Creating a social media strategy for your business is important towards growing a valuable brand on the web. Whether you’re creating content for virality or for ranking on google, it’s important to have a brilliant social media strategy that mirrors the objectives of your business.
Every piece of your social media strategy serves the objectives you set. You simply can’t move forward without knowing what you’re target is, you need something you are gunning for.
Look closely at your company’s overall needs and decide how you want to use social media to contribute to reaching them.
You’ll undoubtedly come up with several personalized goals, but there are a few that all companies should include in their strategy, increasing brand awareness, retaining customers and reducing marketing costs are relevant to everyone.
First, set your goals and objectives.
I suggest you choose two primary goals and two secondary goals to achieve on social media, Having too many goals distracts you and you’ll end up achieving none.
Set Marketing Objectives
Goals aren’t terribly useful if you don’t have specific parameters that define when each is achieved. For example, if one of your primary goals is generating leads and sales, how many leads and sales do you have to generate before you consider that goal a success?
Marketing objectives define how you get from Point A (an unfulfilled goal) to Point B (a successfully fulfilled goal). You can determine your objectives with the S-M-A-R-T approach: Make your objectives specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound.
Measurement is important to your strategy
If your goal is to generate leads and sales, a specific marketing objective may be to increase leads by 20%. In order to measure your progress, choose which analytics and tracking tools you need to have in place.
Setting yourself up for failure is never a good idea. If you set an objective of increasing sales by 1,000%, it’s doubtful you’ll meet it. Choose objectives you can achieve, given the resources you have.
You’ve taken the time to refine your goals so they’re relevant to your company, so extend that same consideration to your objectives. If you want to get support from your C-level executives, ensure your objectives are relevant to the company’s overall vision.
Attaching a timeframe to your efforts is imperative. When do you intend to achieve your goal(s)? Next month? By the end of this year?
Your marketing objective of increasing leads by 50% may be specific, measurable, achievable and relevant, but if you don’t set a deadline for achieving the goal, your efforts, resources and attention may be pulled in other directions.
Identify Ideal Customers
If a business is suffering from low engagement on their social profiles, it’s usually because they don’t have an accurate ideal customer profile.
Buyer personas help you define and target the right people, in the right places, at the right times with the right messages.
When you know your target audience’s age, occupation, income, interests, pains, problems, obstacles, habits, likes, dislikes, motivations and objections, then it’s easier and cheaper to target them on social or any other media.
Conduct a social media audit
Prior to creating your social media marketing plan, you need to assess your current social media use and how it’s working. This means figuring out who is currently connecting with you via social, which social media sites your target market uses, and how your social media presence compares to your competitors’.
Once you’ve conducted your audit you should have a clear picture of every social account representing your business, who runs or controls them, and what purpose they serve. This inventory should be maintained regularly, especially as you scale your business.
It should also be evident which accounts need to be updated and which need to be deleted altogether. If your audit uncovers fraudulent accounts—a fake branded Twitter profile, for example report them. Reporting fraudulent accounts will help ensure that people searching for you online only connect with the accounts you manage.
