How to create a small business social media strategy

There are numerous reasons why digital marketing is key to your business's growth and success. It allows you to target a number of people across various industries and channels and you can learn to market your own business online.

Social media is one of the most popular routes to advertising your business online, and there are many free social media channels with which you can get started.

As a small business, it's likely you don't have a fully fledged marketing team to call on, so the first thing you need to do to get up and running is create a social media strategy (or social media marketing plan, whatever you want to call it).

What makes a great social media strategy

With help from Enterprise Nation adviser and social media expert Lucy Hall, we've broken down the questions any great social media strategy needs to answer.

Who are your customers?

Do you know what your typical customer looks like? How old are they? What level of education and income do they have? What's their gender?

Once you're familiar with your audience, you can understand what motivates them and what value you as a business can bring to them via your products or services.

Next steps:

• Learn more about customer personas and how to use them to define your target audience

What specific social media channels will you use?

Do you have an idea of what channels you'll use and for what purpose? There are many of these to take advantage of, including Pinterest, Instagram and more.

Each social media channel has different functionality, features and audiences. Spend some time exploring them and consider what would be best for your business. Once you understand, you can get more detailed guidance from our free downloadable guides:

• How to start a business on Pinterest

• How to start a business on Instagram

• How to start a business on TikTok

What are your business goals and what are you trying to achieve?

What do you want your business to look like in the future and what goals are you seeking to fulfil?

Having a clear idea of your aims and objectives, and what you'd like your digital marketing to do for you, is crucial when it comes to planning your time and social media activity. It will drive your decision-making and help you understand what action to take going forward.

Next steps:

• Watch a webinar with entrepreneur Steven Bartlett on setting business goals

What content will you use for each channel and how will you engage your target customer?

The type of content you create will depend on which platform you use and the audience demographic present on those channels. But it's important to think about best practices when producing content for your social media. Here are some things to consider:

• Create posts that are actionable! For example, you may want your audience to sign up to your newsletter. This is a great opportunity to add a call to action (CTA) at the bottom of the relevant post directing the reader to where you want them to go next.

• Consistency is vital, so make sure your images share a colour palette and the same branding.

• Only use high-quality images – nothing spoils brand reputation more than a low-resolution pixelated graphic.

• Always make sure the copy you employ accurately reflects your business. Don't do anything that will cause your customers' trust in you to erode.

Next steps:

• Watch this webinar to learn how to create a content plan that will guide your every post

How often will you analyse the results against the goals?

Make sure you hold yourself accountable and have scheduled times to analyse your engagement on social media.

Look at what's working well: how can you improve this even further to increase the engagement? Don't forget to review what isn't working so well and ask yourself why that might be.

As a small business owner, you're incredibly busy so you want to make your digital marketing as easy as possible. As a result, it might be wise to stop certain social media activity if you aren't seeing any results.

What action will you take to test and adapt your social media activity?

Keep trying new tactics and learn from your failures and successes. Measure your activity against your business goals and remember that it's all part of a learning process. In digital marketing, failure is a positive!

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