While expanding digitally, it’s a must to have a proper master plan in place. Here’s how the Social Media Strategy comes into picture. This refers to planning and organizing the flow & engagement actions for your social media content.
Importance of Social Media Strategy
How do you plan to engage with your target audiences? Do you want to create an everlasting impression or brand consciousness or show your messages randomly? What mediums would you choose while conveying your brand story? What can be the right time to showcase your content?
It is vital to consider such factors while creating a social media strategy for your businesses. Be it contractors, home improvement businesses, roofing, or interior businesses, make sure to have the right social media strategy to achieve your end goals and attract the right users.
How to create a Social Media Strategy
Set a goal and aim for the optimal strategy. A good social media strategy can help your businesses attract new followers and customers, drive footfall to your brick & mortar stores or drive traffic towards your digital websites. It helps the businesses to push users from Awareness to Purchase really quick. It also promotes advocacy and make users brand loyalists.
Here is how you can create a social media strategy:
- Define your target audience: Go narrow rather than going broader. Make sure you target the right people instead of going for masses. Work on your buyers’ personas today to make sure you don’t lose out on opportunities. Define the key demographics of the audiences you are trying to reach, such as age, gender, income, occupation, hobbies, and interests, etc. Doing so would help you in creating consumer focused advertising. For example, if you are an Interior designing website, in that case, you would want to deliver your ads to the people looking for home décor ideas, people searching actively for styles and designing, etc.
- Focus on Key Channels: Considering the digital evolution and a plethora of digital platforms, one might not have the bandwidth to establish a strong social media presence on every channel. However, you can focus on few selective channels’ basis the audiences you want to target.
- Start Blogging: Blogging is the key to a successful social media strategy. Let your blogs educate your target audiences about your brand and convey the messages smoothly and effectively. Consistency is all it takes to come up with your daily blogging ideas. Posting regularly helps to create brand image and allows your users to engage and relate with your brand.
- Create Awareness and Educational Content: Once you have decided your end goal and set the most appropriate target audiences to reach out to, all you need to focus on is the content you would serve! If the goal is to create awareness, reach out to more and more people or spread as much publicity, by making the use of right words.
- Create a plan for every channel: After following the above steps, make sure to create a timetable for posting the content on every channel. Research on your audience personas to decide when they are most active and on which channel. Make sure you post the content accordingly.
- Measure your Results: Make sure to track those countless things on social media platforms, basis your business goals. You can always start by looking how much traffic do you generate towards your website or blog. Different social media platforms offer numerous tracking tools. For example, one can use Facebook’s Page Insights, LinkedIn’s visitor Insights or Instagram’ Account Insights to gauge the performance. This is helpful in measuring your progress and making any relevant changes to your social media strategy.
Timely Optimization of Your Social Media Strategy: Social Media doesn’t work overnight and yield the most fruitful results. It takes more than that. Establishing a following, setting up your brand, and getting the viable results require consistency, efforts, and the most appropriate social media strategy. Make sure to update your strategy time and again to stay in the competition.
Along with Social Media Strategy, make sure to have a strong Content strategy in place too, in order to boost your results. This means:
- The content on your website should be aligned with the content you use on social media platforms
- It should establish credibility and reflect transparency rather than exaggeration of products and services. Work on your content to win the trust of your users
- Make yourself readily available to serve the content and make changes basis recent trends and user searches
Now that you know the right mix of Social Media Strategy and Content strategy, it’s time to go social, expand your reach and attract the interested ones out there.
FAQs
Q 1: What Social Media Platforms to use as a new or small business?
Ans: If you are starting from the scratch, make sure to do your homework well. You should do an exhaustive research on finalizing your target audiences and what platforms they use the most. It’s not necessary to use all the platforms in one go. However, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, Tik Tok, etc. remain some top picks that people usually go for.
Q 2: How do I know if my Social Media Strategy is effective or not?
Ans: If you see more traffic being generated and an upward trend in the performance, then you are on the right track. If not, we recommend you to re-work on your social media strategy.
Q 3: How do I define my audiences? Should I keep my targeting broad or narrow?
Ans: The broader the targeting, the more is awareness and visibility. If your aim is to reach out to as many people as possible, you should be broader while choosing your audiences. Narrowing the targeting might guarantee the most appropriate users, but not much visibility. Choice is yours!
Q4: How often should I post?
Ans: It depends on the platforms and the resources you have! You can post frequently on Twitter and Pinterest if you have a dedicated team. Also, to stay top-of-mind, you can always utilize Snapchat, Facebook & Instagram stories.