Social Media Marketing for Small Businesses

Around 83% of the UK population and 64% of the world’s population uses some form of social media, in terms of numbers, that equates to around 56 million active social media users just in the UK, all ready and waiting to be engaged with. But how effective is social media marketing for small businesses?

Social platforms can help get your local business seen and harness untapped audiences. With the rise in social media as a search engine, not being social could be costing you precious footfall and website traffic. However, when it comes to social media for small business, preparation is key. Our guide to social media marketing for small businesses takes you through all of the key steps to creating a winning social media marketing strategy, social media advertising and social media costs for small businesses.

What Are the Benefits of Social Media Marketing for Small Businesses?

When starting out with social media for business, you may be wondering, how important is social media marketing for small businesses? The answer is, very. Brands and businesses without any social media presence in this day and age run the risk of questioned legitimacy and getting lost in the non-digital void.

Social media presence and advertising can be even more important for local businesses who depend on footfall in a physical shopfront. Platforms such as Instagram or Facebook for business can help you show up better in local searches and connect with customers who are close to your location. For businesses who sell online, social media advertising can help drive traffic to your online storefront with even organic social media strategy for small businesses, effectively free promotion, leading to an increase in potential customers both in-person and online.

Social media marketing can also help your business retain customers who have already purchased through building an online community and promoting new offers or products to an engaged, relevant audience. 

Build Your Brand Through Social Media

When it comes to small business marketing, social media can be one of the most accessible tools out there to spread the word of your brand. Creating a social media profile for your company is free and advertising on social media platforms can be relatively low cost. Social media marketing can help build brand awareness for your business allowing more potential customers to hear about what you do and engage with your company on their terms. Social media can be a great way to listen to what is working, or not working for your small business and attract new customers to visit both your in-person store and online.

Core Benefits of Social Media for Small Businesses

• Drive traffic to your website through links in posts and bios. Increase traffic to your website and build its authority to help support your SEO efforts. 
• Generate a higher number of leads and potential conversions through tools such as TikTok shopping, Facebook shops and click-to-contact buttons.
• Increase brand awareness. As a small business, brand awareness is key and building a loyal following on social media is a fantastic way to raise the profile of your brand in the online world.
• Humanise your business through showing up authentically online. Interacting with your customers and potential customers on social platform is a great way to make your brand seem more human and approachable, particularly if you use real-world imagery in your content.
• Build relationships with customers and develop a loyal following through channels such as Instagram, Facebook, X, TikTok and more, reaching and interacting with your target audience through something they use every day.

How to Get Started With Social Media Marketing for Small Businesses

Now you know the benefits of small business social media marketing, it’s time to get your business out there. If you don’t yet have a social media presence for your company, now is the perfect time to start. Meta for Business has a great guide to how Facebook could help promote your business and can answer questions such as ‘what is social media marketing’ and ‘what is SMM? ‘.

The first thing you’ll need to consider before putting any social media plans into action for your small business is who your target audience are and where they show up online.

If you are primarily a B2B business, are your target audience more likely to be present on LinkedIn as a business networking platform? If you are a small ecommerce business with a vibrant product base, are you more likely to connect with customers through the more visual platform of Instagram? Are your target audience Gen Z and more likely to be active on platforms such as TikTok? Thinking about this early on can help feed into your small business social media marketing strategy.

What is a Social Media Strategy?

A social media strategy for small business is, simply put, a plan of how you will use social media to benefit your company. It will detail which social media platform you will be using, what you will be posting and any budget or resource considerations. It will also detail your social media marketing goals, what you would like to achieve through promoting your small business on social media.

How Do I Create a Small Business Media Strategy?

Creating a social media strategy for small business is an essential step to success online. When it comes to creating your social media strategy, it is important to take everything we have mentioned so far in our social media guide for small businesses and use it to inform your social strategy. We’ve outlined the core steps to creating a social media plan below so be sure to align these with your business goals and personality.

Step One: Set Social Media Goals That Align With Your Business Goals

The first step is to choose some social media goals that really align with your company’s aims. Remember that they should be SMART goals. So, specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and time-bound. For example, you may want to use social media to increase the number of website visitors who click through from a specific platform by a certain percentage over the next quarter. Other goals include things such as customer retention through monitoring social media sentiment or growing your brand by increasing brand awareness on social media.

Step Two: Do Your Research

We’ve already mentioned how important your target audience is to marketing on social media, this step of building your social plan builds on that initial thought process.
When creating a small business social media strategy, take some time to create a detailed buyer persona for your target audience.

Taking things such as age, interests, location, career, disposable income and other demographic features into account will allow you to better target your social media marketing towards those you actually want to hear your message and will be more likely to be interested in your brand or product. You should also include some research into how your target audience uses different social media platforms as this can affect how you map out your small business social media strategy.

Step Three: Audit Any Existing Social Media Accounts

If you don’t yet have a social media account for your business, you can skip this step. However, if you have ever created a social media page for your small business, now is the time to really look at it critically. Does it align with the business goals thought about in the first step? Does it match what your audience from the previous step will be expecting? Does it match the way you want your brand to be perceived online?

A social media audit is key to laying the groundwork for a good social media marketing plan as it can help you work out what is already in place, what has been done before, how that performed and generate ideas for where to take your social media plan going forward.

Whilst you are doing your social media audit, take a look at your closest competitors. How are they using social media to promote their business? Is it seeing engagement? What trends have they jumped on board with or avoided? Are there any ideas you could put your own spin on to create unique content that aligns with your brand?

 

 

Step Four: Create a Social Media Marketing Calendar to Fit Your Business and Audience

One of the biggest benefits for small businesses starting social media marketing for the first time is the creation of a social media marketing calendar. This is a brief outline of your posting schedule for any given social media platform. Your social media marketing calendar should include information on what you will be posting and when as well as variations for the different social platforms.

This is an important step as you will need to factor in your team’s resources and working hours to ensure you have the capacity to regularly post to a schedule that works for your circumstances.

You’ll want to create a mix of content for your social media marketing to ensure your customers are not just hit by a constant tirade of sales pitches. Try to include a mix of website traffic generators, shared posts, company culture updates and lead-generation goals such as sign-ups for a newsletter. If one of your social media goals is growth, can your business hold a giveaway for engaged followers or perhaps try your hand at a popular trend that you think would particularly resonate with your target audience? Think about the types of hashtags your audience might use and incorporate these into your plan.

Based on everything you’ve done so far, take some time to come up with social media marketing ideas for your small business. If you’re struggling to get started, Hootsuite has a great list of social media marketing ideas for small businesses. You may want to undertake paid social media marketing as part of your strategy so keep this in mind when plotting out your content calendar and strategy. You’ll also need to assign time to platform engagement to interact with your potential customers online.

Step Five: Review and Revise Accordingly

No small business social media marketing strategy will be completely flawless the first time and a number of economic and topical changes can take place throughout the year that may affect your social media marketing, It is important that you are able to react to this and notice when your social media marketing is seeing an impact.

An established social strategy should include the core facts you know about your audience such as platforms used and content types they engage with. It should also include analytic insights that will inform your ongoing strategy such as audiences reached, best times to post on social media platforms and any other insights. Using an inbound approach, it should include the types of useful content you will create with what you’ve seen success with and how it creates value alongside your content strategy. This should all reflect your brand identity and how you want your audience to feel when they view your social content.

Depending on your resources, you may want to set up monthly or quarterly reviews of your social media marketing performance, perhaps more regularly if you are approaching social media marketing for the first time and still seeing what works for you. Social media marketing costs for small businesses can be a deciding factor when getting started and your strategy will adjust as you find out more about what types of marketing are successful for your company. Consistency is key so if you find your current strategy isn’t working due to time constraints, it may be time to reevaluate.

Download your small business social media marketing checklist for free >

Social Media Marketing Ideas for Small Business

When it comes to creating content for social platforms, creativity is key. There are plenty of ways to have fun with your posts whilst staying on-brand. By creating a wide variety of content types including still imagery and video content, you can keep your content engaging. Whilst your core aim when using social media platforms such as Facebook or Instagram might be to promote your business, it’s important not to constantly post salesy content as this can easily bore and put off users. We’ve included some small business social media marketing ideas below to get you started.

• Behind-the-scenes Lives or video
• Product or service-related how-to’s or top-tips
• Story polls or interactive quizzes
• Industry or company updates that might be of interest
• Carousel-type posts showing your product in use
• User-generated content that showcases your brand or product
• Giveaway or sales-related posts

When to Call in the Experts

Whilst social media can be a world of opportunity for small businesses, the reality is that it takes time and effort in order to be effective. If your small organisation is struggling to grow on social or is struggling to find the time or resources to post engaging content and be present on your chosen platform, it may be time to bring in external help.

A social media marketing agency for small business is ideally placed to build your small business social media profile and activity, driving awareness and traffic through time-honed strategy and creative content. SEM Consultants provides social media marketing services for small businesses and can personalise your service to fit your business needs, big or small.

If you are looking for affordable social media marketing for small business, contact our specialist social media team online or by calling 0121 552 6550. Alternatively, take a look at our social media services page to find out more about our social media for small businesses services.