Social media is an amazing marketing tool that if utilized properly can dramatically increase the awareness of your brand and help create a strong presence going forward. To do this you need a clearly defined strategy. This strategy should be fluid and will change as you grow, but it’s important to have a starting place. Here’s how to develop a strong social media marketing strategy.
Understanding a Social Media Marketing Strategy
A strategy of any kind is simply a plan of action to help you meet your goals. The first part of creating a marketing strategy is to determine your goals. You need to understand exactly what you wish to achieve in order to figure out how to achieve it.
Zero In On Your Goals
There are likely lots of things you want to achieve with your business, and setting goals is how you achieve these things. When mapping out your plan you’ll likely see that you have different kinds of goals – some small and easy goals, as well as some bigger and more involved goals. As you create your marketing strategy you want to pick goals that you know you can achieve. That’s not to say you should just cherry-pick the easy stuff, but selecting an unattainable goal or a very ambitious goal, especially to start out may set you up for disaster. Sooner or later you’ll need to tackle your major goals, but be realistic and plan accordingly.
Have the Right Mindset
The way you plan to reach your goals can dictate how likely are you to reach those goals. Obsessing over the final result can do more harm than good and throw you off your game. Identify actionable goals and focus your energy on creating a solid plan.
Get to Know Your Audience
In order for your efforts to succeed you need to reach the right people. Take the time to figure out who your audience is and where you can find them. If your demographic largely flocks to one or two social media platforms then focus your efforts there and possibly leave other platforms out of your plan entirely. You can do everything else right, but if you screw up this step up and are unable to locate your audience, your entire strategy will all be for nothing.
As well as you think you know your audience, make an effort to get to know them better. Find out everything you can about your target demographic. The more details you know the more precise you can make your outreach.
As you do all of this research, you may identify different segments of your audience. For instance, if you own a brewery, you may find that some people turn up for your weekly trivia night while others come out when you book live music. Both of these segments are part of your demographic. They have some commonalities, as well as differences. The outreach that speaks to the trivia segment may miss the mark with the live music fans. However, having this understanding enables you to create targeted outreach that appeals to whichever segment with which you wish to communicate.
Make Sure to Listen
Content marketing is largely about informing your customers. By explaining your products and services and personalizing your brand you can create relationships. These relationships increase the odds of closing sales. However, constantly going on about your business can get tiresome. Make sure to take the time to listen to your customers. Find out what they like (and don’t like) about your brand, products, services, and anything else they want to offer up. Listening to your customers helps to strengthen your bond by showing you value their opinions. You can also use this new-found knowledge to make some positive changes to help improve the customer experience going forward.
Keep an Eye on the Competition
Your competitors are likely on social media, so check out what they’re up to. You want to observe what they are doing right and what they could do better. Use this knowledge to fine-tune your strategy to better connect with your audience. Look for areas where your competition is under-serving their audience and work to improve your offerings in that area.
Let Your Content Do the Talking
Content is clearly a key component of a content marketing strategy. Once you have a better understanding of your audience, you can then set out to create high-quality content that will appeal to them. High-quality content is important because it positions your brand as an expert. This expert status helps to build and foster trust with customers. When customers trust your brand they will make purchases, offer honest feedback, and talk your brand up to their friends, family, coworkers, social media followers and anyone else in their network.
Diversify Your Content
Written words are a big part of communication and social media but mix things up. Users may skip over a text-only social media post. Utilize graphics, photos, and video to engage with your followers and convey information. Interesting or just plain pretty visuals will catch people’s attention and potentially entice users to stop scrolling and check out your post.
Further up the engagement factor by actually engaging. Ask easy questions or encourage users to share quick stories, tips or anything else. When users reply to your post with an answer to the question, make sure to follow up. Even just liking their comment or reply with quick thanks shows that you acknowledge and appreciate their answer.
Crafting Your Marketing Strategy
Social media is a great way to connect and engage with your customers. Forming a relationship can help close sales, but this bond can also provide very valuable insight. The secret behind an effective social media presence is an expertly crafted social media marketing strategy. Taking your demographic and the goals unique to your business into account can help you create a customized course of action. If you need help with your plan or help writing social media posts or blog posts let me know! I can take on this part of your business, so you can focus on building your empire.
