5 Tips to Grow your Small Business with a Social Media Marketing Strategy

By: Johana M. Caba, M.A. 
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When you officially open your small business, your focus is on growth and success. Like everything else in life, sometimes growth and success hit a plateau. There are many things that you can do to get out of a growth plateau. One of the things that you can work on is developing a social media marketing strategy for your small  business. Below, I discuss 5 tips that to help small businesses grow their following, increase their reach and get more leads. 

1. Engage on Your Social Media Platforms: One of the most important things to do on Social Media is engage. You can engage with your followers and your community by commenting, liking and sharing posts from others. It is important to engage because it creates a human presence for your business. By engaging with your followers and your community, you are building relationships with others that will help your business grow through word-of-mouth on social. These relationships that you build with others can also help you generate leads for your business and get your posts to reach more people.
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2. Increase Organic Reach: Your organic reach means the amount of people that see your posts without boosting posts or using ads. You can do this in a number of ways. For example, you can add relevant hashtags to your posts like #BeautySalon or #HairDresserMagic or #SocialMediaMarketing. These are community specific hashtags that will ensure your posts get grouped with other posts pertaining to the same community. This makes it easier for others to find you posts. Another tip for increasing organic engagement is to tag others. If you partnered with someone for a post, or are sharing something that relates to a specific person or brand, then tag them. By tagging the person you are making sure that they see it, like it, comment and hopefully share it with their audience. It is also important for you to understand the platform. If you are on Twitter, then more posts per day will help you me seen by your followers and found by others in your community. If you are on Instagram, then higher quality photos and content on Stories will help you be seen. It all depends on the algorithm of the platform. For 2020, Pinterest released an advertising guide detailing the full-funnel platform in which you can guide your customers from the planning stages to the purchasing stages. 

3. Increasing Reach with Paid Ads: A component of both organic and paid reach is an editorial calendar. Editorial calendars help us plan out our campaigns, promote our products and services, and curate content to diversify our feeds. We use these calendars to help us plan and execute our campaigns, and we also use them to help us track our analytics. By knowing what works best with our audiences, we have an advantage when it comes to increasing our reach. With paid ads, you can target your specific audience and increase the reach of your posts. This is an easy way to reach more people for a small amount of money because you don't need that much money to reach more people when boosting posts on social media. For more help with creating an integrated marketing communication strategy to help your small business grow, download my IMC Guide for Small Business. ​

​4. Get Leads with Call-to-Action Buttons & Ads: Like I mentioned in tip #3, ads can help you increase your reach. But, they can also help you get more leads by creating lead generation specific ads on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. You can also create ads to lead people to your landing page which can be your website homepage or product page on your website. For more information on lead generation visit this Cloudways article on everything about lead generation through social media.
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5. Create Valuable Content & Be Consistent: I think that the most important component of growing your small business with social media marketing is creating valuable content and being consistent. Sometimes life gets in the way and it's hard to be consistent, but the more consistent you are with a posting schedule, the more your business will grow. You can use editorial calendars to plan your content and use scheduling platforms like Hootsuite and Buffer to schedule your posts ahead of time. By scheduling your posts you make sure that you are being consistent, you stay in the loop, and you can use curated content to give yourself more time to create valuable content. For more tips on creating strategic content read our post, 3 Best Tips for Creating Strategic Content.