Growing your brand on social media requires that you have an effective social media marketing strategy. Without a proper plan in place, your efforts will not be targeted appropriately, and it will be hard to achieve your goals.
When you are not even sure of your target audience, you will not be able to form up proper posts. The messaging of your social media posts can be improved when you have a strategy.
Strategy Vs. Plan
A strategy is different from a plan because a strategy defines what you are aiming for and where you are headed. A plan refers to the ways and means that you will use to arrive at your goal. Whenever you are coming up with a social media strategy for your brand, there are some questions that you should answer.
- Why would your brand want to be on social media?
- What audience will you be targeting?
- What will you be sharing?
- What social media platforms will you use?
- When will you be posting?
You can have a different strategy for each social media platform that you use. For instance, a different strategy for Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram add to your overall social media strategy.
Why Would your Brand Need to be on Social Media?
There are many reasons why your business would be on social media. For instance, you would be aiming to:-
- Grow awareness for your brand
- Increase traffic for your website or blog
- Gain new customers
- Increase revenue for your business
- Grow engagement for your brand
- Establish a community around your brand
- Measure sentiments about your brand by listening to the conversation on social media.
- Provide support for your customers
- Advertise your brand to social media users
- Sell your products and services through social commerce solutions
It is essential that you only focus on a handful of goals you can comfortably focus on as a business.
Target Audience
Knowing who your target audience is can help you build a more effective social media marketing strategy. One of the ways to build a profile for your target audience is by creating marketing personas.
With the personas, you will be able to establish some valuable facts about your social media audience. You will also get to know when they are most active on social media and the kind of content they are interested in.
This is valuable information for your social media marketing (https://sproutsocial.com/insights/social-media-marketing-strategy/) and will ensure that you create a more effective strategy. You should also gather as much data as you can about your audience. The data will ensure that you understand them better and can also be used for behaviour modelling.
What Content to Share
Once you have a rough idea of the kind of audience you are reaching over social media, you will create ideal content for them. The kind of content you make for social media should resonate with your audience’s interests.
Creating compelling content is essential as it will increase engagement and make a better impression on the audience. Your Facebook posts, for instance, should be able to capture the interest of users who read them on their timelines.
The theme of your messages should represent your brand and what you offer to your potential customers. If your content can help your audience solve various problems in their everyday life, it will be more likely to get engagement and even get shared with friends.
Where to Share
Your brand does not have to be on all social media platforms. It is essential that you carefully choose where you will be sharing your content. Using platforms where your audience is more active will be the best choice here.
Young audiences are more interested in photos and will be more likely to be on Instagram. If your brand targets teenagers and young adults, this will be the ideal platform for your marketing. The social media platforms that you use should be the favourite for your audience.
When you post on a platform that your audience is more active on, you will get greater exposure for your brand. It is also essential for obtaining more engagements and ensures that you can relate better with your audience.
Understand your Competition
Chances are your competitor is also using social media as a channel for marketing their brand. It would help if you did a competitive analysis.
This will inform you about your competition’s channels and what they are doing well about their marketing. When you have this in mind, you will work on their weaknesses and make your strategy better.
Several social media tools such as Hootsuite can help with listening to what your competitor is saying on social media. The information will prove helpful in creating a more effective strategy that works on their weaknesses rather than trying to win fans away from them.
When to Share
In addition to a careful selection of social media platforms to share your content on, the timing of your posts should be in sync with the hours when your audience is more active on social media. For instance, if your audience likes to use social media during the weekend and evenings, this is when you should post your content to social media.
This way, you will get the most significant exposure for your content and increased engagement. Sporting events are ideal times to post if your brand targets sports fans.
With a calendar, your efforts will be better targeted and your posts well planned out. A schedule will also ensure that you know when to be on social media. As such, you will spend less time on social media but still achieve greater effectiveness with your strategy.
Execution of Your Strategy
In addition to creating a social media strategy, execution is just as important and should never be treated lightly. Take the time to find your voice and tone and ensure that your presence is uniform and consistent across all the social media platforms that you use.
Your brand will appear unique with a consistent voice, and the audiences will be more likely to trust it. You should accurately fill out your profiles to ensure there is correct information about your brand.
Profile images and background theme images should also be uniform for all the social media platforms your brand uses. Ensure that you fill out all the details about your business so that your audience clearly understands what your business is about.
Detailed information is essential for your social media profiles and will increase your audience trust and engagement. At this point, you should also make use of keywords that are more likely to drive audiences to your social media page.
The correct use of keywords can improve your ranking in social media searches and increase your online traffic. The keywords that you use should be relevant to your business. Images should also be of high quality for all the social networks that you will use.
Find Inspiration
Even with an excellent social media strategy, you can do better with a bit of inspiration from success stories. Others have tried it and have become successful with social media marketing.
Look at what successful businesses have been doing with their social media accounts and replicate their methods. For instance, consistent content and branding elements have made many businesses successful on social media.
Listen to your Audience
Feedback from your audience is one of the most valuable assets that you can get on social media. To continuously improve your social media strategy, you must listen to what the customers say about your brand.
Some streams have your brand as the keyword, and reading these separately can be helpful. When you know what your customers think about your brand, you will work on making improvements.
Evaluate and Adapt your Strategy
Is your social media marketing strategy proving effective? Are you achieving your goals with the methods that you have been using?
It is important to regularly evaluate your strategy for social media and make changes to places you think need improvement. The changes that you make will have a significant impact on your overall impact on social media.
As you continuously adapt and improve your strategy, you will eventually develop a more effective strategy than previous reiterations. When you track your results, you will determine what works for your business and is not practical. As such, you will focus your efforts and energy on a better strategy that will be more profitable in the long run.
Conclusion
Social media moves fast, and there are always new changes and inventions that emerge. Being adaptive is key to having an effective social media marketing strategy. When you know the current trend, you will be able to evolve your strategy and use up-to-date methods of interacting and engaging with your audience.
For instance, the introduction of stories has seen many businesses use them for releasing new products and introducing new features for their businesses. Social media is constantly improving, and you must stay aware of the changes to better take advantage of them.
