12 Easy Steps to Start Marketing Your Business on Social Media for Free

POV: you’re a small business with a limited budget, and social media marketing sounds daunting.

Yet, social media can bring you closer to your target customers and generate traffic to other channels, such as a newsletter sign-up or your online store. With just a bit of practice—and quite inexpensively—you’ll be able to expertly use trends and hashtags to boost brand awareness (while looking #lit).

In this article, we break down how to market your business on social media, using plenty of examples, practical tips, and types of social media marketing tools you can use. Let’s jump right in.

Research Your Audience

About half the US population uses social media platforms like YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram. With each platform attracting different users, you need to be specific about who you’re targeting and what they want. This helps you create engaging content that better informs and converts your audience.

Here’s what you might want to research to better understand your business or consumer audience.

Business Customers

• Research which seniority level, department, and profession is most likely to buy your product.
• Check the links between your target customer’s career choice and matching personality types using free tools like 16 Personalities.
• Understand their buying priorities, including product features, brand values, and pricing.

Consumer Customers

• Identify your target audience’s ideal demographics, including age, location, household size, and disposable income.
• Pinpoint their top hobbies and interests, such as sports, music, and film preferences.
• Identify which products your social media audience is most interested in, including preferences like price brackets, colors, and store locations.
• Understand how they use technology, including mobile versus desktop use, preferred social platforms, attention span on social channels, and preferred post length.

Build customer personas—if your target audience were a person, who would they be? Include age, location, gender identity, hobbies, profession, personality, and preferences. All this detail can be used later to target your social media ads and better tailor your marketing messaging.

Set SMART Goals

Define what social media success looks like. This way, you can measure and assess progress and improve your activity.

Let the SMART framework guide you. Here are some examples of SMART goals.

Unsure what goals to set? Here’s a quick rule of thumb.

• Increasing followers and impressions helps grow brand awareness.
• Boosting comment numbers helps build community.
• Increasing the number of likes helps grow reach.
• Boosting re-shares helps build reputation and capture new viewers.

Define Your Brand’s Tone of Voice

Craft your tone of voice by integrating your brand values with your audience’s expectations. Here are our top tips to ace this task.

• Brainstorm with your team: Consider your mission, values, and unique selling points (USPs). Ask creative questions like “What animal best represents our brand?”
• Summarize how customers perceive your products: Are you the friendly, knowledgeable provider, or upmarket and exclusive? Explore multiple options and narrow it down to between three and five characteristics.
• Conduct audience tests: For instance, interview a few target customers or survey your current customer base. Ask questions like, “How would you describe your reaction if we published the following Facebook post: [post content]?”

Use these exercises to write a tone of voice document. This can be as detailed as you like, including examples and tips for marketers, but start high-level by using human attributes. For instance, your tone could be “active, sociable, and inspiring,” or “reliable, down-to-earth, and precise.”

Pick Two to Three Appropriate Social Media Platforms

Three words: quality over quantity.

Targeting all social platforms at once can be expensive and produce lower-quality results. Instead, pick the two or three your target audience is most likely to use.

Largely, here’s what the top social platforms are suitable for.

• LinkedIn: Great for B2B audiences and professional consumer niches
• Instagram: Great for design-led brands (such as fashion and hospitality) and general consumer marketing 
• Facebook: Great for general brand awareness and live messaging
• X (formerly, Twitter): Great for real-time engagement and building a reputation
• TikTok: Great for engaging millennial and Gen Z groups and for video content
• YouTube: Great for educating audiences and long-form videos

Hop on Relevant Trends

Occasional trend-hopping can increase your followership, engage your audience, and make your brand feel up-to-speed with popular culture. You must, however, ensure trends resonate with your business values, tone of voice, and target audience. 

Do: Create a brand-affirming meme based on a current television show that your audience is likely to be engaging with. By appealing to your audience’s personal interests you can make your business seem relatable and relevant.

Don’t: Ask your employees to do the ice-bucket challenge (or any other potentially risky behaviors that are not aligned to your business goals). This could cause your audience harm and will likely not build positive associations with your audience in the same way

Need more tips?

• Check popular hashtags and trending topics on your chosen platforms. Craft new posts that include relevant ones. 
• Create images or videos relating to buzzworthy events in your audience’s geolocation. Think Oscars, big sporting events, or a beloved musician’s comeback.
• Adopt platform-specific lingo. Examples include “POV” (point of view) on TikTok and replacing words with emojis in Instagram captions.

Create Evergreen Content

Your evergreen posts are everyday content not tied to specific trends, company events, or announcements. These build steady awareness and followership over time. Posts can describe how your products are designed, what makes them different, and why customers love them. For instance, a local cafe might share videos of baristas expertly making a brew. 

Want inspiration? Check what brands in your industry—or with similar tones of voice—are posting. Additionally, survey your team for fresh ideas.

The key is consistency, so ensure you post evergreen content weekly. Depending on your SMART goals and internal resources, aim to post between three weekly to 10+ daily.

Create Time-Sensitive Content

Time-sensitive content encourages engagement and action—including taking the next steps such as visiting your website. It can include:

• Big company announcements, such as product or partnership launches.
• Official statements on, say, new legislation impacting your industry.
• Invitations to read or watch fresh content, such as blogs, reports, and videos.
• Joining live events such as industry-focused webinars, conferences, and Q&A

Reuse and Recycle Content

You probably already have marketing collateral showcasing your services and values. Reuse the content by extracting and sharing bite-sized information. Also, recycle it by adding new twists to the mini-versions.

For instance:

Do: Extract a 20-second clip from a five-minute customer testimonial and caption it with more background about the specific product or benefit in the mini-clip. 

Don’t: Share the 20-second version with a caption that says “This clip is from a longer video— watch it here: [link].”

You can cut longer marketing videos into several clips and schedule them, with descriptive captions, as a social media campaign. Likewise, you might promote distinct takeaways from recent blogs or white papers over a month-long series of posts.

Include Calls to Action

Some posts are solely informative, while others drive audiences to take action. Plus, personalizing your social media calls to action based on audience preferences can convert up to three times more users than generic prompts like “Shop now.” 

Calls to action include:

• Sign up for our newsletter.
• Book a webinar ticket.
• Use the code [insert code] to get 20% off your first purchase.

However, one-off calls aren’t enough to increase conversion. Some users need reminders, while others may not see your first post in their feeds. So, create a multi-post campaign with the same call to action, but with different messaging. 

For example, say you’re promoting an event, campaign posts may include the speaker lineup, session descriptions, topic-based research, and guest reviews from past events.

Create a Content Schedule

Schedule your social content using a content calendar to keep track of all your plans and ensure you’re providing a variety of content types (including calls to action, information, and trending reactive posts or ones with entertainment value).

This could be as simple as listing out dates in a spreadsheet and writing post ideas and plans into each upcoming day or week. However, social media marketing platforms including Hubspot and Buffer let you do this within their tools in an even easier way. You can use their calendar views to look ahead to the upcoming weeks and months and schedule social posts across multiple channels. They even tell you when to post for maximum engagement.

Generate Traffic to Your Accounts

Visualize a funnel to represent user engagement. To increase the number of users who like, comment on, and follow your content, you need enough eyeballs at the top of the funnel viewing your posts or visiting your page, so that more will trickle “down the funnel” and become your key brand advocates.

Here are our quick tips to generate traffic and keep growing the number of people who could turn into your most engaged and valuable, bottom-of-funnel audience:

• Add social media buttons (linking to your account) to assets, including your website, marketing emails, and employee email signatures.
• Build relationships with micro-influencers. These are individuals with a mid-level following (say, 50,000 followers) that includes your target audience. Ask them to promote your brand in their posts, or set up partnerships in exchange for cross promotion, or payment, if you have the budget for this.  
• Engage regularly with followers, brands, and influencers connected to your market. You could even follow some of your active followers and add informative comments on their content.
• Mention people and brands in your posts. First, it helps your posts feature on their followers’ news feeds. Second, it encourages them to re-share your content, further boosting your reach. You can tag employees, clients, partners, or other brand-aligned accounts.

Analyze Audience Engagement

By analyzing your social content’s performance, you can identify what resonates with your audience and supply more of it. Don’t worry—you don’t need a statistics degree to do this.

Here’s the quick version:

First, export an analytics report from the social platform you use (say, for the last six months.) In the spreadsheet, create new columns and label individual posts. For instance, post labels could refer to a topic (product feature vs event announcement), length (short, medium, or long), or tone (witty vs factual).

Then, rank posts according to engagement metrics such as impressions, likes, or comments. Look for patterns. For instance, you might notice that posts with many likes are associated with specific labels—like “witty” or “short.”

Write down hypotheses (theories) based on this exercise. Test them using future content over the next, say, three months. For example, create more witty, short posts. Then, repeat the exercise. If your metrics increase based on this test, keep the winning strategy and continue trialing other hypotheses.

Finally—Should You Pay for Ads?

You don’t have to pay for social media ads, especially if you’re seeing month-on-month metric improvement. That said, paid ads can increase brand awareness and sales conversion when used appropriately. 

To start, focus your ad budget on one or two platforms where your customers are most likely to spend time. Create a combination of visuals and text that includes a clear pain point, solution, and call to action. Then, use social media ad tools to define your target audience based on factors from your audience research, like location, age, interests, and interactions with your brand or similar accounts.