Top Social Media Strategies Small Businesses Have to Try

Running a new or small business can be challenging for several reasons. Budgets are tight, margins are low and your customer base is limited and temperamental. For most small businesses, marketing budgets are absolutely minimal, and any kind of brand reach needs to be carefully curated and managed.

Social media has, over the last decade or so, mitigated the risks and high costs that come with marketing. It has offered a simpler, effective way of reaching out to audiences that you might not have been able to reach before. You can also manage and decide on the budgets and spend for each platform and campaign, keeping full control of marketing in your hands.

With this in mind, we took a look at the top strategies that you can start implementing today. We unpacked key tips and techniques that you can follow to expand your digital footprint and scale your business.

Put A Budget On Social Content

Social media, when used correctly, can help you grow your business swiftly and efficiently. You just need to know what to do and how to do it. Getting the right content out is critical, especially to attract the right audience, drive them to your site and convert them to paying customers. The next step will then be to put some money behind the campaigns and posts to reach extended, targeted audiences.

Setting the right budget and getting the right campaigns together can be tricky, especially for new users. Consider bringing on a Facebook ads agency to assist you with the paid ads. Not only is Facebook constantly changing the rules and algorithms, but your audience is continuously evolving too.

Not only will they be able to find and target specific audiences, but they will design the right content and create to appeal to that audience. Once a budget has been set for the various campaigns, they can assist in monitoring and testing the ads to determine what is effective and what needs to be removed in order for you to not waste money.

Build Communities on Instagram

Instagram is a great platform to build up organic and engaged followers, provide them with great content and direct them back to your site. The trick is to keep them interested and engaged at all times. So, constant, high-quality content is absolutely necessary.

Instagram offers several ways of creating and posting informative and entertaining content. You can post attractive, educational marketing campaigns, add a shop function into posts and upload stories to personalize your brand with your customers. Many brands globally include their customers’ stories or content into their stories, driving an even deeper connection with the customer and building up and expanding their communities.

There is also a new Instagram DM API, in which you and your team are able to manage all of the DMs coming to the account. In the past, you were just able to answer comments on the posts from the various management platforms, but now, you are able to offer a more personalized service to your customers and followers.

Invest in Affiliate Programs

The next thing to look into is by getting your brand out via partners and affiliates. Take a look at influencer campaigns. Now, we don’t mean bringing on Kylie Jenner or a multi-million dollar celebrity to partner with you. Micro-influencers are a highly effective strategy to reach their specific target audiences and expand the reach of the combined content to new, very segmented and targeted audiences.

Look for influencers who are already invested, and possibly experts in your field. So, say, for example, you are an organic food retailer. Reach out to local well-known chefs and partner with them on educational and informative content which promotes both brands.

Not only are you able to control the budget, but you will know that the audience that you are reaching out to is your direct target audience and that any traffic that you will receive are qualified leads.

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Constantly Monitor and Measure Your Campaign’s Successes

The last strategy that we want to touch on is an absolute must for every single business and every single post and campaign. By keeping an eye on how each ad and post performed, you can keep a firm grip on the budget, re-align the strategy for future campaigns and have an insight into what works and what doesn’t work for your audience.

All social platforms provide you with a panel of metrics and reports to track what happened with each post. You can track the number of impressions, the opens, the clicks and how much traffic was driven to your site by the campaign. This information is real-time and accurate, so if something is simply not working, you are able to kill the ad immediately and reallocate the budget to something that is working.

You can then use this information to plan the rest of your content and marketing strategy for the next few weeks. By duplicating what really worked, you can draw your audience into your brand and create a loyal and engaged community on social media.

Last Thoughts

In wrapping up, social media marketing can be incredibly resource-intensive, but once you have established the basic ground rules, you will be able to create successful strategies and play around with various ideas and methods to reach your targeted audience.

Samantha Acuna: Samantha Acuna is a writer based in San Francisco, CA. Her work has been featured in The Huffington Post, Entrepreneur.com, and Yahoo Small Business.

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