Hashtags and keywords are less about helping users find your content and more about helping the algorithm on respective platforms categorise your content and push it to your target audience. Even when users search for your small business or the content you create, you want to make it as easy as possible for them. This is where hashtags and keywords come into play.
Before you even post content online for your small business, you want to give it the best chance possible to link that content back to your profiles. Optimising your social media profiles using relevant keywords will ensure that you are more visible to your target audience when they search for what your small business offers online. Take advantage of the free social media marketing educational resources on YouTube to find out how to optimise your social media profiles for maximum reach.
Once you’ve optimised your social media profiles, you can begin considering the hashtags you will be using in your posts. Avoid using the maximum number of hashtags possible. This can potentially lead algorithms to categorise your content as spam. Instead, use a handful of relevant keywords for each specific piece of content along with popular hashtags within your niche.
Tip #6: Leverage Paid Ads
Once your small business has gained a fair amount of organic growth online, consider leveraging paid ads. Targeted ads can be costly but will ultimately lead to more engagement and sales. However, this will only work if you thoroughly understand your audience. Knowing the location, interests, behaviours, and demographics of your target audience will get you more bang for your buck when it comes to paid ads. For instance, if you’re a local brick and mortar business, you rely more on social media engagement leading to foot traffic to your store. In that situation, it would not make sense to run international targeted ads. You would instead, target your ads locally.
When choosing the content you want to boost using paid ads, don’t select your most recent posts. Instead, select one to three of your top performing organic posts. This will create even more engagement on those posts but, it will also boost the visibility of your other content too, subsequently leading to more followers online.
Social media algorithms consider engagement as importance so when even just one of your social media posts are doing well, the algorithm will naturally push the rest of your content further.
Tip #7: Social Proof and User-Generated Content
Consumers have more options than ever these days when it comes to products and services. Especially considering the large number of scams and biased product reviews online, social media users tend to look to trusted influencers or brands to decide which products or services they invest in. This is why social proof and user-generated content (UGC) is important to build trust and credibility with your audience.
To do this, showcase testimonials online. Testimonials will build the credibility of your small business and boost sales since potential customers are more likely to invest in your product if they see positive feedback from other online users. Testimonials come in different forms: written testimonials, video testimonials, and case studies. Written testimonials can come in the form of customer reviews or online articles and can be shared across your social media platforms. A common way to do this on Instagram specifically is to create a clearly visible highlight reel containing all your written testimonials. Video testimonials can come in the form of video reviews from your consumers. Make sure to engage and share these videos on your own platforms. Lastly, case studies provide more in-depth credibility by showcasing the measurable results and specific problems that your product or service solves.
When promoting testimonials on your social media platforms, ensure that they are genuine, detailed, and address specific concerns or benefits potential customers might have.
UGC refers to any content created by users of your product or services shared publicly on social media platforms. UGC benefits include social proof, content for marketing, and community building. You can encourage UGC by creating a branded hashtag that your customers can use when posting about your product or services, running contests or challenges, and by incorporating UGC into paid ads.
Tip #8: Influencer and Partner Collaborations
Influencer and partner collaborations have become an essential component of any social media strategy. It typically leads to increased brand presence, reach, and fosters community engagement. Before you reach out to an influencer to promote your small business, you must identify what type of influencer is best suited to achieve your goals. There are two types of influencers: micro-influencers and macro-influencers. Micro-influencers have a following that ranges between ten thousand and one hundred thousand. While macro-influencers have a following of over one hundred thousand, it is recommended that you start collaborating with micro-influencers first since they have higher engagement rates and are believed to be more authentic by users. You can execute influencer collaborations through sponsored posts, brand ambassadorships, product giveaways, and affiliate partnerships.
Partner collaborations are like influencer collaborations but, instead, you will be collaborating with other brands or organisations. The idea is that you partner with a brand or organisation within your niche to achieve mutually beneficial goals. Choosing the right business to partner with can amplify your message, enhance your brand reputation, and provide access to new audiences. Types of partner collaborations include co-branding, joint marketing campaigns, and content collaborations. A popular example of a partner collaboration is when two brands come together to create a new product that can be marketed toward each brand’s audience.
Tip #9: Engage With Your Audience
Since social media users and consumers, in general, look to invest in more authentic brands, engaging with your audience has become a fundamental aspect of social media marketing. It is important that you respond to comments on your posts. The comments section of any social media platform is one of the best ways to gauge the perception of your brand and by responding to as many relevant comments as possible, you can manage or even change that perception. Prioritise comments by users who have concerns, critiques, or even bad reviews of your product or services. This will show your audience and potential customers that you care about what you provide and are willing to make changes to increase customer satisfaction. It will also show that you believe in the brand of your small business which can be a contagious attitude, helping your audience believe in it too.
Another way brands have started engaging with their audience is through viral videos online. Large brands have started commenting on viral social media posts in a tongue-in-cheek fashion as if they were simply another user. This is a fun and easy way to increase brand visibility and awareness. This type of audience engagement is more commonly found on TikTok. With brands posting funny comments on viral videos. However, don’t attempt to do this unless, or until, you have a good grasp on online lingo. Otherwise, you risk your brand coming off as inauthentic, desperate, or worse: cringe.
Tip #10: Keep Up With Trends
It’s no secret that trends are what makes the social media world go round. These trends come and go at an extremely fast pace. This is why it’s important to consistently monitor social media for emerging trends. Incorporating trends into your social media marketing strategy will come in the form of creating or repurposing content around whichever trend is popular at any given time. Participating in trends does not always have to contain content that ties into or promotes your brand. It is even more effective if your small business participates in a trend as if you were an ordinary social media user. The digital space has become heavily commodified, with advertisements at every corner. Users have developed an extremely keen eye for brand advertisements posing as regular content. That’s why it’s important to keep in mind that when participating in trends, your small business should do so in earnest. It’s a way for consumers to see that you’re not just another money-hungry corporation. A great example of this is the “Grimace Shake” trend. This was a trend that was sparked by the release of McDonald’s Grimace shake to celebrate the birthday of one of the brand’s mascots. The drink quickly went viral as it was a limited time product, but a funny trend emerged from it too. The trend was to create a short video starting with what would seem like a genuine review of the drink but after taking a sip, the video would cut to the user on the ground with the drink spilled everywhere as if they were poisoned. Celebrities and brands hopped on the trend after it gained popularity and created viral videos. Avoid hopping on a trend too early or too late. Participate in a trend during the height of its popularity for maximum engagement.
In conclusion, social media has become an essential tool to not only sustain a small business, but also grow it into a large organisation. A good social media marketing strategy is one that is well researched, proactive, and flexible. Understanding and growing with your audience will always be the foundation of successful social media marketing. If you always remember that attention and authenticity are the currency of the digital world, your small business will be led to money in the real one.
