A Three-Step Social Media Marketing Plan To Boost Your Small Business

Businesses with an active online presence experience faster growth than businesses without. With almost one-third of the world’s population regularly on social media, you can see how much of an impact Instagram or Facebook can have on a business’ advertising campaign. And why it’s so important to mine these platforms to boost your message, grow your audience and build your reputation.

Social media outpace other advertising channels in terms of cost-effectiveness, potential for interactivity, ease of use, and scope of reach. Given the chance, they can serve as your greatest resource and tool. This makes it all the more important to have a marketing strategy that can optimize your online accounts. Here are three basic steps you can follow to help tailor your own social media marketing plan:

1.Start Small But Think Big

While social media makes it easy to join the online community, building your presence takes a little more work. You face a lot of competition online and it can be difficult to establish yourself, particularly if you’re a small business on a limited budget. Don’t be discouraged by this. Instead, plan for the long-term. Building a social media empire doesn’t happen overnight. First, establish what your endgame is and tailor your strategy to reach that goal.

Next, take it step by step. Find the social media channel that your target audience prefers above all others and build your home base there. Focus all your efforts there to start. It’s important not to spread yourself too thin among multiple platforms if you lack the time or resources. Instead, make the most of what you have and funnel it into a single venture: the returns will be worth it. Later, once you’ve established yourself, you can use your home base to leap to other platforms. The key here is to steadily mine and grow your audience over time.

Another good tip if you’re just starting out: make use of domain names. A domain name is the perfect way to get your company’s brand out there and to connect all your social media under one banner. One way domain names can boost your online presence is through domain forwarding, or redirecting your domain name to your social media sites. Often used by companies who don’t have websites, domain forwarding allows businesses to send customers to the social media of their choice.

2.Content Is King – Prioritize It

Any digital marketing expert would tell you how vital content curation and management is to any advertising strategy. Particularly in social media, your content determines the success of your brand, message, products or services. It is probably the most effective way to get your customers’ attention and build a strong rapport with them. Prioritizing your content is key to building a successful marketing campaign.

But not just any content will do. You need content that is 1) high-quality, 2) relevant to your audience, and 3) regularly produced. Naturally, it’s best to make your own content, so that you can curate it more specifically to your audience. But if you’re stretched on time or resources, then here are some tips to help you out:

• Learn from previous posts. Your previous posts are a goldmine for inspiration. Look back on your past content and identify which posts resonated with your audiences the most. Analyze what made them so popular. Once you’ve cracked the code, curate more content centered around these topics of interest.
• Create a social media calendar. Running out of ideas when it comes time to post? Plan ahead with a social media calendar, sorting out what content you’ll post on which day. This is a great way of ensuring that you regularly churn out interesting, high-quality content so you never leave your audiences hanging.
• Build your own social update library. Similar to the calendar, this is another effective way to organize and plan your social media posts. The concept of the social update library is simple: for every piece of content you create, come up with ten more ideas you can use based on that content. Now you have a storehouse of ideas whenever you run out of inspiration. Social updates libraries are huge time-savers. 

3. Spend A Little To Learn A Lot

It’s basic business logic: a little investment can bring in big returns. Social media is great for raking in customers, but if you want a really big boost then you need to shell out a little cash. Paid advertising helps increase your business’ exposure and most social media offer budget-friendly options that can give you an edge over the competition.

Each social media platform requires a different advertising strategy to make the full use out of it. For Facebook, your business might want to focus on promoting your blog posts or making sponsored stories to capture attention. Twitter allows similar advertising, such as Promoted Tweets, that can help funnel traffic to your posts. LinkedIn offers Sponsored Updates, similar to other platforms, but can also serve as a great place to promote your long-form content.