Having a strategy for your social media marketing campaign is extremely important. It’s hard to achieve results on social media without having a clear strategy that takes into account what your goals are, who your target audience is, and what their needs and wants are. It would be kind of like taking a road trip without also taking a road map or GPS.
Creating a social media strategy for your business or brand may seem daunting. Fortunately, if you keep things simple, it can also be fun, easy, and rewarding. We’ll show you how.
1. Find your WHY.
Ask yourself “Why do I want to create a presence for my brand on social media?” Do you want to promote your products? Increase awareness of your brand or business? Drive more traffic to your website (or increase the conversion rate of people who visit your site)? Engage more openly and creatively with your fans and followers?
Your WHY is crucial, because once you define your purpose—what you hope to achieve, what motivates and drives you—you now know how to steer your social media marketing campaign in the desired direction.
2. Define your audience.
The next step in creating a simple social media strategy is to really know and understand your target audience. How old are they? What do they for a living? Where do they live? How are their families comprised? How much do they earn? Which social media platform(s) do they prefer? What are their needs and interests, and how can you cater to those needs and interests through your social media campaign?
These are just a handful of questions that can help you develop a better understanding of your target audience. Putting yourself in their shoes is one way to discover the answers, but you can also check out their social media accounts to see what their interests are and how they talk to and interact with their friends and followers. Social media itself is a valuable tool in creating a simple yet successful social media strategy!
3. Determine what content you will share where, and in what voice.
Determining your brand’s “voice” is another extremely important step in creating a successful content strategy.Once you’ve determined the tone and voice you want your brand to communicate in, it’s time to determine what kind of content would best suit your business and your social media strategy goals. Play to your strengths; do you have great writers on staff? A blog would be a great idea, and so would any of the social media platforms that support longer written content, like Facebook or Reddit. Got some stellar photographers? You’ll want to use Instagram and Twitter for sure. Aspiring directors or videographers? YouTube and TikTok are your friends.
Also keep in mind your target audience and what type of social media they prefer to consume. It won’t do you any good to launch a Twitter campaign if your target audience mostly uses Facebook and nothing else. And a social media strategy doesn’t have to be social in order to work; for example, women between the ages of 21 and 34 tend to listen to a lot of true crime podcasts, so a well-placed ad in a popular podcast that is as much fun to listen to as the podcast itself could do wonders for your business if this is your target demographic.
4. Set SMART goals.
SMART is a clever acronym for the qualities that good, strong goals should have. It stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timed. Following this method will help you set goals for your social media strategy that you will actually be able to achieve. For more on SMART goals, check out this article by the Corporate Finance Institute.
5. Know your competition.
It’s always a good idea to know what you’re up against when designing a social media campaign. Chances are your competitors are using only one or two platforms for their content, so you’ll stand a better chance if you plan to cover areas of social media your competitors are neglecting rather than trying to steal their followers from a major platform like Facebook or Twitter. If you do try to build a similar presence on the same platform as your competitors, succeeding at this is actually fairly easy: See what content your competitors are sharing and figure out how you can do it better.
6. Don’t reinvent the wheel.
Do an audit of your existing social media content. What’s working and what’s not? How does your content compare to that of your competitors? Which of your content has garnered the best response from your target audience? If you’ve had success with specific content in the past, consider repurposing it: turn a blog post into a video, a video into a transcript, an article into an image, a photograph into an article. Adding a new twist or updating outdated information can help freshen up old content while saving you time that would otherwise be spent trying to come up with brand new content.
7. Set a schedule.
Now that you’ve found your WHY, identified your target audience, discovered your brand voice, and decided what to post, the only thing left to do is to do it. Consistency, repetition, and reliability are crucial to the success of any content marketing campaign. Two or three sporadically published Facebook posts is not going to produce results for your business. You need to be posting some kind of content at least once a week, and if you’re advertising on more than one platform, you should be posting to those at least once a week, too.
Set yourself a schedule for posting on social media and stick to it as diligently as possible. It may still take a while for your social media strategy to deliver the results you’re hoping for, but you’re far more likely to increase brand awareness and gather a following if you actually have a presence. As Woody Allen once said, “Eighty percent of success is just showing up.” So show up!
Still feeling daunted by the prospect of creating your own social media strategy? Let the social media experts at Absolute Holdings Group help manage things for you. Reach out to us on social media, contact us through our website, or give us a call to let us know what we can do to help you and your business.