In recent years, demand side management programs are in the spotlight due to the evolution of the smart grid and consumer-centric policies. Demand side management program contains many objectives one of the prime objective is to manage energy demand by certain change in consumer demand. This can be achieved by various methods such as financial discount and change in behavior through imparting education to support the stressed conditions of the grid. This paper demonstrates demand side management strategies based upon strategic conservation, peak clipping and load shifting techniques for future smart grids. The grid contains large number of controllable devices. The day before strategic conservation, peak clipping and load shifting techniques discussed in this paper are mathematically derived for minimization problem. A heuristic-based Whale optimization algorithm (WOA) was developed for solving this problem of minimization. Simulations are conducted on a test smart grid that contains a variation in loads in two service areas, one with residential consumers, and another with commercial consumers. WOA proves its efficacy by comparing the results with spider monkey optimization and biogeography based optimization. The simulation results show that proposed demand side management strategies achieve substantial savings, while reducing the peak load demand of the smart grid.