How to Create a Social Media Strategy for a Small Business

What is a Social Media Strategy?

Small businesses don’t always have the funds necessary for large-scale marketing campaigns across multiple channels. While big corporations can dominate our screens, the small players must use their reserves wisely if they are to build consumers’ trust and persuade them to make a purchase.

Social media is a fantastic tool for the underdogs of the market.  Not only is it fairly cheap to use, it can also provide highly targeted messaging opportunities, helping you to gain exposure and drive sales. However, it’s vital that a proper social media plan is created, so that you can achieve your goals.

Why Small Businesses Need a Social Media Strategy

The first thing you should know about social media marketing for small business is that strategy comes first. If you dive straight in without one, you’re much less likely to have all the bases covered and ultimately achieve your goals.

Your strategy will help you to define who you want to target and what their interests are. It will also enable you to market to consumers at different stages of the buying cycle. Whether you’re simply trying to make your brand more visible or want to prompt users to take a specific action, your marketing needs to reflect the goal.

Creating a social media plan also means you’re more likely to stick to a schedule. Otherwise you may start out with good intentions, but as work in other areas increases you could find yourself neglecting your social media marketing and losing any benefits you were beginning to gain. A good strategy will also help you to analyse content that you’ve posted, find what’s popular and create more of it.

How Do I Create a Social Media Plan for My Small Business?

The first step to creating a social media plan is identifying your goals. Are you trying to increase your following and engagement? Do you want more people to be aware of your company? Or are you specifically trying to drive sales or newsletter signups? Your goals will help to determine the next steps in your strategy.

It’s not yet time to get cracking. When you set up your business you likely did extensive customer research and identified the kinds of people your products are aimed at. You’ll now need to use this for your social media marketing. What platforms are your audience using? What are their interests? Knowing the answers to these questions will inform the content you create.

Now it’s time to create content. Devise a content calendar that will help you stick to your posting schedule, and leave room in it for creating content, posting, and replying to queries or comments. There are some great tools that enable you to schedule posts, like later, so that you can cover everything for the week in one hit.

Use blogs you’ve written, compelling imagery, polls and more to engage your audience. Then, be sure to go back and analyse the response to each post. This will help you determine what your followers engage with, shaping future content. 

Social Media Help for Small Businesses

If you’re looking for help with your social strategy, get in touch with Bold Marketing today. We offer comprehensive social media marketing services for small businesses and can help you get off on the right foot.