Social media marketing uses social media platforms to connect and engage with your target customers on social media channels, for example, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Pinterest. Social media is widely used in digital marketing to help businesses raise brand awareness, increase web traffic, generate more leads, and improve customer engagement.

Social media is no longer a ‘nice to have’ for businesses it’s a ‘must have’. Using social media to market your business, product and services enables you to connect directly with your target audience, raise brand awareness, create conversations, drive website traffic and leads and grow your business.

Social media is a great way for small business to promote products/services, grow an audience, increase awareness and generate leads. Best of all, organic social media is free to use, and there aren’t many marketing channels that can say that! Paid targeted advertising really does put your brand in front of your audience in a way that most other ad channels can’t.

If you haven’t used paid advertising or remarketing before, it’s hard to know what will work and what won’t. A/B testing your paid campaigns with a small ad spend at first, before you create a full paid social media campaign, allows you to test different creatives, audience profiles, targeting and keywords so that you can analyse which channels, ad types and targeting is right for your business, products and services.

Posting content regularly from your personal profile, company page and into groups enables you to showcase and raise awareness of your business. Connecting with your target audience on LinkedIn allows you to increase the organic reach of the content you share and is a great way to open up conversations. Sharing updates, blogs, videos and white papers are a great way to create significant interest in you and your brand.

Firstly, stary by identifying exactly who your target audience is, what channels they will be most active on, what type of content will work for them and each channel and focus on those. Posting to a channel that isn’t relevant for your audience or content is a waste of your time and resource.

Next, make sure that for all your social channels, your BIOs are complete and consistent and that they clearly explain what you do and check that all your contact details are full. Having eye-catching header images, the right size logo and profile picture are really important here. 

Then, create a content calendar. Note key dates, awareness days, events that you might be attending and add-in content that will be of specific interest to your target audience, including sharing of 3rd party content. Investing in a scheduling tool that allows you to plan and schedule content in advance is a great way to save time.

Finally, take note of what’s working and what’s not and tailor your content plan to maximise the most engaging content for your audience.