71% of small businesses plan to use social media content to attract new customers in 2018 according to Infusionsoft. But how many of them are actually thinking about creating a solid social media strategy? Social media strategy is crucial if you want your brand to stay consistent across multiple platforms. Having an integrated communication plan helps your business deliver a consistent message in a number of ways making your followers connect to your brand in a more human way.
Instead of sharing the same message over and over again, we encourage you to think out of the box and create a social media strategy plan that will get your followers excited about your next post.
To learn 7 steps to a remarkable social media strategy, read on…
1. Analyze your social media presence
First things first. If you already have social media profiles, before you start thinking about your goals for the upcoming period, you first want to do a little bit of marketing inspection.
Here are a couple of things you should check:
- how many followers / likes you have?
- is your profile picture consistent across different platforms?
- is your cover photo looking good on all platforms?
- how about your contact information?
- does your about us or bio clearly states your mission?
Ok then, now you know where you stand. The next steps would be to go into more details of analyzing your followers and posts that performed well so that you have an idea of what to focus on in the future.
Now, if you’re starting from scratch, then we suggest you first do a bit of the detective work. Look at your competitors and find out what they are doing and which platforms they are using. It will give you the idea of where to start, but it will also help you understand if they’re missing something.
2. Identify and research your buyer persona
When it comes to marketing strategy, the first step is always to get to know your buyer and your customer. Otherwise, it’s a shot in the dark.
By identifying and getting to know your buyer persona, you will more easily identify the network you should be focusing on. You will understand what type of posts they expect from you. You will tailor your message so that it resonates with them.
3. Think about your social media mission statement
What are you trying to accomplish for your business? How does social media help you get there? There you have your mission statement.
Your social media goals need to be aligned with your business goals, otherwise your wasting your time on social.
Write it down so that you have a written statement to keep you pushing your social media in the right direction.
4. Identify how you will be measuring your success
We don’t suggest you focus solely on the number of likes or followers, because you will not get far measuring just that.
Some of the metrics you can track are listed below:
- Audience growth rate
- Post reach
- Social shares
- Engagement rate
These will give you an idea how you are spreading the awareness about your business on social media and how people are engaging with your posts.
Then these are especially important because they are directly impacting your business:
- Conversion rates
- Customer reviews and testimonials
5. Create engaging content
Before you jump into creating content, make sure you have the previous steps completed.
Your content will be useless if it is not tailored for your target audience. Make the content more engaging and enticing by sharing a mixture of photos, videos, blogs, news, infographics and other types of content.
But, remember that the content types will also depend on your audience and they’re preferences.
Make sure your content is aligned with your mission and that is helping you get to your goals faster.
Creating high-quality content for your readers should always be your priority.
6. Use social media as a promotion channel
One of the most common mistakes that many businesses make is that even if they write great blogs, they do not do enough to promote these blogs and distribute the article.
Facebook is a great platform where you can do just that. Even Instagram allows business pages with a great number of followers to include links in your stories. Take advantage of that and increase the number of visitors on your website.
7. Track and analyze the results
One of the most important steps you cannot miss in your social media marketing is tracking and analyzing the results.
Failures will help you identify the types of content you should not be publishing and success will help you understand what to publish in the future.
By tracking, you will be able to identify what went wrong along the way, and you can make some changes to fix the errors.
Your success in social media marketing does not happen overnight; it is a work in progress. You just have to be patient and you need to be able to implement changes whenever needed.
Ready to create your social media marketing strategy? Good luck!
