How to Build a Social Media Strategy That Works for Your Small Business

Yes,  social media marketing is required during difficult times for any small business. It enables you to:

• Let potential customers learn about the existence of your products /services
• Gain new leads to your website to convert to sales
• Improve your search engine rankings (if done correctly)

If you’re overwhelmed or don’t know where to start, you’re definitely not alone.

Here are some tips on how to stay focused and build a social media strategy that works for your small business.

1. Set your digital marketing goals

   
   First, understand your audience. Are they millennials, 40+ males, parents or art lovers? If you don’t have this demographic data on hand, take some time to think about who your customers are and what customers you want to attract.
   
   Analyze your current customers and then determine whether your goal is to increase brand awareness, generate leads and sales or increase web traffic for another purpose. It could also be a combination of these goals, so discuss these objectives with your social media professional to ensure you are both on the same page. 
   
   

2. Choose a few social channels to start

   Now choose two channels  to show and share your posts. No need to spread yourself thin across many platforms. This brief guide will give you an overview of the pro’s and con’s of each of the major social media networks. 

Remember to give your posts time to reach your audience, especially if you are pursuing a primarily “organic” (non-paid ad) strategy. It will take multiple posts recurring frequently with engagement to reach an audience. Be patient. It can easily take 3-6 months or longer until you see verifiable results of your social media marketing efforts.

3. Create and curate valuable, engaging content

   
   This is the hard part and where many businesses turn to a social media marketing professional to help. While blogging has long been the go-to method of content creation and distribution for many years, videos are now widely popular and effective on all the major platforms. Short and long non-professionally produced videos continue to dominate the social space across all platforms.
   
   When informing your social media marketing firm about your business,  you should be able to educate them about your businesses target audience by asking these questions to assist your content writer:

What do my customers  want?

What pains or problems are they experiencing?

What are the root causes for those problems?

How does the above make them feel?

How can my products / services help solve those problems?

How will their life improve after solving their problems?

Simply put, your posts and content should help answer the above questions. 

4. Post on a regular, consistent schedule. Then engage with them.

   
   Regardless of the number of postings each week, make sure you are posting consistently so your followers know when to expect them. Your social media professional should be able to use analytics on your accounts to determine the best days and times to reach your specific audience.
   
   It is crucially important to answer comments and share your posts in a timely manner. Engagement is what will help build you a community of followers which you can turn into leads and then customers.
   
   

5. Analyze the results and adjust as necessary

It is a fact that social media marketing is a lot of trial and error, but by following the above advice you should have a better understanding of your social media strategy.

It’s important that you’re able to adapt your strategy as you progress throughout the year. Without continuously analyzing your efforts, you’ll never know how one campaign did over another. This means reviewing your top-performing content and having your social media professional tweak your campaigns accordingly.