Cost-efficient Social Media Marketing Strategies for Small Businesses

Well, no matter the size of your business, it must be on social. Even if you run a small, local shop, or just established your tiny B2B startup, social media are mandatory for you to bloom in sales and brand awareness.

One thing to feel proud of today, as a business owner: You’re here reading about how to use social media for small business growth. So, you comprehend the importance of social networks for your business and you’re willing to squeeze it into your very busy schedule.

Congrats! That’s the first step toward your social media success!

Now, let’s go straight to small business social media marketing and what strategies you should follow to thrive, without spending a fortune.

What are the Main Challenges for Small Businesses on Social Media?

Digital marketing for small businesses, and especially social media, is a real challenge. In fact, 93% of small businesses admit that they struggle with social media management.

Below we analyze the challenges you are going to face, as a small business owner, who manages their business’s social channels all by themselves.

Limited Resources

First and foremost, you don’t have all the financial resources you need for a great online presence. Perhaps, you can’t invest right now in that designing tool that you want, to enhance your graphics.

Not to mention that all businesses start with a limited workforce. It’s so common for people to wear more than one or two — or three — hats at the early steps of a new business. Chances are you don’t have a dedicated professional working for your social. And you won’t have one, for a long time.

So, you have to get your hands dirty and learn social media marketing for small business brands. You don’t have to master the art, just get as far as you can.

Keeping up with Changes

Another problem with investing in social media for small business growth? Keeping up with the ever-changing magical world of social networks!

But to be fair, that frustrates most of us. You’re not alone, however, you have to dedicate some time to learning the current social media trends and be aware of each network’s algorithm changes, among other things. The harsh truth is that if you don’t do it, nobody is going to do it for you.

Fortunately, there are tools, like Mentionlytics, that can keep you up-to-date with the latest social media news and changes in your industry. We’ll elaborate on that later.

Fighting your Competition

Battling your competitors on social is one of the greatest challenges you’ll face at the beginning of your business journey. In fact, it’s a continuous challenge, even for mature companies.

Nonetheless, due to limited resources and lack of expertise in small business social media marketing, you have some serious disadvantages.

A solution to that can be a thorough competitor analysis, especially their social media accounts. You can get valuable lessons learned by just observing what they do and seeing what’s working for them. And try to compete with your strengths.

The good thing about social: You don’t have to be a massive giant to succeed and outperform your competitors.

Maintaining Consistency

Being consistent with your posting and content creation is essential for scoring high on your social media goals, whether those are brand awareness or social engagement.

On the other hand, maintaining a consistent schedule on social media means that you have to invest hours in writing captions, recording reels, and so on. But you have so many other tasks to tender, so naturally social media networks can’t always be among your priorities.

Don’t feel bad for yourself. Social media management is a full-time job, after all.

Finding the Right Audience

Identifying and targeting your ideal customers via social platforms isn’t a walk in the park. A reason for that can be that you aren’t 100% sure who exactly falls into your target audience at the beginning. Of course, there’s no shame in that! Finding the right audience comes in time.

What’s more, even if you know who you want to target, it’s not easy to address them via social media. You know, each social platform appeals to different kinds of people. That’s why finding the right audience on the right social medium is so important.

To give you a little help, we analyze below the 4 best social media for small business brands, like yours.

Which Social Media is Best for Small Businesses?

We agree that it can be really confusing to choose which social platform can bring better results to your business. But you shouldn’t go all in and create profiles on each and every one of them.

It goes without saying that different social channels can help you reach alternative and broader audiences, but you don’t have to begin with all of them at once.

In our opinion, you should choose one or two of the following major social media for small business brands like yours.

TikTok

Undoubtedly, we live in the TikTok era. This video-based social medium is continuously growing and people absolutely love it because it’s fun and simple. Actually, the average user opens the app 19 times per day!

But long past is the days when TikTok was only for personal use among young people. Now it’s becoming more and more necessary for every kind of business.

The real advantage of TikTok marketing for small businesses is that you don’t have to invest an enormous budget to create quality content for this platform. You just need some creative ideas and you can go viral, too!

TikTok is a go-to social platform if you want to:

1. Attract Gen Z and Millennial customers
2. Give an approachable and fun personality to your brand
3. Address people’s concerns about your products in a human way

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is the ultimate option if you work in B2B. It’s the online place-to-be for finding clients and establishing your small business as a real player in your market.

This platform offers great potential for social networking with other business owners like yourself, keeping up-to-date with the latest news in your niche, and of course, it gives you opportunities to reach out to prospects for free.

LinkedIn is essential if you want to:

1. Attract professionals from a wide range of businesses
2. Expand your network and build a brand community
3. Exercise your personal selling techniques

Bonus: B2B Social Media Strategies for All Businesses

Instagram

It’s true that many small businesses start with Instagram, even before getting themselves a proper website. And that’s a smart move. Instagram is a popular social platform, with an astonishing 90% of users following at least one business there.

Instagram is the right place for you to highlight what you do, like your products or services, and start creating a unique brand image. It can serve as your virtual display window for your creations, or your online catalog, with absolutely no cost.

Instagram is a must if you want to:

1. Attract Gen Z and Millennial customers
2. Showcase your product or service in a visually appealing way
3. Get started with social commerce

Facebook

Facebook is still a good addition to small business online marketing. It’s a social network for sharing all types of content and has the most monthly active users, 2,9 million to be exact!

This social channel can become an important contact point for your business since you can add much information, allowing potential customers to get to know you with a simple scroll.

It offers great analytics to track your performance and get to know your audience better. Also, you can advertise your business there with a limited budget.

Facebook is a good pick if you want to:

1. Attract customers from many different age groups
2. Set up a social media community
3. Get started with social media ads without spending too much money

So, you got a glimpse of which social medium you should choose to achieve specific goals. Now, it’s time to explore some small business social media marketing strategies you can begin with.

Keep reading!

Creative Social Media Marketing Strategies for Small Businesses

Truth be told, social media is a cost-efficient highway to brand awareness when you own a small company. That’s because you can create an account for free and start promoting your business, generate new leads, drive traffic to your website, and build a solid brand.

Let’s have a look at some cost-efficient strategies and tactics on social media marketing for small businesses you can try out.

Establish Your Social Media Presence

First things first, you need to establish your business’s presence on social. We don’t mean just creating profiles on Instagram and TikTok. Of course, you’ll have to decide where you’ll focus, as we discussed in the previous section of this article.

However, here we talk about establishing a unique brand voice and personality for your business on the social channels you prefer. For that, we have some tips for small business brands below.

We highly suggest you be authentic and try to highlight all the things that make your business one of a kind. People love authenticity more than seeing your brand jumping on every social media trend.

So, choose the content types you feel most comfortable creating, like photos of your shop with a clever caption or a fun reel featuring your product, and go.

Furthermore, to set up a good social media presence you don’t have to be posting content every day. Don’t take us wrong. Certainly, it will help a lot with your growth, but it’s not necessary if you’re taking baby steps in the social media world.

More important than everyday posting is the quality of your content and being consistent without letting too much time pass by without new posts or stories on your accounts. It’s quite disappointing for a potential customer to visit your social profiles and see them practically dead, with your latest post being published almost 3 months ago…

So, to avoid this beginner mistake you can create a social media content calendar to keep all your ideas for new posts and organize when to post what. It will help you stay consistent as far as possible considering that you only have two hands and you’re swamped with other critical business tasks.

Also, having a content calendar will help you plan your posts in advance and put some thought into what to create, instead of trying to come up with a last-minute idea. Posting on the fly won’t get you far and won’t help you create engaging content.

Grow Your Social Media Audience Organically

Investing early in community building can bring real success to small business social media channels. Because giving much attention to your followers from the very beginning will help you establish a human brand.

Today, your audience wants to see the human face of your brand and understand that you care about them as much as they care about you. They aren’t just potential customers and prospects, they’re part of your community.

The foundation of community management, as we see it, is being responsive and relatable. Answer all the comments in your posts, respond to your brand mentions, say thanks, highlight your customers, give kudos, and take part in relevant discussions. Community management can be part of your customer service as well.

What’s more, you can create polls to get your audience talking and start conversations on trending topics. Also, you can share any user-generated content that can serve as social proof or publish any good reviews your products or services get on other websites.

Leverage Partnerships & Small Creators

You might believe that forging collaborations and partnerships with other brands is a sport for bigger businesses. But that’s not true! Small businesses, like yours, can do fantastic brand collaborations.

Social networks are ideal places to search for potential brands that could be interested in creating a partnership with you. Also, they give you a direct means of reaching out to make your case. A post about new and unexpected brand partnerships is always welcome in the social media sphere.

Moreover, you can partner not only with brands but also with influencers to promote your products or services. We know that this is an expensive practice, but we don’t talk about high-profile, celebrity influencers. In fact, smaller creators are a better fit for a small business’s influencer marketing efforts.

Small creators maintain a strong-tied community of users and can introduce, for example, your shop or product, to a group of people that really trust the creators’ opinion, because it’s mostly honest. And your collaboration with them won’t cost you a fortune.

Monitoring and Analyzing Your Social Media Performance

You can’t build a reliable social media strategy for small business brands unless you keep track of your performance and analyze your data to see what’s working and what’s not.

Definitely, you should dedicate some time every month to check your progress. Social listening can help you save time and make your life easier. How? By analyzing your post and account performance automatically.

The best social listening platforms, like Mentionlytics, monitor your social media performance and provide you with comprehensive analytics, so you can easily understand where you need to improve. Plus, our Social Intelligence Advisor will give you actionable advice on how to grow your small brand on social, based on your data!

Use Hyperlocal Social Media Marketing

Hyperlocal social media marketing is a great way for small businesses to connect with their local community and reach potential customers. By targeting their marketing efforts to a specific geographic area, small businesses can create a more personalized and relevant experience for their customers. This can lead to increased brand awareness, foot traffic, and sales.

Use a Social Media Management Tool

Let’s get this straight. Social media management is hard and you need a social media tool for that if you run the accounts of your business yourself.

Social media management tools are great for keeping your content calendar there, scheduling posts on specific dates without having to think about it every day, and many more!

Experiment

Pay attention to this one. Experimentation with different social media ideas for small business brands is a must.

You should test alternative types of content to see what your audience resonates with and which posts perform better in terms of social engagement, reach, and so on. Reels, memes, carousels, you can’t know what your audience wants, if you never try to mix things up.

For example, here’s a meme that the marketing manager at Respona shared within Respona’s group to admit and address a small mistake that happened in a human, friendly, and funny way. Brilliant!

Pro Tip: Experiment with different hashtags as well. Hashtag tracking tools can help you choose them wisely.

That’s it! Now, you have an idea of how to grow your small business via social. Keep scrolling down to see two examples of small businesses using their social the right way and get some social media tips.

How Effective is Social Media for Small Businesses?

So, it’s very reasonable to wonder if social media can be effective for a small business, like yours, and if you’ll have a good ROI, at the end of the day.

Well, we won’t tell you our opinion here. We’re going to prove the effectiveness of small business social media marketing through the following brief case studies.

Case #1: Askinosie Chocolate

Askinosie Chocolate is a bean-to-bar chocolate manufacturer from Missouri, which was among the 25 best small companies in the US, according to Forbes.

Although it’s a small company, Askinosie Chocolate maintains a great social presence counting over 21 thousand followers on Instagram! Their profile looks delicious and has a unique personality.

It highlights that it’s, basically, a family business, with father-and-daughter photos, other pictures featuring their products and new releases, along with their journeys to the farms they source their ingredients.

The key takeaway here: A small business can score great in brand awareness metrics, like follower count, on social if it’s consistent and publishes high-quality content.

Case #2: Uncle Bobbie’s Coffee & Books

Uncle Bobbie’s Coffee & Books is more than a coffee shop and bookstore in Philadelphia, PA. As they state on their official website: “It provides underserved communities with access to books and a space where everyone feels valued.”

This business uses social media platforms mainly for letting people know of news and events and for building relationships with its fans. Its account has more than 68 thousand followers and its posts get hundreds of likes! It seems like Uncle Bobbie has managed to build a strong community there.

The key takeaway here: A small local business like a shop can have good engagement rates, if it maintains its unique personality and offers people opportunities to engage, both online and offline.

Ready for Your Social Media Journey?

The bottom line is that small business social media marketing is working. There are many creative ways to promote your business on social media without investing all your marketing budget. You just have to start and see how it will go.

So, for starters, just book a live demo with us to see how Mentionlytics can help you deal with your social media challenges and win!