Social Media Marketing for Small Businesses: What Should You Know?

Social media has become the new playground for businesses to reach all demographics.

It is an excellent way to attract new customers and engage with current as well as prospective customers.

The best part? — It offers free access to a massive audience (over 4.26 billion to be exact!) of potential customers for any service and/or product.

Furthermore, social media also provides target capability with a wide reach and high scalability at a far lower cost compared to other marketing channels.

If you’re a small business owner looking for ways to get your company in the eyes of your potential customers, you must consider small business SEO and social media marketing. In this guide, we have shared everything you need to know about social media marketing for small businesses to start attracting new customers and growing your business.

What is Social Media Marketing?

Social media has been ingrained deeply into our daily lives.

According to Global Web Index, the average internet user today has more than 5 social media accounts that they access almost on a daily basis.

While the primary intent of most social media platforms was to help people connect with each other and share their life moments with their followers.

Today, however, all social media platforms have evolved into digital marketing tools for businesses to expand their reach in the market.

As per AdWeek’s latest report, 91% of businesses (both big & small) utilise at least two social media platforms to reach and communicate with their existing customers and attract prospective customers.

The primary reason for this is because social media marketing provides businesses with an inexpensive & effective way to reach their target audience.

If you’re still not convinced, read on to learn more about how to start social media marketing for a small business to target and engage with new customers and grow your business.

Why Use Social Media Marketing for Your Small Business?

Social media marketing not only helps to attract prospective customers and engage with new & existing ones. But beyond that, social media marketing also helps to build brand awareness, increase website traffic, and boost sales.

Let’s discuss each of these benefits of social media marketing for a small business in more detail.

Brand Awareness

Social media platforms have become the go-to place for every business to reach and attract prospective customers.

Nowadays, people not only connect with brands they know on social media, but they also discover new brands’ products on various social media platforms.

According to the official Instagram report, 83% of Instagram users discover new products on the social media platform.

Not only that but when Stillhouse Spirits, an American Drink Company, ran a social media marketing campaign on Facebook to boost brand awareness, it achieved a whopping 17-point lift in ad recall.

Building Trust with your Audience

One of the most significant benefits of social media marketing is it allows you to be authentic & gives you the ability to create real human connections.

Since authenticity helps to build trust in general, social media platforms are indeed the best place to get real with your prospective customers.

The good news is that there are several ways to build trust among your target audience.

For starters, you can consider showing:

• How your small business is embracing its brand values.
• How your product(s) works in real life.
• How your existing customers are benefiting from your products.

You can even consider introducing your current followers to people who work at your company and show how they put the interests of their customers first.

Increase Website Traffic

Social media platforms are a great place to drive traffic to your small business website.

For instance, you can simply share highlights of your latest blog post on your social media profiles & get readers to your website as soon as you hit the Publish button.

Besides that, you can even consider participating in social chats regularly to showcase your expertise, get the attention of your prospective customers, and ultimately encourage them to visit your website.

visit your website. Just make sure that all your social media accounts have a link to your website so that people who want to learn more about your small business can do so by clicking on your website link.

Lead Generation

Lead generation is another great benefit of social media marketing for small businesses. Many social media platforms even have ad formats that are specifically designed to help collect leads.

Recently, McCarthy and Stone, a Home Construction Company, ran a lead generation campaign using Facebook ads to educate their prospective customers about their real-estate project.

The ads ended up generating more than 4 times more sales leads than the previous year and cost 2 times lower compared to the traditional real-estate lead generation ads.

Boost Sales

Social media platforms are becoming an increasingly crucial part of the sales funnel for small businesses as the number of social media users continues to grow.

Through social selling, businesses, both big and small, are actively leveraging social media platforms to connect with prospective customers, build a relationship with them, and engage with potential sales leads.

SoKind, a Natural Skin-Care Company, is a perfect example of this. By outlining how their products solve skin problems for new moms on their Facebook Page, they’re successfully attracting their potential customers and boosting their sales.

Now, if you’re wondering how you can enjoy all of these benefits for your small business or not, we’ve got that part covered as well.

After trying and testing dozens of social media tactics, we’ve finally figured out the best social media marketing tips to help small businesses succeed on social media. And we’ve shared that information right below!

Social Media Marketing Tips for Small Businesses

Even if you are currently implementing SEO best practices for your small business, here are the top 11 social media marketing tips for small businesses you need to consider implementing to grow your business.

1. Choose the Right Platforms for your Business

When it comes to social media marketing, most small business owners make the mistake of assuming on which social media platforms their target audience spends most of their time.

For instance, they believe that if their primary target audience is Gen Z, TikTok and Instagram are probably the right social media platforms for them. But according to research, almost a quarter of Facebook users are actually Gen Z.

Similarly, if your target audience is baby boomers, you might neglect social media marketing entirely. But again, Facebook and Pinterest are actually highly used social media platforms among baby boomers as per the same research.

The point here is that instead of making assumptions about where your target audience spends time on social media, you should take advantage of demographics information compiled by HootSuite & identify on which social media platform your target audience spends their time.

Doing so will help you to choose the right social media platforms for your small business and increase the chances of expanding your reach, increasing website traffic, and generating quality leads from social networks.

2. Identify your Target Audience on Social

One of the reasons why social media marketing for small businesses is so incredibly effective is because it lets you micro-target your prospective customers. But in order to do that, you need to identify who your target audience is.

To identify your target audience, you can start by compiling information about your existing customers. Later, you can consider digging a little deeper using social media analytics. Doing so will help to understand who’s buying your product and interacting with your brand on social media.

And once you’ve identified your target audience, the next step is to create buyer personas & figure out different ways to start a conversation with them.

3. Create a Content Calendar

Planning is an essential part of a successful social media marketing strategy. If you don’t take the time to plan your social media content in advance, you’ll soon end up struggling to come up with new content ideas to share on your social media profiles.

This is especially true because sharing thoughtful, engaging, and quality content on social media is actually key to engaging with your current customers and attracting new ones.

So, it is critical to create a content calendar if you really want to succeed at social media marketing for your small business.

If you’re not sure how to create a content calendar for social media, we’ve good news for you. Creating a content calendar for any social media platform boils down to following the five simple steps:

• Identify your target audience and the social media platforms they spend their time on
• Figure out what content resonates best with your target audience
• Decide how often you’ll post on each selected social media platform
• Create meaningful & engaging content to post on each social media platform
• Fill your content calendar using any social publishing tool

4. Engage to Build Relationships

Engaging with your target audience on social media platforms is extremely important.

According to a HubSpot study, 71% of consumers are more likely to purchase from a brand after they had a positive experience on social media.

So, if you’re not reaching out to your current and prospective customers to answer their questions in a timely manner, you’re not going to be able to build a meaningful relationship with them.

5. Leverage Optimal Timing to Post Content

We’ve often been asked what time is best to post content on social media platforms and the answer always remains the same. — It depends on many different factors.

Sure, there are research studies suggesting the best times to post on each social network. But because these studies are highly popular, more businesses start to post their content at those times. Eventually, the feeds of your potential customers start to get flooded at those times and before you know it, they’re no longer the best times to post content on social media.

To overcome this, we recommend figuring out the optimal post times for your own small business. To do this, you can start by studying the time you receive most messages on your social profiles from current and/or prospective customers. You can even check the Analytics to see when your posts get the best engagement.

The point is that if you want to get maximum results for each social media content, you have to figure out the optimal timings for each social media platform you’re using.

6. Keep a Tab on Latest Trends

If you want to succeed at social media marketing, it is a good idea to keep a tab on the latest social media trends. It tells you what is currently popular among social media users and gives you an idea to create content that resonates with them.

State Farm, an Insurance Company, did this perfectly well.

When the COVID-19 Pandemic hit worldwide, travel immediately changed from a global affair to a local experience. As a result, road trips became a hot topic all around the world.

State Farm immediately banked on this opportunity by launching a Pinterest campaign about road trips and how the company can help to protect its customers in such uncertain times.

7. Use Effective Hashtags

Hashtags are supremely important for social media marketing. They can help to increase your audience reach significantly by making it easier to find content with a specific theme easily. Furthermore, they can even help to encourage customers to Tweet when they normally wouldn’t.

If you haven’t used hashtags before, you can consider using the Hashtag Holidays Calendar to get started. It’s a free resource that tells you about all the upcoming holidays such as World Entrepreneur Day, Mother’s Day, etc.

Besides, hashtags also make it easier to cut through the digital noise and be seen by your potential customers. All you need to do is figure out which hashtags your target audience usually searches for on social media, and start using them in your future social media posts.

8. Design Eye-catching Visuals

Gone are the days when posting a mere text update on social media was enough to get noticed by your target audience.

Nowadays, if you want to generate the highest level of engagement and build a strong brand on social media, you have to design eye-catching visuals to go along with your social media posts.

The main reason why visuals are key to social media marketing success is that people on social media tend to engage more with visual content than just simple lines of text.

For example, Facebook posts with images tend to generate 2.3 times more engagement than posts without images. A recent study also found that tweets with visuals tend to receive 18% more clicks & 150% more retweets than tweets without visuals.

These statistics clearly show that designing eye-catching visuals such as images, infographics, GIFs, etc. can increase engagement on your social media post tremendously.

9. Utilise the Power of Video Content

Social media is continually changing the way people interact and consume information. And as we just learned, visual content can generate more engagement compared to text-only content. And that includes video content as well.

In fact, video content has become incredibly powerful when it comes to appealing to and engaging the target audiences on social media platforms.

According to a 2019 report, the average Gen Z consumer spends more than 3 hours every day watching videos on social media.

This has led as many as 85% of businesses to start using video content regularly as their primary marketing tool.

If you are looking to increase engagement, drive traffic to your website, and grow your business through social media marketing, you must consider posting video content on a regular basis.

10. Use Social Media Marketing Tools

If you want to make the most of your social media marketing efforts, then you ought to leverage social media tools that simplify or automate the majority of your work.

There are plenty of social media marketing tools out there that can help to boost your productivity by automating certain tasks on your behalf.

HootSuite, for example, can not only help to plan your social media calendar but can also help to centralise all messages and mentions your small business receives in a single dashboard.

11. Combine Paid Social with Organic

If you’re not getting the impressions, views, and engagement you hope for your social media marketing efforts, you can always stir up by putting up a few dollars to give your social media posts a boost.

Following are the types of social ad content you can consider posting if you’re not sure what kind of content generates the most engagement on social media.

By combining any of these social ad content with your regular organic posts, you can instantly generate hundreds of new impressions, reach your target audience, and achieve your end goals.

Get Social

Now that you know how to use social media marketing for your small business, it’s time to start putting the above tips immediately into action.

If you don’t have prior experience in social media marketing for a small business, it might take some time to generate your desired results. But if you remain committed to applying these tips in your social media marketing strategy, you’ll definitely conquer social media marketing.

On the flip side, if you’re looking to generate results fast, you can always partner with a digital agency and achieve your social media goals a lot faster.