5 Proven Social Media Marketing Strategies to Grow Your Small Business

As a small business owner, social media presents a huge opportunity to expand your reach, drive business growth, and increase your market share.

With over 5 billion daily active social media users, social media provides invaluable avenues to connect with your customers authentically.

Image via DataReportal

But with so many options, where should you focus your efforts?

The key is being strategic and purposeful with your social media marketing approach.

So, if you’re looking for social media marketing strategies to grow a small business, you’re in the right spot. We present the five proven tactics that have worked for us.

5 Social Media Marketing Strategies to Grow a Small Business

Social media is among the top ways to boost your brand’s online visibility. As this Semrush survey shows, it is the leading avenue that small businesses use to promote their content organically.

Image via Semrush

Let’s explore the top social media marketing strategies to grow a small business.

1. Know Your Target Audience

Understanding your target audience is among the first social media marketing strategies to grow a small business. Before anything else, you need to understand your ideal customer.

What are their demographics, interests, pain points, and needs?

How do they behave on social platforms?

Taking time to understand your audience and creating buyer personas pays off. It allows you to create tailored content that truly resonates and helps you connect with them meaningfully.

It also strengthens your SEO strategy by allowing you to create and optimize social content using the keywords your audience searches for.

Moreover, per the previously cited Semrush survey, 47% of respondents acknowledged the significance of audience research as the main factor in marketing success. So, this is one of the most important social media marketing strategies you need to implement.

2. Pick the Right Platforms for Your Social Media Marketing Strategies

Choosing the right platform is crucial to social media marketing success. A platform that actively engages your target audience can drive your business growth.

With so many social media platforms, it’s tempting to be everywhere at once. But, it’s better to focus on just a few and invest in stellar optimized content that aligns with your audience.

Consider which platforms your ideal customers actively use and which accommodate modern contactless marketing tactics. Here’s an overview of the most popular social media platforms for you to choose from.

Image via Backlinko

3. Embrace Brand Ambassador Marketing

One social media marketing strategy for growing a small business is brand ambassador marketing. This involves turning your most loyal customers, followers, and fans into brand ambassadors and advocates.

Choose ambassadors who can effectively personify your brand values and align well with your brand image. Ensure they promote your brand authentically and naturally instead of being promotional.

For instance, Lululemon partnered with Canadian pro tennis player Leylah Annie Fernandez to showcase its leggings in a photoshoot.

Image via Instagram

Lululemon leveraged Leylah’s credibility and 349K+ followers to reach new potential customers and increase organic traffic. As a professional athlete, Leylah was a natural fit for being Lululemon’s brand ambassador.

Brand ambassador marketing has enormous benefits, from authentic endorsements from real users to fostering loyalty and UGC. It’s also affordable and can grow your business and gain valuable word-of-mouth exposure.

4. Use High-Quality Visuals

Using high-quality, engaging visuals is a critical social media marketing strategy for small businesses to grow. Visual content like photos, videos, and infographics garner more attention and engagement on social platforms than text-heavy posts.

Users are drawn to eye-catching and vivid imagery, making them pause and notice.

To leverage this:

• Invest in professional, high-quality visual assets like product photos, lifestyle images, and brand videos to share on social media. Tailor the visuals’ color, texture, and styles to your brand identity.
• Employ graphic design tools like Canva to easily create social media graphics, banners, and visual quotes.

Using high-quality visuals can help boost your brand’s social media reach. Visuals grab attention quickly as users scroll through their feeds, making them more likely to pause, like, comment, and share visual content.

This signals to the platform’s algorithm that the content is engaging, leading to increased reach.

5. Post Regularly and Consistently

Frequency is among the top elements that social media algorithms gauge when ranking content. Accounts that post frequently tend to appear higher in users’ feeds and search results.

There’s no one-size-fits-all posting schedule; it depends on on your platform. According to Hootsuite, this is how often you should post.

Image via Hootsuite

Creating an editorial calendar outlining relevant topics, campaigns, and series to promote can help plan your content and posting frequency. This ensures you always have great content lined up.

Consider using social media management tools to schedule content in advance and post it according to your schedule. Here is Attrock’s curated list of several effective tools to use.

Posting consistently helps build authority and solidifies your followers’ trust that you deliver value consistently.

Bottom Line on Social Media Marketing Strategies

Use these five social media marketing strategies to authentically grow your small business by engaging with your audience.

As you implement these strategies, leverage social media management tools to provide data and analytics. This will help you be flexible and refine your strategy over time. Start applying these strategies and watch your small business expand.

Grow your business by engaging and educating your ideal audience. Get a fresh perspective on your marketing with a free assessment today.