A social media strategy is a detailed blueprint that answers essential questions for the marketing goals for your business.
The what, when, how, and why for all the content you post on your business’s social pages.
Social media strategy isn’t just about posting tweets and liking photos. There needs to be a well-thought-out agenda behind what you’re posting and a goal you want to achieve. The more creative and specific your plan is, the more effective it will be. Keep it clear and concise, and don’t make it so lofty or too broad. Ensure that it’s unattainable or impossible to measure.
In this post, we’ll walk you through a six-step, easy plan to create a winning social media marketing strategy for your business.
What is social media marketing?
To understand how to create a social media marketing strategy, it’s crucial to understand it. Social media marketing is the art of using social media to sell or advertise a product, brand, or service.
Social media marketing helps businesses:
- Build engaged communities.
- Increase brand awareness.
- Sell products and services using commerce solutions.
- Provide customer service on social media platforms.
- Measure brand sentiment through social listening.
- Promote products and services to target audiences.
Choose goals that align with business objectives.
The first step to creating a quality social media strategy is to establish your goals. Without decided goals in place, you have no way to measure success.
Each of your goals should be S.M.A.R.T. goals:
- Specific
- Measurable
- Attainable
- Relevant
- Time-bound
This S.M.A.R.T. goal framework will guide your actions and ensure they are leading to tangible results.
Learn everything you can about your audience.
Work to create audience personas. Understanding who your demographic is and what they want to see on social media is vital. That way, you can create content that will make them all want to engage.
When it comes to creating personas and finding your target customer, you should know things like:
- Location
- Age
- Average income
- Interests
- Typical job title or industry
Click here for a simple guide and template for creating buyer personas.
Get to know your followers and customers as real people with actual wants and needs, and you will learn how to target and engage them on social media.
Research your competition.
Your competitors are probably already using social media. The good news is that you can learn from what they’re doing.
Your first step in getting to know them is conducting an analysis. With quality, competitive analysis, you will learn who your competition is and what they’re good at. You’ll get a sense of the industry norms, which will help you set some marketing targets of your own.
It will also help you identify some opportunities. Maybe one of your competitors has a solid following on Instagram but has put little effort into Twitter or Facebook. You might want to focus on those underserved networks of your audience instead of trying to win them over.
Perform a social media marketing audit.
If you’re already using social media, evaluate your current efforts. Your team needs to ask the following questions:
- Who is engaging with you?
- What’s working, and what’s not?
- Which platforms does your target audience use the most?
- How does your social media presence compare to others in your industry?
Once you gather those details, you’ll be ready to start thinking about how you can improve. Your audit should highlight the purpose of each of your social accounts – and if the purpose of an account isn’t clear, it’s time to decide if it’s worth keeping.
Set up accounts and improve profiles
Decide which networks and platforms to use (based upon your audit research, of course!). As you decide which networks you will use, you also need to refine your strategy.
Pro tip: Write out a mission statement for each. One sentence to keep you focused on your goals.
The next step is establishing up your profiles. Once you’ve decided which to focus on, it’s time to create those profiles. Or working on improving your existing ones to ensure they align with your strategy.
Be sure to complete all profile fields, utilize quality images, include keywords people would use to search for your business. And most importantly, use consistent branding (logos, color scheme, images, etc.) across networks so your profiles are easily recognizable.
Create a social media content calendar
Sharing great content is essential to your strategy, but it’s equally important to have a blueprint in place for when you’ll share content to get the most impact and response.
Ensure your social media content calendar lists the dates and times you publish content on each channel. This is the ideal place to plan all your online activities, from images and content to videos and blog posts.
Determine the right content mix to appeal to your customers and keep them engaged. Ensure your content strategy and calendar reflect the mission statement you’ve assigned your profiles to ensure you are supporting your business goals.
When you’re ready to put your plan into action, we’re here to help! Save time managing your social media strategy by contacting the social media experts at Sage Island!