Almost all businesses find social media overwhelming and that is because there are so many platforms out there, with new features added frequently for you to learn and integrate into your marketing plans.
What you, as a business, needs is a simple and sensible strategy that suits your goals and resources. This is where a social media strategy comes in. Your social media strategy is a framework for how you create, post, and engage with your social media content. It includes your social content guidelines, posting style, social media marketing campaigns, creative plans, and engagement strategy.
A social media strategy is vital to give your online marketing efforts a solid foundation. Once you have defined your goals and objectives–and made a plan for how to achieve them–you will be able to measure the return on investment for your online business and improve your efforts in the future too.
A successful social media strategy sets your brand apart from your competitors. However, creating a winning social media strategy can be daunting so here are some simple steps to help you achieve just that:
- Recognize your goals and target audience
The first thing to do when drawing out a social media strategy is to understand your goals because these goals will later serve as a metric of achievement. Each of your goals needs to have the following characteristics:
- Specific
- Measurable
- Attainable
- Relevant
- Time-Bound
Another factor to pay attention to is to establish who your target audience will be. After identifying them, you need to gather details about them like location, age, gender, interests, etc. Once you have established that, utilize social media and search engine analytics to get a better understanding of your target audience.
- Gather data
The more data you have, the better it will be for your to create your social media strategy. Besides conducting product research and target audience behaviour, you should also be aware of your competitors as this will give you an idea of what will work for you.
Gathering data is a very challenging and time-consuming task so make sure that you take advantage of social media management tools. These tools have features that will automatically generate data reports and monitor competitors in real-time, besides a number of other benefits.
- Conduct a social media audit
How are your social media platforms performing at the moment? Is your business doing well on popular social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, YoutTube, Instagram, and TikTok? Ask yourself these questions:
- How frequently are you posting?
- How are your post engagements?
- Are your posts aligned with your brand?
What your gather from an audit can help you recognize the aspects you should pay more attention to for your social media strategies. Doing so will also ensure that your efforts are streamlined toward your goals and target audience.
- Draft your social media strategy
Once you have completed gathering data and conducting a social media audit, it’s time to draft your social media strategy. Here are some of the factors you have to pay attention to:
- Based on your target audience’s psychographic and demographic analysis, you can decide which social media platforms to use by accurately predicting the channels they use the most. If you’re planning on using paid advertisements, decide which social media to use that has the highest chance of reaching your target audience.
- Step up your social media accounts. Make sure that all your accounts are business pages and that they are detailed and include keywords so that your target audience can find you easily.
- Make a content calendar. Doing so will save you a lot of time and effort and it will also ensure that you’re consistently providing your audience with quality content. A content calendar will also give you an idea of the types of content that work and the ones that need improvement.
- Keep adjusting and improving
Your ability to adjust and adapt will make your social media strategy more successful. Do more of the things that are effective and change those that aren’t bringing in results. This will be a difficult task but there is no one definite way to be successful in social media marketing.
With the above steps, you will be able to reach your audience more effectively. Remember to be consistent with posting and interacting with your audience on social media and to measure your results so that you can enhance and improve your strategy every month. Also bear in mind that any online marketing efforts you make are a waste of effort without a detailed strategy in place.
