How to Create Social Media Content for Small Businesses and Run Campaigns
If you’re a new business wondering how to create social media content and run campaigns for your biz, we’re walking you through everything you need to know to do it effectively.
Posted 2 months ago
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Guest PostPosted 2 months ago
As a small business, you won’t have the budget to compete with bigger brands.
However, social media is one channel that levels the playing field. If utilized correctly, small businesses can compete with larger companies for attention and market share — and succeed. Think Dollar Shave Club. The subscription-based razor company went from a startup to a billion-dollar brand in less than five years, partly due to its social media marketing strategy.
This doesn’t mean your business will also be worth a billion dollars through social media (but you never know!). However, there is enough evidence to show that social media content can help.
This blog post will discuss how you can create social media content and run effective campaigns.
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7 Social Media Content Marketing Tips
You can’t reap the benefits above by just posting anything. You need to follow social media marketing best practices to make the most of your efforts. Here are seven tips to create social media content and run effective campaigns:
Define Your Goals and Objectives
To guarantee your short and long-term success on social media, you need to set goals and objectives. They’ll inform the types of content you’ll create and how you measure success.
Consider your overall business goals. Then see how your social media strategy contributes to them. These are your social media goals. Once you have these, break them down into smaller objectives.
Let’s say your main business goal is to increase conversions. Then, one of your social media goals might be to boost awareness of your newest product. Based on that social media goal, one of your objectives could be to publish promotional product posts.
Another objective could be to create social media content with a CTA that directs people to a landing page or product page where customers can pre-order. Notice how all the business and social media goals and objectives align?
Know Your Audience
It’s easier to create social media content for your audience when you know who you’re talking to. When you understand your audience, you can easily attract new followers on Instagram, boost Facebook comments, and increase LinkedIn shares with your content. This puts you on track to achieving your social media marketing goals.
An effective way to know your audience is by creating personas. Personas are fictional representations of your ideal audience.
Start by analyzing the demographic information of your potential customers. This includes their age, location, occupation, income, educational level, gender, and hobbies. Next, look at their psychological attributes, such as behavior, personality types, attitude, and lifestyle preferences.
You can also gain insights about your audience through surveys and feedback from existing customers. Encourage new and old followers to ask questions via DM or openly in the comments section. Then take note of recurring statements.
Allocate a Budget
You can have the best social media marketing strategy in the world. But it is irrelevant if there are no resources to execute it.
Having a budget allows you to explore more content formats, advertise on new platforms, and invest in strategies that attract customers. It also helps you prove your ROI and justify your marketing spend.
Moreover, to justify future investments, such as new software or a larger social media team, you need to be able to quantify social media ROI.
To allocate a budget effectively, go back to your social media goals and objectives. What exactly do you need to achieve them?
That said, your social media marketing budget may cover:
- Content creation; graphic design, copywriting, and video production costs
- Paid social media campaigns; cost of advertising on social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter (Now, X), and LinkedIn
- Collaborations; influencer marketing, brand partnerships, etc..
- Social media management platforms, analytics tools, and other software to help you manage your social media presence
You’ll also need resources to train new employees and hire freelancers or a social media marketing agency to help with social media campaigns. Nevertheless, make room for miscellaneous expenses as these can throw a wrench into your plans.
Choose the Right Platforms
Consider your target audience, business, and the products or services you offer when choosing a social platform for your content.
You may be tempted to create a profile on every social media network — after all, it exposes you to a larger audience. The problem is that you’re a small business with limited resources.
If you run a lifestyle or beauty business, for instance, you can create social media content on visual-heavy platforms like Instagram and TikTok for the best results. They allow you to showcase your brand and products through visually appealing images or videos. Besides, this is usually where people who love these visuals, including your potential customers, hang out.
On the other hand, a business coaching service will fare better on LinkedIn, where business professionals looking for career tips are active.
e.l.f is one brand that chose the right social platform. The beauty brand knew that TikTok was where its target audience—Gen Z—hangs out.
So, they focused their social media efforts on the platform. The results have been astounding. Its Eyes, Lips, Face campaign above remains one of TikTok’s most successful ones, with over 10 billion views.
Diversify Your Content Mix
It’s a given that you need to create social media content your audience wants. But that’s not all you need to remember at the content creation stage. When creating your content, make sure you also diversify.
There are several reasons to diversify your content mix.
First, it helps you overcome the lack of inspiration that can come with consistently churning out content. Second, the algorithms (Instagram and Facebook, especially) favor variety.
Third, seeing a diverse content mix will increase the overall account engagement rate. People learn differently and prefer different types of content.
Video content may appeal to some people, and written content may appeal to others. So, Wendy’s covers all the bases by churning out a mix of witty memes, product images, GIFs, and Reels on its Instagram account:
Images and texts aside, other types of content to consider for your social media content plan include:
- Live videos: The most popular tools for sharing live videos include Facebook Live, YouTube Live, Instagram Live, and LinkedIn Live. Live videos such as tutorials, behind-the-scenes footage, and product demonstrations lend authenticity to your business. You can also post videos of interviews with industry experts or hold webinars. Their credibility will benefit your brand, and they’ll get more exposure as well. Find their contact information with email finder software and send your pitch.
- GIF/memes: They are popular with the younger generation and reflect different emotions.
- User-generated content (UGC): Many small businesses leverage this type because it shifts the creativity to the customers, who create the social media content.
Lastly, linking to other content is an excellent way to draw more followers to your website. When links are embedded into your social media posts, your followers can gain access to website content of interest to them.
If you don’t have the time to create copy for your social media content, don’t worry. Flick can help you with crafting captions–and it does this 10x faster, too. You can be assured the captions are on-brand as well. When all is done, just use the tool again to auto-generate hashtags based on the resulting content. How cool is that?
Develop a Content Calendar
You can streamline your content creation efforts by planning and scheduling future posts with a social media content calendar. This can help you create relevant and engaging social media content consistently and also visualize your ideas, and identify any gaps or overlaps.
But even with a calendar, publishing posts can be time-consuming, especially with a lean team. That’s where automation can be helpful.
Flick’s social media post scheduler allows you to schedule content and publish your posts automatically across multiple social media networks.
The tool uses your Instagram audience insights to highlight the best posting slots for each day, amplifying your reach to the best followers.
As a small business, developing and sticking to a content calendar frees up your time for other activities.
Measure, Analyze, and Adjust
Assume you’ve published all the content you need to post as part of your social media campaign. Great! Does that mean your job is done? Not really.
You’ll still need to determine the effectiveness of your social media efforts. That means looking at data to see what worked and what didn’t. Why is that important? Well, it can help you improve your future campaigns. Ultimately, you can optimize your social media efforts.
So, if you’ve set up a social media campaign to drive traffic to your website, you can use Google Analytics 4 (GA4) to monitor incoming social media traffic. If the traffic is low, then that means there might be something wrong with the types of social posts you publish.
You’ll need to go back to your audience persona to create social media content that truly resonates with them. Perhaps you used the wrong language style in your social media posts? Or maybe you need to incorporate more colorful visuals into your written posts to make them more engaging?
As part of your monitoring, you can analyze a number of social media metrics, including:
- Reach
- Impressions
- Likes
- Shares
- Comments
- Click-through rates
- Hashtag performance
But don’t analyze everything. Not all of them will be relevant to your campaigns. It’s best to just consider the metrics that align with your goals. For instance, if your goal is to increase Instagram engagement, there’s no need to analyze Facebook likes or shares.
The built-in social media analytics tool of each platform can help you analyze these metrics to a certain extent. But if you want more in-depth insights, use third-party tools.
Flick’s Instagram Analytics Tool, for instance, can help you monitor metrics you can’t find on Instagram analytics. You can know how well your profile converts into followers.
You can even know what percentage of your audience you’re reaching and compare social media posts.
With all that data, you can adjust your social strategy accordingly to ensure social media marketing success.
If used correctly, social media provides small businesses with the opportunity to compete with larger companies for attention and market share. But you need to know how to create social media content and run campaigns the right way.
Define your goals and objectives and know your audience. Also, allocate a budget for your social media marketing. Don’t forget to choose the right platforms and develop a content calendar. Diversify your content mix. As a final tip, measure your social media efforts so you can improve your campaigns.
If you follow these tips, you’ll achieve social media content marketing success. Good luck!
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Author’s Bio
Owen Baker is a content marketer for Voila Norbert, an online email verification tool. He has spent most of the last decade working online for a range of marketing companies. When he’s not busy writing, you can find him in the kitchen mastering new dishes.
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