Social Media Strategy for Small Businesses

Small business owners often struggle to create and manage an effective social media strategy. However, social media marketing has significant advantages for businesses of any size. It can be an incredibly effective way to expand your business’s reach, build client trust, and grow. In fact, research shows social media use amongst businesses is the highest it’s ever been.

It’s clear that social media marketing works. But how do you know that your social media marketing strategy is hitting the right notes? The best way to find out is to understand what it looks like when it’s not quite working as it should be.

Why Social Media Marketing Is Important

In the modern market, having a social media marketing strategy is a must. However, we are all too familiar with social media plans failing, and business owners losing their faith in what could be an incredibly successful strategy.

Ensuring a business gets a return on investment requires patience, sound data tracking methods, and accurate targeting strategies. Luckily, there are experts on hand who help put this all together, giving SMEs the breathing room they need to do what they do best – run their growing businesses.

What is Social Media Marketing?

Social media marketing is the practice of creating engaging, relevant content for a target audience using appropriate social media platforms. It’s the act of generating content, and sharing it at the right time, in the right way, and on all the right platforms. It’s an inbound marketing method that, when done strategically, attracts high quality business leads.

Marketing with a social media strategy is multifaceted. This is because each social media platform serves a particular function, and targets a particular buyer audience profile.

For example, LinkedIn is a social media platform that targets professionals. Instagram, on the other hand, can be used to advertise to a younger client base. Overall, each platform is valuable in its own right, but not necessarily where your business needs to be focusing its marketing efforts.

Social Media Marketing Platforms

Overall, social media platforms work together to funnel an audience to a website or a sales and growth team. Social media also keeps your business relevant and active online. This is just one of the many reasons why we recommend optimising your LinkedIn profile, so that prospects get a clear, instant idea of who you are, and what you do.

Why Your Business Needs a Social Media Marketing Strategy

Succeeding at social media requires a clear strategy. Nowadays, it’s estimated that the average person sees between 4,000 to 10,000 adverts each day. This is influenced by a multitude of factors, including how much time a person spends online. These numbers show just how much online noise there is to get through in order to be heard by your target audience.

If a business’s online content isn’t reaching its desired audience, you might need to adjust your social media strategy. An effective social media plan will reach your target audience, build trust, and engage prospects with well-thought-out content.

However, to make the right changes, you first need an understanding of the areas where your social media marketing strategy is falling short.

Signs That Your Social Media Marketing Strategy is not Working

Some signs your social media marketing efforts are failing can include:

1. Your content isn’t bringing in new leads.
2. Social media engagement is low.
3. Your online audience growth has plateaued.
4. Your social media followers are not your desired audience.

Targeting these issues can help to strengthen your social media strategy and get you back on the right path.

Social Media Strategy Solutions

1. The content doesn’t bring in new leads

Your business may have nailed the social media basics, like posting to a regular schedule. To help even more with this, try scheduling LinkedIn posts in advance to ensure that your profile is always active. This in turn boosts post engagement and expands your online audience. While covering the basics is a good place to start, some business may not see their efforts turn into leads.

A common problem SMEs face is that they focus solely on advertising their services on social media. Nowadays, any online selling strategy must adopt a soft-selling approach. Hard-selling, or sharing only service-related, advertorial-style posts can be off-putting, or even flag up spam alerts. The focus has shifted from the traditional approach of highlighting a business’s services or products, to showcasing its expertise instead.

Online content should include:

• Client testimonials
• Case studies
• Examples of previous work
• Opinion-related content about interesting, current news in your relevant industry.

This is one way to tap into ‘the interest economy’. Remember, the average scroller sees up to 4,000 adverts per day. The scroller, and the social media platform, want more than just an advert.

Use your content to build trust before offering a service that solves a real pain point for your intended audience. Building client-company trust requires research into online trends, industry trends, popular keywords, the latest search optimisation strategies, and more.

2. Social media engagement is low

Low social engagement is not uncommon, but it is unsightly. After all, your prospects want to see that you’re a ‘legitimate’ service. Legitimate, trustworthy service providers have personalities. They also have support. Online, this looks like engagement in the form of comments, likes, and shares, as well as reviews and testimonials.

Prospects research a business first, and social media helps to make a business discoverable online. The copy must be enticing enough to funnel prospects to a webpage, make an enquiry, or even press that like button. These are proof that a marketing strategy is heading in the right direction.

Here are some points to remember:

• Content must encourage an audience to interact. Use captivating, emotive text with a clear call to action. Call to actions encourage likes, shares, and subscribers. They also encourage readers to contact your team, or visit your website. If you find that you just don’t have the time to create your own regular social media content, why not consider outsourcing to an agency like 100 Pound Social?
• When posting online, the first hour is the most important. This is when businesses should encourage engagement. It sifts content to the top of the search engine so that it can be seen amidst all that online noise.
• Use this free social media engagement checklist to ensure that your online activity is hitting the right notes.

3. Online audience growth has plateaued

Some businesses have marketing strategies that work well initially. But, once they’ve obtained a following, they may see a decrease in their engagement, or their account might become stagnant altogether. This could be a result of changing online trends or an updated algorithm. In this case, you need a new perspective to keep followers engaged.

To reiterate an earlier point, stop using your social media to just advertise your business services! Opt for posts that generate value. These are thought-provoking, original posts that are relevant to your clients’ needs and solve a problem for them.

For example, a recruitment agency could share interview or CV tips in their online content. Health & wellness companies can share new health advice. The content can refer to their own website. It could be pulled internally from a blog post. This content could also be shared from another website (called ‘curated content’). Either way, sharing industry-related content drives interest. It offers value by providing its audience with the answers they’ve been looking for.

If you want to level-up your social media strategy, but don’t know where to begin, take a look at another blog post of ours, all about how to plan and review a winning social media strategy.

4. Your social media profiles have followers who aren’t your ideal customer

We all want growth, and we want it fast. It’s the nature of the modern market. However, organic growth – that is, growth that isn’t bought (many companies buy likes, followers, and subscribers) is best. Slow, organic growth requires creating an online audience that is actually interested in the services or products a business offers.

One way to ensure your business’s website and digital platforms reach your desired audience is to create industry-specific blog posts. Blog posts, when crafted well, include the latest trending (and relevant) keywords to attract your target audience through search engines.

If you’re not sure who you should be targeting in your social media marketing strategy, try working through our Ideal Customer Persona Planner. This free guide will ask you questions to help you to build a better idea of who your ideal customer is, which can then be used to influence your social media activity. After all, if you don’t know who you’re supposed to be speaking to through social media, how can you target the posts you put out to make them work for your business?

Social Media Content Strategy

It can be tricky to know if (and how) your business’s social media marketing strategy is failing, but hopefully this article has given you some useful pointers to get started.

Essentially, begin by working out who you are targeting on social media, and then build a regular posting schedule of exciting, relevant social media posts to speak to them through.

And if that all sounds like something you just don’t have the time for right now, consider outsourcing your social media posts, and even blog articles, to the experts.

Social Media Marketing Packages

Creating and maintaining an effective social media marketing strategy is not always clear-cut. In order to stay ahead of the game, always ensure the following:

• Blog content includes trending keywords.
• Social media content is posted consistently, across different platforms.
• Social media posts look beyond services, offering value and original insights.

At 100 Pound Social, we offer creative and unique social media posts for businesses across all industries. Our most popular package is our Post Plan, which includes regular weekly posts. Your posts are carefully written and managed by our dedicated team, and you can also provide monthly feedback to help us ensure your posts are in alignment with your growth goals and brand voice.

Why not try our Free Plan to get started? This social media marketing strategy template has been designed to leverage all the benefits the online marketing world has to offer. Alternatively, contact our team to book in for a demo of our services to see how we can work for your business.