A Practical Guide to Using Social Media for Small Business Marketing

Admin | Posted on April 26, 2021 |

Small businesses are turning to social media to get their voice heard and grow their business. Social media is an invaluable tool for small business marketing, but it can be challenging to know where to start. This blog post will give you the basics of using social media for your small business to increase revenue.

Understand the benefits of using social media

A great social media strategy can help your small business stay ahead of the competition and grow. Social media gives you a way to connect with potential customers, tell them about your products or services, drive traffic to your website (which will increase revenue from online sales) and create partnerships that allow you to collaborate on marketing campaigns together.

To benefit most from this, you need to come up with a social media content plan.

Create a social media marketing plan

The first step in creating a social media marketing plan is to determine which platforms you want your business to use: Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn or YouTube.

Once that’s done, it’s essential to set goals for what you want with social media and how much time you’re willing to spend on the platform every day.

The plan should include:

A social media content calendar that lays out what you’ll share and when, as well as any goals for engagement or traffic (ex. our goal is to publish 50 posts per month)
How often you will post on each platform, and which days of the week this will happen
The types of content that you will create and share. Remember, this needs to be a balance between sales/promotional content and informative content
You will also have to consider the tools that you use to create and publish this content

Identify your target audience and their needs

You need to tailor your social media content and posts to your audience. The more you know about them, the better suited you will be when creating or sharing content on their behalf. This is because it will help you understand the type of content that will resonate well with your audience, resulting in higher engagement.

So, what do you need to know about your target audience?

How old are they? What is their gender and ethnicity (a person’s social identity)?
Which geographic regions do they come from?
Where will the majority of them be on any given day?
Do they have a relationship with your brand or company already?
Are they likely to be interested in your products and services?

All this intel will help you to understand when to post and what to post.

Develop a content strategy that will resonate with your audience

People are social creatures who love to share content.

While it’s tempting to take the easy way out and only post sales messages, this is unlikely to help you build a loyal following of people that care about what your company does or sells. Instead, create quality content with the intent of providing value for them so they will see your business as thought leaders in its field.

Social media is a powerful tool for any company to build awareness and visibility, but it takes consistency to be effective.

To keep up your social momentum, you need to create content that will resonate with your audience on an ongoing basis.

You can then intersperse this informative content with promotional content, but you must appropriately balance the promotional and informational content.

Measure the success of your efforts through analytics tools

You have to have the right tools to help you understand how your content is performing is an integral part of any social media strategy.

There are several Social Media Management tools available to help you publish and importantly measure the success of your social media content.

Effective social media management tools can provide the following features:

schedule your posts in advance so that they automatically go live at a pre-determined time, location or date;
monitor what people are saying about you on social networks and other places online, which will tell you when it is time to act by responding publicly
Allow you to respond to comments and engage with your audience
Provide you with detailed analytics to ensure you can see how your social content is performing

We also highly recommend taking the time to set up Google Analytics, allowing you to track your social media success on an ongoing basis.

You can then use this data and combine it with other marketing techniques to make informed decisions about how best to spend your resources online.

No time? Why not have an agency manage your social media for you?

We hope this guide has been helpful, but if you’re still unsure of how to get started with a successful social media marketing strategy, there is help available. It may be that if you don’t have time or want to leave this to the experts. If this is the case, you could employ a Social Media Agency to manage your social media on your behalf.

Social Media Agencies will know the best platforms to use, how often you should post and what content is most likely to get attention.

A social media agency can take care of everything from creating a strategy for your business to implementing it on all your chosen channels – so you don’t have to worry about anything.

They would also remove the need for you to purchase expensive Social Media Management solutions for you to use.

Here at LS25 Web Design, we offer a range of affordable Social Media Management services. We would love to hear from you if you need someone to help you gain the benefits of an effective social media strategy.