How 5 small brands optimized their social media strategy

For SMEs, it’s crucial to get the most out of their digital marketing spend.

And by leveraging deep consumer insight, ensuring they know the whole story behind their target audience’s actions, SMEs can know exactly how to allocate their budget, driving engagement and brand awareness through a social media marketing plan.

Here are some brands doing it right.

1. Letterfolk

The true essence of an SME, this husband-and-wife-run company specializes in creating beautifully-made felt letter boards. They come with a full set of characters, which the consumer can use creatively to spell out a message and decorate their home in a highly personalized way.

In a bid to achieve the greatest ROI possible, the team has focused primarily on Instagram.

And it makes sense.

The image-centric social platform allows the brand to not only show off their product, but also create fun, relatable images that will entice social media users to tag others and share posts.

2. Bloom & Wild

This flower subscription service knows how to work social media to its benefit.

Across its online marketing via social media profiles, the brand consistently puts the consumers in focus, encouraging its customers to share photos of the flowers they receive.

This social media marketing strategy, along with engaging competitions and beautiful seasonal content, makes its social channels a joy for consumers, proving a huge budget isn’t always necessary to have a strong social presence.

3. NotOnTheHighStreet.com

NotOnTheHighStreet.com is the epitome of a successful SME powering their marketing beyond a big budget.

By knowing its consumers’ style and product needs, the brand works with over 5,000 relevant partners that fill the site with unique products.

Specializing in thoughtful gifts you can’t find elsewhere, the site showcases everything from jewellery-makers to chocolatiers, and incorporates stunning photography throughout.

Beyond its own site, the brand also nurtures a highly engaging, consumer-centric social media presence, consistently jumping on relevant, trending topics and touting its consumers’ product images and reviews across their social media channels.

4. Canva

Graphic design tool website, Canva, was born in 2007 when founder Melanie Perkins, a former graphic design teacher, found students often struggled to learn the basics. The site is now used by nearly 300,000 marketers, bloggers, and small business owners around the world.

For its marketing efforts, the brand has stuck with its initial mission to educate.

For example, its popular posts on Instagram aim to not only showcase beautiful imagery, but also show what lies underneath the surface, and how to make good use of colors and fonts.

The success of these efforts lies in the brand being confident in what its users want to see.

5. AND UNION

Modernist craft beer. Who saw it coming?

AND UNION works with small Bavarian brewmasters to create craft lagers and ales. The brand has a strong identity in its modernism and its purity, rationality and simplicity, claiming to “love, live by and follow this philosophy.”

But while its methods are traditional, its product design and social media aesthetic are striking.

The craft beer market is crowded at the moment, yet AND UNION firmly extricates itself from the crowd by combining a great product with an innovating brand message that’s infinitely shareable on social media networks.

Using consumer insight to optimize your social strategy

When you have a limited budget, it’s crucial to know how to allocate it right, and to pick the best social networks for maximum ROI.

SMEs in particular need to make the most of their marketing, which is why in-depth consumer research is so crucial.

With consumer data that goes beyond the ordinary, you can go far past traditional demographic data to find out the why behind the what, and get a true picture of your target audiences’ social media usage.

In the past, having this kind of research at hand was only possible for large corporations and media organizations with the budgets that allowed for extensive time and resource.

Now, all you need is a single source for all your consumer data needs.

GlobalWebIndex conducts a global survey that’s fully opt-in, leveraging a panel of 22 million consumers (the largest in the world), to give SMEs a true, detailed representation of their target market and buyer personas.

Being able to access this research as and when it’s needed means knowing not only who and where your target consumers are, but the motivations behind their actions.

This is how you optimize a social media strategy, consistently placing your brand in the right spotlight.