5 social media content strategy tips for your small business

In this day and age, to build a successful brand, you have to have a social media strategy. Social media offers almost unlimited possibilities for small businesses, especially those with limited budgets. If you’re unsure where to start, we’ve put together some tips, tricks, and tried and tested formulas to help you create a successful social media strategy.

Your social media strategy should outline how you want to use social media to promote your small business and achieve your business goals. Your strategy is a roadmap to keep your socials on track, including your content, audience, and results. You should check in with your strategy regularly to ensure you’re getting closer to reaching your goals. 

The easiest way to create a winning strategy is by following a formula that works. The SOSTAC model is a tried and tested formula that tells you exactly where to focus your attention.

Ready to start crafting your successful social media strategy? Here are our top 5 tips for slaying your socials.

Your first step should be to look into your competitor brands and businesses. You’re not the only player on the market, so to stand out from your competitors, you must get familiar with their products, audience, and social media presence.

This can also help you avoid similar branding or duplicating your competitors’ content — like this mistake TicTac and Mentos made by posting similar graphics on their Instagram profiles.

To identify and analyze your social media competitors thoroughly, here are some questions to consider:

You can fully automate your competitor analysis using third-party social media analytics tools like Sotrender.

Why do you need to set goals and objectives? Aside from keeping you and your team accountable, they can help you track your strategy’s success and progress and let you know if you’re heading in the right direction.

You should check your objectives regularly to ensure you’re ticking off tasks and meeting deadlines. If you’re not achieving results or meeting deadlines, it’s a clear sign you should update your strategy.

The easiest way to set and track your goals is with SMART goals. By using this method, you can ensure your goals are:

Following this formula will make planning more precise and setting goals easier.

Knowing your audience is the most crucial element of your strategy. Before promoting your products or services, you must know who you’re selling them to! Learn everything you can about them, such as their gender, age, and location, as well as their challenges, interests, and daily routines. 

Consequently, you’ll also need to understand their most-used social media channels. This will strongly impact your social media strategy — investing in platforms your audience isn’t active on doesn’t make sense.

For example, if you’re targeting young adults, they are most likely avid TikTok users. So if you’re considering using TikTok over Instagram as your primary communication channel, you may need to readjust your strategy. 

As a freelancer or small business owner, you should use all available free channels. However, you probably won’t have the budget to run paid ads on every social platform. Invest in the channels your audience frequents and that you feel most confident with.

Use time-saving AI tools and social media templates to keep your posts and branding consistent across channels.

Visual content is critical to building a brand’s social media presence. After all, this attracts users to a profile, engages them, and makes them more likely to stay.

However, when working as a freelancer or for a small brand, you may not have the capacity or skills to spend hours in Photoshop or other advanced design tools. The good news is many online content creation tools can help you deliver professional graphic designs.

For example, Envato enables you to quickly, easily, and affordably create unique social media content aligned with your branding. From Instagram to YouTube, it offers everything you need on a day-to-day basis for your social media video content. You can take advantage of Envato’s fantastic selection of assets and AI tools to streamline your content creation process.

Another example of a useful content creation tool is an AI caption generator, as it helps you easily create catchy and engaging captions for your posts and stories.

Your branding (including your logo, tagline, color palette, fonts, etc.) must remain consistent to build a solid social media presence. Utilizing content creation tools can make this much more manageable.  

Whether you’re setting up your first social media profile or have been working in digital marketing for years, there’s always room for improvement.

You’ve already analyzed your social media competitors, but monitoring your overall results is critical to a successful social media strategy. Your SMART goals are one thing, but you must also assess the bigger picture of your strategy’s performance.

This is where external social media analytics apps will come in handy. Although social media channels usually offer built-in analytics, third-party tools store data for all your profiles under one roof and provide a unified presentation.

By using them, you’ll be able to learn:

Besides analyzing your social media content’s performance, you need to stay on top of your content creation process, and that’s where AI-generated marketing content comes in handy.

AI is no longer a futuristic concept; it’s a powerful tool accessible to small businesses that can revolutionize your social media content strategy and speed up your processes, significantly boosting your efficiency and impact.

Here’s how you can leverage AI in social media marketing, along with actionable advice and AI content marketing tools:

Struggling with content ideas? AI can be your endless wellspring of inspiration.

Instead of staring at a blank screen, use AI writing assistants like ChatGPT, Gemini, or Jasper AI to kickstart your brainstorming sessions. Input keywords related to your business, industry trends, or audience pain points. Let the AI generate a range of potential topics, angles, social media post ideas, and even outlines.

Compelling visuals are crucial for social media engagement. Envato’s AI tools can help you create stunning graphics and images without needing a dedicated designer.

Crafting engaging and effective captions can be time-consuming. AI can help you write compelling copy and optimize it for your audience and platform.

General AI writing assistants like Copy.ai, Jasper AI, or ChatGPT are excellent for generating captions, headlines, and call-to-actions. Some social media management platforms like Hootsuite and Buffer also have built-in AI writing assistants for generating captions and hashtags. Many creators use an AI detector to refine the tone and ensure that AI-generated content reads naturally before posting.

Beyond content creation, AI can optimize your posting schedule and even predict post performance.

Look for social media management tools with AI features that suggest optimal posting times based on your audience’s activity patterns. Some tools can even predict engagement levels for different types of content, allowing you to fine-tune your strategy before publishing.

Platforms like Social Champ, FeedHive, and Buffer offer AI-powered features for scheduling, content recycling, and performance predictions.

AI can help you delve deeper into your audience’s preferences and deliver more personalized content.

While not directly for content creation, using AI for sentiment analysis on comments and mentions can give you insights into what your audience genuinely feels. This understanding can then inform your content strategy, allowing you to create more relevant and impactful posts. AI can also help identify trends your audience is interested in, so you can create timely and relevant content.

Tools focused on social listening and analytics (e.g., Brand24) often incorporate AI to process large datasets and extract actionable insights.

These AI content marketing tools are just a few ways to empower small businesses like yours. Take your time to experiment, streamline processes, boost your creativity, and drive engagement and growth.

As a small business or freelancer, DIY is a must. When creating your social media strategy, remember to leverage the AI in content creation, assess your audience, analyze your competitors, test various content creation tools, set SMART goals, and track them regularly.

Happy posting!