How to develop a social media marketing strategy for your small business

Having a social media presence for your business has become the benchmark for success for almost all businesses nowadays. Previously, most business operations were done on companies’ websites and other relevant channels.

The emergence of social media has gradually changed how businesses interacted with their customers and vice versa. In fact, most small businesses these days are only present on social media, with no physical locations or company websites to their name.

For your business to succeed online, you need a robust social media marketing strategy that compliments your overall digital marketing strategy. It spells out all that you want to achieve with social media for your business.

In today’s guide, we will be looking at how to develop a social media marketing strategy for your small business.

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What is social media marketing?

Social media marketing is the process of using social media channels to build awareness, increase customer loyalty, and promote your business’s products or services.

Some of the benefits of social media marketing for your business include;

Building brand awareness
Attracting new buyers
Allows a 1:1 communication with customers
Powerful for advertising and reporting
Social media marketing allows brands to listen and join customer conversations on the platform.

What is a social media marketing strategy?

A social media marketing strategy is a document that outlines your business’s overall social media goals, the social media channels you will use, the team, and key metrics that will be used to track progress on social media.

In summary, a social media marketing strategy is a blueprint or a master planning document that contains how your business is going to succeed on social media.

How to create a social media marketing strategy for your Business

1. Set your Goals

What do you want to achieve with social media for your business? Are you trying to increase sales, keep an engaged audience for your business or reduce customer phone-ins by the adoption of social media?

Setting Goals at the beginning will help you set targets for what you want to achieve with social media for your business. Each of your goals needs to be SMART – Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bound.

2. Define your audience

What are the pressing needs of your followers and customers? How do you know which content to create on social media that will delight them?

By defining your audience, you need to create buyer personas that will help you determine who your ideal customer is, what content mix they want, or what social channels they prefer.

Defining your audience allows you to also create stunning social media advertisements that target the needs of your ideal customers. Here are some key information you need to learn about your followers:

Age & Gender
Location
What social media channels do they use often
Interests
Occupation
Income

3. Choose your social channels

There are a lot of things to consider when it comes to choosing the right social media platform for your business.

For small businesses, tackling all available social media platforms may not be ideal as compared to large organizations. It is okay to begin little and map out what you want to achieve with each platform.

For example, a small cosmetic brand may choose to use Pinterest solely for creating awareness by sharing pins of its product catalogs whiles using its Facebook page for product promotions and advertisement purposes.

On the other hand, a large-scale technology company may choose to use LinkedIn to support its HR department in promoting company culture whiles using Twitter to respond to customer queries.

4. Track and measure performances

Setting social media goals alone is not enough. You need to set up KPIs that will keep you on track and take your assumptions off vanity metrics like shares, follower counts, retweets, or impressions.

Meanwhile, if your goal is to create awareness you may want to focus on metrics like reach, page views, followers, shares, etc.

You can also focus on conversion-related KPIs such as Return on Investments(ROIs), customer ratings, website link clicks, direct sales from social media, etc.

NB: Vanity metrics are surface-level metrics made up of numbers or statistics that seem great when viewed in a presentation but don’t correlate to business success.

5. Review and Adjust tactics

Your business’s social media success won’t happen overnight. Make sure to set clear achievable goals to begin. Also, be checking your insights & analytics periodically to see what works and what does not. Keep trying out different content, different times, different messages, etc to see which tactics work best for your brand.

Wrapping Up

Social media marketing is a great way to build loyalty, attract new customers, and help you shape conversations around your business and more.

However, you may not have a working strategy that keeps you aligned with everything you are doing or whatever you want to achieve with social media. By following the above steps, you can come out with a master plan for your to achieve your business’s goals using social media.