How to Create a Social Media Strategy for Your Small Business
In our last podcast and blog post, we helped you choose the right social channels for your business. Now that you have a particular platform, maybe two, in mind, it’s time to develop a social strategy that can help you show up, attract the right audience, and get that audience to do what you want.
Why do you need a social strategy?
Why can’t you just post whatever comes to mind? Well, you can if you really want to, but here’s why it might not be in your best interest.
A lack of clear messaging can create confusion for your audience. You need to post things that create a consistent brand image. If you’re a small business that sells jewelry and you come out hot on social media talking about interior decorating, it might confuse people who know you as a jewelry brand. Your strategy helps you stay consistent and deliver the right message to the right people in the right way at the right time.
Showing up inconsistently or stopping altogether could make people incorrectly believe you’re no longer in business. Have you ever pulled up a brand on Google and then gone and checked their Facebook or Instagram accounts only to see that they haven’t posted in years? It’s weird, right? You don’t know what they’re up to or if they even still exist. Don’t let this be your customer’s experience. We’d rather you wait until you’re prepared to do social right than hop on, try to post every day, burn out, and stop.
Social may not make sense for your business at all. Yes, you’re reading that right. If your business is doing well with your website alone or a physical presence, you might not need to spend money and time on social media right now. Yes, they’re technically “free” marketing channels unless you’re posting paid ads, but it’s still an investment of your time or someone else’s, which ultimately comes with a price. All of small business marketing is about prioritizing your efforts across channels and mediums. If you know your north star and where you’re heading with your business, it’s okay if social isn’t a part of the plan for now or forever.
Going at social all willy-nilly can blow your budget. You have limited resources, and spending someone’s time, whether yours or someone else’s, on social media without a plan could mean you’re wasting valuable money. Your strategy helps you decide where to put your focus and budget so you can make social the most effective avenue to do what you want, whether that’s promoting a new product or service, educating your audience, or tackling another business goal.
How to create a good social strategy
Strategy is a word that gets tossed about a lot. So, let us break down what it means to us. Strategy is a holistic plan of attack that helps you reach your goals. Bam, it’s that simple.
With that in mind, your first step in developing your social strategy is to clearly define those goals.
Set clear goals
What do you want from getting into social media? What’s your intention and desired outcome? You might be thinking along the lines of:
Build brand awareness: I need to let people know my business exists, we’re new, and we need to get people talking!
Convert customers on the platform itself: I.e., I want to push people to shop on my Instagram page, or I want to sell something directly on Facebook.
Increase website traffic: That might lead to someone buying a product from your website or signing up for an email list.
No matter which of these desired outcomes you have, leverage it to create a goal. Think about how you’ll know if your social efforts are successful. If the goal is to build brand awareness, how will you know if you’ve made it?
A bad goal for building brand awareness: I want more people to see and talk about my business.
🚫 Why it sucks: You can’t possibly know when you’ve arrived at the finish line. What would it mean for people to see and talk about your business?
A good goal for building brand awareness: We want to reach 250 real, local followers in the first 3 months of launching our social media account with an average impression per post of 1,000.
✅ Why we like it: It’s specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. You can easily track your progress toward the goal and know when you’ve reached it.
2. Make sure your profile is optimized
Before you make your first post, be sure your profile is filled out and branded appropriately. Include your contact details, relevant images, links to where you want to send people, etc.
Ensure there is brand consistency between your social platform and your website. If your social media description says you’re a guitar instructor offering lessons for kids and adults, your website should also speak to people who want adult or child guitar lessons and offer them ways to sign up for them.
3. Determine who is responsible for social
Are you planning to do it yourself, or are you delegating social media to your intern? Are you hiring Big Bad Marketing to develop and schedule your social content? It doesn’t matter who it is, but you need to be darn sure you’re clear on who is developing the posts, scheduling them, and engaging with any responses you get. Otherwise, it can turn into something you do “when you have time,” which is the equivalent of transferring money to your savings account at the end of the month…it just never happens.
4. Decide what to post and when
As we mentioned above, we’re not going at this social thing all willy-nilly. (Don’t you love that term? So appropriate.) Instead, we’re going to get organized and develop posts that are cohesive and make sense.
Start with a theme. A high-level theme might be something like “budgeting” if you’re a financial planner. From there, consider what types of individual posts can fit within that theme. Maybe you want to break down budgeting into six sub-topics:
Why develop a budget
Types of budgets
How to build a budget
Sticking with a budget month-over-month
Assessing the effectiveness of your budget
Getting help with budgeting
You’ll likely want a variety of content types to keep it interesting and content that aligns with the platform. Some examples include:
Photos + Carousels
Videos + Reels
Stories
UGC
Within these, you’ll want to have variety, too, like product/service images, tutorials and how-to’s, testimonials, feedback, reviews, customer images, people using/enjoying product & service, or tangential lifestyle content. Depending on the platform, you may want to promote events, other kinds of local content, info about your values/community impact, or share blogs, promotions, industry news, etc.
So, to further expand on our six posts, we might add more details like:
Why develop a budget (video, financial planner discusses importance)
Types of budgets (static post, infographic with popular budgets)
How to build a budget (reel, how to build a budget in less than 5 minutes)
Sticking with a budget month-over-month (testimonial, current client who has had a budget for over a year and offers tips about how they stay on track)
Assessing the effectiveness of your budget (pdf download template to see if the budget is working)
Getting help with budgeting (video, financial planner discusses how they can help you build a budget, CTA to schedule an appointment or attend a budget party local or virtual event)
Now you have a direction for those six posts, and you can move forward with deciding the post description, hashtags, imagery, CTA, etc. Your calendar also lets you track the due date for each post, what internal checks need to happen, whether the post is scheduled, and how much engagement it got after a certain period.
5. Don’t forget about engaging with your audience
Creating content and publishing on social is only one critical part of the game. To really build your audience, you also need to engage with them. That could look like this:
Joining communities
Interacting on forums
Following your audience and liking their content, too
Responding and sharing your expertise via comments
Reposting content from your audience
Asking questions about how your audience uses your products/services
Engagement doesn’t have to mean you’re always on the platform, though. Schedule periods of engagement where you might spend 30 minutes or an hour each week seeing what your audience is saying and participating in the conversation.
6. Determine how and when you’ll measure success
Decide which metrics you want to track, which may include:
Referral traffic
Conversions/sales
Email newsletter sign-ups
Impressions
Followers
Likes/comments/shares
Then, figure out which analytics tools you’ll use to view metrics and how frequently. Will you check key metrics every week or once a month? We highly recommend not checking in daily but at a larger time interval to allow you to look at trends over time.
7. Just start posting
There are a lot of small biz owners who hem and haw over their first posts. Will I sound stupid? Is this too self-promotional?
Take a deep breath, step away from the digital ledge, and let us share some hard truth: Until you have an audience, it really doesn’t matter. Everyone starts somewhere and cringes looking back at their early posts.
Done is better than perfect, so just go!
Rest in your strategy, and be confident that you have a plan that can guide you to social media greatness. And if you need a little support along the way, the team at Big Bad Marketing is here to help. Schedule a free 15-minute consultation and let’s get to strategizing.
