2024 Social Media Marketing Strategy Guide for Small Businesses

Businesses today know the importance of social media marketing more than ever before. They invest vast amounts of time and money in ad campaigns and learn how to create strategies. However, they need to improve at understanding and executing the process in the best possible way. Many small businesses hire young social media managers and hand over their social accounts to them, assuming they know the ins and outs of social media. It would help if you had a solid social media marketing strategy to operate your social media thoughtfully. Even if you rope successful influencers to promote your business, you still need a strategy to accomplish the same. 

Here are a few ways to build a solid social media strategy for your small business in 2024 and grow digitally. 

1. Set realistic goals

The major problem that many businesses need help with social media is setting relevant and realistic goals. They have zero ideas of their “why” behind being on social media. They don’t have a clear understanding of their short-term and long-term goals. Ideally, it would help if you had a goal before creating a social media marketing strategy. Set a goal that your business wants to achieve and keep tracking it. Remember, your social media marketing goal should help you achieve your overall business goal. Also, the goal should be realistic and attainable. For instance, setting a goal like reaching the 1 million subscriber mark on YouTube in a year is unrealistic and unachievable. Even if you perform exceptionally, you’ll still fail to achieve such an unrealistic goal. 

Hence, you should have some limitations and aim to succeed on one or two social media platforms first. Strive to perform exceptionally on the social media platform where your target audiences hang out. 

2. Analyse the relevant metrics

Creating a social media account, being active and spending all your resources on it are insufficient. You’ll have to establish a social media presence and check if you’re achieving any results. Social media analytics aren’t the same for every business. Your business goal might be different from other businesses. Hence, track the metric that shows you if you’re close to achieving your goal. Don’t fall into the trap of measuring your social media success with the number of followers you have or someone else has. It’s pretty easy to buy these followers and trick the world into believing that a social media account is going. Today, the follower count metric has little value compared to the engagement metric. You must look at your business and marketing goals to determine the right metrics to show you the results. For instance, If your goal is to increase your post engagement, then looking at the impressions and reach metric would give you a better picture of whether or not you’ve achieved the goal. 

3. Understand your audience

Not all audience categories are the same on social media platforms. Various kinds of people use social media on an everyday basis. Therefore, you need to know your audience persona to meet your goals. To target businesses looking for help with Instagram management, you’ll have to target people on Instagram. Similarly, if you want to run an influencer marketing campaign, you’ll have to engage and connect with influencers on social media. If your customer demographics don’t match the audience that you’re targeting on social media, then you’ll not achieve the desired results. Millions of users are active on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp daily. But, your target audience is a small percentage of those million users as you focus on targeted marketing. For instance, if your business focuses on targeting people aged 18-25, then Snapchat and Instagram are ideal platforms for your business. 

4. Select the right social media platform for your business

Once you find the right social media platform to operate and showcase your business, you don’t have to worry about spending excessive time and energy on every platform. Research to find out which platform your audience is on most of the time. This is the easiest step. If not, you can run a survey or ask your audience which social account they prefer the most. You can start with one platform and expand to other platforms with various active social media accounts. Also, you don’t need to be on more than three to four social media platforms. You can choose to include Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter and later on tap on to platforms like YouTube if your audience uses it extensively. Live streaming platforms like Twitch can explain your products and services in more detail.

5. Research your competitors 

Today, almost all firms have a social media presence. Your competitors might also have a content strategy to help them better run their social media platforms. You must know what they are doing, their point of focus, their target audience and their critical actions to dominate the industry. A quick competitor analysis will help you analyze their strengths and weaknesses. It will also help you understand what your potential customers are looking for in the industry. You can spot your competitor’s weak points and exploit the gaps. For example, if your competitors have a strong presence on Instagram but a weak Twitter presence, it’s a great chance to strengthen your Twitter presence and build an audience. You can also use various social media tools to analyze your competitor’s moves and spot their successful content pieces on social media. And, once you know the type of content that works better, you can produce the same type of content in a much better way and go ahead of your competitors. 

6. Set a realistic budget

Social media marketing is a suitable form of marketing for all types of companies. Hence, you mustn’t take it lightly and prepare a budget accordingly. Your business will never be successful on social media if you see it as another expense burden for your company. Also, it would help if you didn’t spend much of your marketing budget only on social media marketing. Therefore, setting a realistic budget is crucial to achieving a sweet balance. It would help if you clearly understood the return on investment from your social media expenses while keeping your social media strategy in mind. While setting a budget, consider the amount you intend to spend across marketing channels and then devote a particular percentage to social media marketing. 

7. Plan the content type 

To be successful on social media, you should share good quality and valuable content. As a business, try not to share too much promotional content. Try to be as social and friendly as you can be with your audience. Remember, social media is a social networking platform, don’t treat it like a marketplace to sell products. Your social media content should have a balance of all forms of content—such as educational, informational, inspirational, funny and motivational content. Add only a tiny percent of promotional content into it. You must also engage, share and like other creators’ content. Once you know your audience well, you can create content that specifically targets your audience’s interests. If you’ve already determined your goal and know what works for you, you must start creating content that resonates with your audience. And there is no point in creating content that will not help you meet your business goals.

8. Paid promotions 

Paid promotions such as paid ads help you reach broad, demographically targeted audiences. Every social media platform allows you to run paid ads on the platform and easily showcase your products and services to a wide demographic. You can reach relevant users who don’t know about you, your products and your services. You can use paid ads to strengthen brand recognition, promote posts/videos and sell your products/services. 

9. Work with influencers

Engaging with influencers and working with them has its advantages. When you choose the right influencer, you can tap into a broader audience interested in buying your products and services. Influencers are considered masters of social media marketing and have a solid personal brand online. You can collaborate with such influencers to gain the utmost benefits. You can work with influencers and direct their followers to your websites/social media pages. But remember that you’ll have to post content that matches their interest, and only then will they be interested in following you. Try to choose an influencer whose followers list has your target audience, and you also create content that directs the audience to follow your page. It’s a great way of gaining additional followers and growing your account.

Conclusion

Social media is the most potent and cost-effect way of marketing your products by sharing content. All you have to do is set the right goals and use the right goal-tracking metric. Always remember that you must be one step ahead of your competitors and strive to perform better with each piece of content. To make creating a social media marketing strategy easy, you can use a schedule and stick to a plan. Measuring your social media marketing success is vital to check if your strategy is performing effectively. 

FAQs

Team EMB

Our team of expert writers is committed to bringing insights on topics ranging in the fields of technology, marketing, and business. With a wide-reaching range of services on our platform, we help businesses achieve digital transformation end-to-end.