Social Media is an important platform for marketing of any size of the business in today’s digital era. The question “Why should we use social media for our business” quickly shifted to “How should we use social media for our business”. Whether your business is 24 hours old or 24 years old, creating an online presence is very important. Marketing yourself well on social media needs a very strong strategy and there comes the real challenge. First of all, let me explain what exactly strategy is. It is a well planned tactical strategy to define the main aim of your social media presence, your goals and to set parameters deciding what to achieve and how to achieve. Today we will learn how you should plan your social media strategy in few simple steps:
Set your Objectives & Goals
First of all you need to specify your goals and objectives. What exactly do you aim for? Do you want brand awareness, customer engagement or you want conversions? There are different strategies for different goals. Decide what you want from your audience. If you want brand awareness then you have to focus on attracting more and more unique visitors to your website. If you aim for customer engagement then your focus should be getting more comments & likes on your social media posts. Keep your goals clear in your mind before planning your strategy. The major goal ideas are basically:
- Brand Awareness
- Customer Engagement
- Lead Generation
- Generate Revenue
- Grow Signups, newsletters, subscriptions
- Build a Community
- More Traffic to your Website
- Increase Press Mentions
Audit your current Social Presence
Before you start with your plan; start with auditing yourself where your social presence stands currently. Keep the following points in mind:
- Check which media you are currently active on
- Decide if it is the best social media as per your business goals. Not all social media works for all kind of businesses.
- Keep a note of your current followers count.
- Compare your profile with your competitors’ profile and see what all changes you need to implement.
Find your Ideal Customer
You really need to be specific with this part. Imagine you are doing your marketing with all the planning, consistency and dedication but if the audience that you are targeting is not your potential customers then there is no point of all that hard work. Even the best business marketing strategies fail if you are targeting the wrong audience. You need to find out your buyer persona from the population and target them to make your strategies work and ultimately achieve your goals.
Keep an eye on your Competitors
It is very important to be well aware with your competitors. Your competitors can tell you a lot about what strategies to pick and what all to do, after all they are targeting the same customers as you are. You can learn a lot from their successes and mistakes and implement them while planning your strategies. Pick some of your top competitors, check their social media pages and get an idea about the posts that are getting more engagements and research them.
Plan Your Content
It is very important to have an attractive and engaging content in order to drive audience’s attention. If the content that you are posting on your social media is not engaging enough then you may not drive enough attention and you may even lose your current followers. You need to deliver fresh and engaging content consistently to get more visibility from new visitors and retain existing followers.
The different types of contents that you can share are:
- Blog Posts
- Videos
- Images
- Infographics
- Company News
- News
- eBooks
Invest in a Tool
When Focussing on social media, investing in a good social media management tool is very important. The main feature and benefit of such tool is that it lets you schedule posts for future so you never miss your deadline and you can schedule post as per your content calendar. Some of the tools are HootSuite, Sprout Social, Buffer, Social Oomph etc.
Track, Analyze & Optimize
Now when you have planned everything then comes the step where you need to measure whether the efforts that you are putting is paying off. It is time to track, analyze and implement necessary changes as required. Marketing is solely based on trial & error. You need to keep on optimizing your measures to improve your chances of success.