A strategy is needed whenever you run a business. Without it, your operations lead to chaos. Having a strategy and a plan is necessary in order to reach your business goals. Even posting on social media needs a strategy.
Do you use the same social media strategy for each of your business pages? If so, how much success have you achieved so far?
If your answer is not much, then it is time for you to create a more comprehensive social media marketing strategy. Each social media platform requires a different marketing persona. They also have different types of consumers in terms of age group and preferences. An overall social media strategy that will contain separate strategies per platform will be good in promoting your business.
For example, since LinkedIn is the only platform that caters to business-to-business companies, a different strategy is necessary. Unlike Facebook and Instagram, which can have almost the same techniques when posting.
5 Easy Steps in Creating an Effective Social Media Strategy for Businesses That You Can Do
Creating a strategy is easy if you know where to start. Having an idea of what to do will often lead to the next steps. As mentioned earlier, a different social media strategy for each social platform will greatly benefit your marketing campaigns.
Below are five easy steps to effectively create a social media strategy:
1. Create a list of social media marketing goals
The Plus Side of Having Excellent Customer Service for Your Business
Your goals should be:
- Specific
- Measurable
- Attainable
- Relevant
- Timely
When setting your business goals, you should be clear about the things that you want to achieve. It could be either increasing engagements or increasing sales.
Either way, you should know what you want in order for you to know what you need to do. Tracking the performance of your content is important. However, when you are setting a goal, make sure that it is not too ideal. You would want to set a goal that you can achieve within a given period of time and not something that is just there for the sake of it being there.
The analytics of your postings would tell you whether you’re getting closer and closer to achieving your goal or not. Social media platforms have some tools for measuring the performance of your content. Measuring the performance of your content would greatly help you keep your content relevant to your business goals. Make sure that you create content that will help you achieve the goals that you set. Since you limit your goals to attainable goals, you should be able to estimate when you should have reached your goal. Impose deadlines in order to be able to know whether your social media marketing strategy was a success or it needs adjusting.
2. Know your target audience
To make it easier to know your target audience by knowing who are the ones that would be interested in buying your product or availing of your service. The categories that you may consider are age, budget, needs, and preferences. It would then be easier for you to know what social media platforms they use the most when you have figured this out. This would help you determine what social media platforms you should use. Since different types of content could be posted for every social media platform, you can also determine what type of content you would be posting. Knowing your target audience is very important because your social media marketing strategy needs to be patterned to their preferences.
3. Look for social media platforms that are suitable for your business
Knowing where to post would greatly help the efficiency and effectiveness of your social media marketing strategy. You might have noticed that you would see lots and lots of advertisements hanging or posted somewhere everywhere you go. You could also see them on billboards or huge screens. These are strategic locations that your target audience would most likely notice. You could apply this in your social media marketing strategy.
By knowing what social media networks your target audience use, you would then understand what social media platforms would help achieve your social media marketing goals. You would not want to spend your time and money on social media networks that your target audience is not interested in. In order to somehow know where your target audience spends most of their time, you may conduct your research or ask them out through conducting a survey. For starters, you may want to start with the most popular social media networks like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
4. Create engaging content
Social media networks were made primarily for interaction and entertainment. The promotions and advertisements that you find when scrolling through a particular social media network are just an added feature of social media networks that enable businesses to interact with their desired customers. As a social media manager, you should take note of this and make sure that you balance your content. Posting too many promotions might bore your audience. You also need to post some engaging, entertaining, or informative content from time to time. Be creative and set up a well-planned content calendar to keep your audience coming back for more.
5. Monitor insights to track performance and adjust accordingly
Social media networks have analytic tools that will help you track your marketing campaign’s performance. It may even track your overall social media marketing strategy. Tracking your performance will help you determine if you are still going in the direction. Remember that you are creating content for your audience and not just for marketing your business. By tracking the performance of your strategy, you can determine whether you are doing something wrong or when something is not working for you. After some troubleshooting, all you have to do is make some changes that you think will help you achieve the goals that you have set.
Formulating a social media marketing strategy appropriate for your business is not that tricky. You just have to know the right way to do it. As a business owner, you want to be investing your money in the right places. Having a well-planned social media marketing strategy will help you do just that. Knowing what content to create and where to post them are the most important among all the steps that were mentioned. However, in order for you to know that, you must first set your goal and know what content your target audience would prefer. After gathering the right information and finally determining what social media platform fits your business, you just have to check whether your social media marketing strategy is working. If not, make the necessary adjustments. You’ll have a working social media strategy in no time.
