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Social media marketing tips and ideas for small and medium-sized businesses

Published on 03-28-2022

Social media marketing tips and ideas for small and medium-sized businesses

Daily, people spend a lot of time on social media platforms. This is a pool of potential customers that every business should harness. Read on to find out social media marketing tips and ideas that could help your business get more customers.

Beyond your business website (if you have one), an active social media presence can give you more visibility and boost your market reach.

What is social media marketing for businesses?

Social media marketing is a strategy that professionals, small and medium-sized businesses use to build their brand presence, connect with their audience, generate leads and conversions (sales).

How to use social media marketing for your business?

As you approach social media marketing, consider strategizing, planning, and publishing content, listening and engaging with your clients, collecting reports and analytics, then advertising.

1. Build a Social media marketing strategy

The first item on your list is to build up a social media strategy. It is the action plan with an outline of steps to execute to achieve successful marketing on your social channels of choice.

Even if you think you have the skills, engage an expert to help you craft and refine a strategy that will work for you.

A social media business strategy sets the pace for everything else you’ll do for your business on social media.

2. Determine and plan your resources

Successful social media marketing requires a budget to facilitate your online business marketing activities.

Get a minimum budget to help you implement your social media marketing strategy.

As you get into social media you at least need a minimum budget to facilitate implementing various elements.

This could be things like hiring a graphic designer or a social media manager to help you plan.

3. Competitor analysis

Discover and understand your competitors to identify the platforms that work best for them.

A keen analysis will reveal how they engage their audience over each channel, what works and what doesn’t work for them, and match it to your business model.

You don’t need to reinvent the wheel, pick what works and implement it.

4. Identify your audience

Although your competitor’s audience may be similar to your potential target, you may want to refine it to match your services and products.

Think about your audience from the lens of the social media channels they use most. As much as you target a broader audience to increase your chances for more leads and conversions, ensure the target is relevant.

5. Set the right goals for your business

Outline your business goals on social media.

Primarily, it could be increasing the brand awareness of your business, generating leads, conversions, and ultimately – sales.

The ultimate goal is to connect with your audience, listen to them, respond to their concerns, win their trust and win them as customers.

6. Identify social media platforms to focus on

Choose a few social media platforms to start with.

Most professionals and businesses start with Facebook and Instagram. You can always diversify your options over time.

7. Decide the content to share

Whatever content you decide to share, remember you’re doing it for your audience.

Consider a mix of educational, entertaining, and informative content. You can share text content, links, videos, images, and graphics.

8. Get the right tools

A successful social media marketing plan needs the right tools to work.

You can attain more efficiency in your business by getting a social media scheduling tool, a content creation tool, and an appointment reminder app to automate appointments.

9. Plan and publish your content

Publishing is simply getting your content onto your social media profiles.

Post text, share a video, an image, or a blog post.

Planning involves coming up with a schedule to help you maintain consistency when posting content.

10. Focus on posting quality content

While creating your content, the purpose is to share high-quality videos, images, graphics, and useful links with your audience.

11. Engage your audience

Engage with your clients in a lively manner. Keep it professional and be a bit playful.

Build conversations with your clients by joining them as they comment and engage with the content of your posts.

Audience engagement creates closeness with leads. Over time it becomes easier for your clients to identify with your business as they seek your services.

12. Analyze social performance statistics

As you share content and engage your audience, analyzing the performance statistics will help you find out the effectiveness of your content and keep track of your growth rate.

Use the data findings to keep refining your content strategy until it clicks.

13. Advertise to boost your business

If you already have the advertising costs in your budget, boost your business presence by running ads.

This is particularly important if you’re just starting out.

If you’re already into the game then you can boost your business to broaden your audience reach.

With social media platforms like Facebook, you can target the right audience by segmenting them as you like based on similar characteristics.

Succeeding in social media marketing requires you to post content around trending topics. A two-faced approach to this is to align your posts with relevant general trends or use industry-specific trends to position yourself better before your target audience.

15. Accept online appointment scheduling via your social media profiles

Make it easier for your clients to book their appointments with you 24/7 from your social media profiles.

It’s so easy.

Get a Free 14-Day Trial at Appointment Reminder and get an online booking link you can add to your Facebook or Instagram Book Now buttons.

Get your automated online scheduling appointment and add it to the booking buttons on Facebook and Instagram.

Are you ready to save time and money?

Appointment Reminder is designed with one goal in mind – to allow you to
make more money off of your clients, while wasting less time contacting them.