With the emergence of new tools and platforms, it is easy to fall into the trap of thinking of social media through a tactical prism instead of a strategic one. But without a strategy, you will be just posting on social media for the sake of posting. It is impossible to achieve results on social media without understanding the goals and identifying the target audience and what they want. So many businesses post on social media blindly and hope for the best results. case study assignment sample There is no one-size-fits-all approach when it comes to effective social media strategy.
A successful social media strategy sets your brand apart from its competitors. But, as we all know, creating a winning social media strategy is easier said than done. So, if you are thinking about building a strong social media strategy that can help your business stand out, I would like to walk you through a step-by-step process to create a quick and simple social media strategy.
- Clearly define goals and objectives
The first step toward making a good social media strategy is defining the goals. The goals can later serve you as a metric of achievement.
Some of the characteristics your goals should have:
- Measurable
- Specific
- Attainable
- Time-bound
- Relevant
Having these characteristics will mean that the goals you have set are achievable and reasonable. If you do not want frustration or disappointment, it’s best to do it this way.
- Create customer personas
You may have already defined an audience for your business; this is a good time to create detailed buyer personas to understand personal needs and design social media strategy accordingly fully. The buyer personals will take the form of fictional, generalised representatives of your ideal customer. Use native analytics to find relevant information. You will be able to collect valuable data from social media channels that include:
- Locations
- Demographics
- Attitudes
- Interests
- Language
- Beliefs
Do a brainstorming session to understand their problems and how you may fix them. Also, take a look at what might cause them to resist adopting your message.
Here are a few ways to improve buyer personas:
- Interview customers to discover their likes, and dislikes about your products or services
- Take a look through the database of contacts to uncover trends on how certain customers or leads find and consume your content.
- Use forms on your website to capture important personal information
- Gather data
Information is essential to creating social media strategies. Besides research on the target audience and product research, you also need to have an eye on your competitors. It will give you a better idea of the best strategies in your niche and which ones to avoid.
I will suggest trying these data-gathering methods:
- Social media listening
This method will let you take advantage of different platforms like dissertation help online to understand how competitors are doing. You will have to look at their content and brand and see what others say about their products or services. If you are a newbie, you are expected to find it challenging and time-consuming. However, you can make things easier if you take help of the social media management tools. The features of these tools will automatically generate reports and monitor competition in real-time.
- Competitive analysis
A competitive analysis will help you recognise your top competitors. Its content will give you a fair idea of what exactly is in your niche area and what should be your social media targets.
- Establish a realistic social media budget
Consider social media to be viable marketing as any other type of marketing. So, make sure to allocate your budget accordingly. You cannot expect success if you just tag it onto the pre-existing list of duties your existing office staff performs. With saying that, you cannot also spend more on social media activities than you realistically earn in increased sales.
So, with the goals you have set earlier in your strategy, I suggest calculating the return on investment (ROI) from your social media expenditure. Determine the cost you are ready to spend on all your digital marketing across all channels. Finally, ask yourself how much of the budget you are prepared to devote to social media.
As per some basic calculations done by WebStrategies for a typical company, most companies tend to spend about 5% to 15% of their annual revenue on marketing. Out of that, most tend to pay 35% to 45% on digital marketing activities.
- Plan for the contents you want to share
This is another aspect you need to be serious about to be successful on social media. So, to take you to the right path of action, let me tell you one of the biggest mistakes businesses tend to do – sharing excessive promotional materials. The very idea for creating social networks was to be social. It’s never meant to be a marketplace to sell your products or services.
So, make sure to balance the contents you are sharing socially. Make it a mixture of informative and entertaining items with a small number of promotional materials. You will also require liking and share other people’s content from time to time.
- Set up the Content calendar
Most social networks use algorithms to filter the result they give people. Thus, if you post something at a different time to when your target audience is online, they may never see your content. Ideally, you should be using social scheduling tools so you may set up and organise multiple posts at the same time.
SUMMING UP,
Social media is a constantly changing landscape, so be flexible and prepared enough to forecast, bring changes to your strategy and pre-empt potential disaster. By considering the steps discussed in the blog post, you can definitely set yourself up for success. So, are you ready to take your business to the next level?
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