Elements of a Successful Social Media Strategy for Small Businesses

Build an effective social media marketing plan that moves the needle.

Brand awareness, customer engagement, targeted advertising, up-to-the-minute market research, cost effectiveness—these are just a few of the reasons why businesses, and especially small businesses, are actively utilizing social media marketing. But just like any other form of marketing, social media cannot be effective and help you achieve your goals without a solid, well-developed strategy.

Everyday users are generating information on social media platforms that can be useful for business owners. And much of this information is exactly what marketers need to know to improve their results and achieve the KPIs that define a successful campaign. For example, the number of consumers that “liked” a piece of content from a brand went from 21% of all users in 2020 up to 42% in 2023.^[1] These likes are a remarkable way to gauge just what customers care about the most and can help direct your efforts in content generation, paid social advertising messages, and so on.

Social media marketing can be incredibly powerful and valuable for SMBs. And making that value a reality for your small business requires the development of a social media marketing strategy for small businesses that harnesses the power of these platforms.

What is a social media strategy?

A social media strategy is very much like the strategic approaches you develop for other marketing outlets and campaigns, but with consideration for social-specific capabilities, audiences, and engagement.

A good social media marketing strategy for a small business will be composed of many familiar elements, including:

• Specific goals: Goals for any social media marketing strategy should include both the type of response you want to achieve and specifics about metrics. For example, your strategy may include goals of increasing brand awareness, driving new leads, generating direct sales, increasing brand loyalty, or launching a new product or service. Whatever your goals are, be sure to make them specific by clearly defining the key metrics you will be measuring and what constitutes success for each of them. 

• Target audiences: There is a great deal of crossover, of course, but social media platforms also have unique audiences and differing demographics. Defining your target audience, again in specific detail, will allow you to perform research into where they engage, what content resonates with them, and how best to reach them. 

• Relevant social media platforms: Related to your audience, your strategy should also include relevant platforms and how you plan to use them, as well as the content that makes the most sense for each. 

• Content creation approach and tactics: What you’ll say, where you’ll say it, and how you’ll deliver it to your target audiences are all questions that need to be answered in your strategy for content creation. 

• Implementation and monitoring: Here you’ll develop your posting schedule as part of your larger strategy, including who will be posting, what times and days make the most sense for your goals and your audience(s), and so on. This is also where you will establish a cadence and strategy for monitoring engagement and online conversations.

• Performance measurement and reporting: Finally, tying your specific metrics (established earlier in the strategy process) with actual performance figures is how you will measure and understand not only where your strategy is working, but how to make adjustments and improve performance moving forward.

These are a few of the ingredients and steps in how to create a social media campaign strategy, but they are not the only elements you can include. In addition to these considerations, there is also the notion of “social media maturity” to consider as part of your social media marketing strategy.

Social media maturity, as explained in recent research^[2], can help companies create and adjust their social media strategy to make the biggest impact on their customer journey. There are five dimensions to help companies create an effective social media strategy, and those are:

1. Business impact

2. Organization and roles

3. Strategy

4. Content

5. Data and technology.

Many small-business owners will begin their strategy development process by compiling and evaluating these factors in order to understand their company’s present maturity level in the social media landscape, and then include their advancement and growth planning in the overall social media plan.

Benefits of a successful social media strategy for small businesses

As with your other marketing efforts, having a solid social media marketing strategy for small businesses specifically makes it much more likely that you can achieve (or even exceed) your goals and acquire the benefits that come with a well-conceived strategy.

And extensive research backs this up. Putting together clear, well-defined objectives for your use of social media marketing is the best way to make strategic use of resources.^[3] Those objectives, of course, are a part of your strategy for social media marketing. And there are numerous benefits available to companies who take the time to develop a strategy and create content for social media based on a robust strategy, including: 

• Leveling the playing field: One of social media’s biggest benefits for the small-business owner is that it allows you to compete with not only businesses of the same size but with even larger firms, all with the same tools and options available.^[4]

• Immediate connection: While the algorithms are always shifting and changing across social platforms, social media marketing still offers the best and most immediate way to reach an audience, engage in current topics of conversation, and grab attention.

• Access to new customers: 87% of organizations say the goal they are trying to achieve with social media is to build brand awareness.** Social media offers access to the biggest number of people across just a few platforms and gives you the ability to promote and target your messaging to exactly the people you are seeking.

• Immediate feedback: Social media offers small businesses the most immediate path for learning what works, what doesn’t, and what customers need or prefer.^[5] Those insights can then help drive everything from customer service approaches to product development, support, and remarketing efforts. 

• Drive sales: Advancements on social media platforms have allowed businesses both large and small to make sales directly through these channels, reducing purchase barriers and streamlining the customer journey.

Elements of an effective social media strategy

As you lay the groundwork for your small business social media strategy, there are a number of items you want to check and a number of things that need to be present before you begin. These include:

Up-to-date social media profiles 

Nothing is as impactful as a good first impression. And your business’s social media profiles are the first impression you make on each platform. As a result, making sure that they are all up to date establishes your business as active, trustworthy, professional, and engaged.

Content creation

As mentioned earlier, creating content for social media should be done according to a social media plan and strategy. With a plan in place, you can make the most of the content opportunities for your business, including driving web traffic, generating leads, establishing your business as credible, engaging in relevant and current conversations, and educating customers.

Consistent branding

Consistency in your branding begins with ensuring that your profiles are accurate and up to date, but continues on to every element of your presence on social media. However, with different aspect ratios, file formats, and audiences to consider, creating a social media campaign strategy should include the specifics of how exactly you will represent your brand consistently across platforms.

Social media content calendar and scheduling

As you begin creating content for social media, no tool may be as valuable and important as your editorial calendar. By planning and scheduling your content pillars for social media, you can establish a rhythm for posting and types of content that keeps your business relevant, engaged, and in front of the intended audiences.

Omnichannel distribution

Your social media content calendar is just one component of an omnichannel distribution strategy, which covers all of your social media content and advertising plans. Omnichannel distribution and coordination are necessary to your social media strategy because it can help both your paid and organic social efforts maximize reach and audience exposure, dramatically increase visibility of your brand, offer better and more robust metrics, and provide you with more information about audiences, engagement, and more.

Social media marketing metrics to track

All of your efforts on social media will not guarantee success, which is why tracking and analyzing performance is the key to making your plan work well. Tracking and reporting is so important that, according to recent research, 73% of companies have dedicated resources (budget, staff, software, task force, etc.) for social media monitoring and the other 27% have plans to have the resources for social media monitoring in the next 12 months.**

But choosing the right metrics to track is just as important as any other part of your social media marketing strategy. Some of them may be obvious based on your KPIs and business goals, and some of them may be irrelevant to your particular needs. However, some of the most common and most important metrics include:

• Reach and impressions: These two metrics are a great place to start as they tell you the total number of unique platform users who have viewed or encountered your content (reach), and how many times your content has been displayed (impressions).

• Click-through rates: Click-through rate divides the number of people who clicked on your ad by the number of impressions, giving you a percentage. That percentage then gives you a ratio as to how effective one ad is and how it compares to other ads. From there you can make decisions about copy, imagery, and so on.

• Engagement metrics: Engagement metrics are total figures that include likes, shares, reposts, and comments on your posts. An engagement rate can be calculated by dividing this total number by the number of impressions, which will give you a sense of the content that is resonating better with your audience.

• Follower growth: This metric tells you the rate at which your followers is changing in either the positive (more followers) or negative (fewer followers) direction. This is especially useful both for small businesses that are new to a platform and for campaigns aimed at new product launches, brand awareness, and so on.

Tools and services to help with your social media strategy

While it used to be a very manual process, there are now a number of valuable tools to help businesses manage, monitor, and track the performance of their social media strategy. Both paid and unpaid (organic) performance can be tracked and compiled, allowing even small businesses to gain immediate insight into their social media metrics and make adjustments quickly.

The above statistics mean that nearly three quarters of respondents are already either employing a social media marketing software monitored by in-house marketing personnel or outsourcing their social media needs to an expert agency.

Which means that one or both of these options may be an excellent choice for your small business. If you already have an in-house marketing team with social media expertise, explore our social media marketing software directory to learn more about tools that can streamline your efforts on social.

And if you have a smaller team or simply want to maximize your results from a social media marketing strategy, take a moment to review some of the social media marketing agencies in our directory of providers.

Effective social media marketing for small business  

Whether you need to grow your brand’s awareness in the marketplace, counter negative reviews, launch a new product or service, or generate new leads, social media marketing is an essential tool for any small business. And while we have covered an extensive amount of information about crafting and implementing a social media strategy for your small business here, there is a great deal more information and advice available through Capterra.