Behind every great social media presence is an even greater social media strategy. When you’ve got your social media channels working like your right hand man, it will attract new followers, drive traffic and generate leads and revenue for your business. How do you get it to work like this?
Well, this article will tell you how!
First of all, you have to define your social media goals. If your business goals remain fuzzy and undefined then so does your presence and progress.
You start by creating S.M.A.R.T goals, which are your best friends in business and strategy. They align business objectives with your social media, while creating a way to measure success and ROI (Return On Investment).
Before you go researching what it means, S.M.A.R.T stands for: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Time-bound.
After you’ve sat down and drawn out some S.M.A.R.T goals the real, real fun can begin:
Create Customer Personas
The key to creating customer personas is, basically, roleplay.
Imagine you’re rolling up a new character sheet in Dungeons & Dragons; you’ve got the basics of age, location, interests and hobbies to think about, but you should also consider average income and typical job title and industry (if it’s relevant to your product and services).
Every great strategy includes customer personas as they’re the best way to get into the mindset of how your products or services can solve their day-to-day issues, and in doing so you can begin to intimately know your ideal customer and how to target your messaging towards them.
Check out our handy Brace persona guide to get you started!
Keep Your Friends Close, and the Competition Even Closer
Conducting competitor analysis and including it in your social media strategy is imperative to keeping your online presence relevant and avoids stagnation.
It’s a crucial step as it will reveal to you where there is a gap in the market and where your audience is being underserved. From there, you’re able to constantly scout for new opportunities.
Additionally, you’ll gain keen insight into what’s expected within your industry and ways in which you could innovate with your own targets, while keeping a steady framework in place.
You may also reveal a platform where your audience is being underserved. If you do, it’s easier to nurture a following you’ve built up yourself rather than attempt to win fans away from a dominant player.
Social media listening is a great tool in order to keep an eye on the competition. You can achieve this by researching things like their name, account handles and other relevant keywords on social media.
The goal is to find out what people are saying about them, find out what they’re sharing, what the engagement is like and how their campaigns are performing, etc.
The more you track, the more you may notice changes in social media trends and spot really specific social content or content that really hits the mark (or totally misses it) and you can become inspired by these.
Remember though: keep focused on your own channels, strategy and analysis. You don’t need to obsess over the competition; checking in once a month or so is healthy enough.
Create Blogs and Educational Content
Blogs expand your content reach as it uses your social media to pique the interest of your target audience with a little snippet from the blog, and then the website will expand upon the information.
It’s a fantastic way to drive traffic to your website, engage with your audience on your socials and also show that you are a resource of information and trustworthy experts in your field.
Similar to blogging, but encompassing the whole range of content you can create and distribute among your channels and audience: downloadable content such as ebooks, checklists, videos, templates and infographics that address your buyers’ pain. By having beneficial content you are value propositioning yourselves.
Find Your Niche
It’s more worthwhile to have just one or two networks with a solid presence, where you know the ins and outs of how it works, what your demographics are and how the network engages with your audience, etc. Once you’ve learned where your key demographics are and where they are most likely to find you on social media.
Measure Results, Adjust Tactics
The only way to know if you’re achieving your goals with social media is to measure meaningful metrics.
Meaningful metrics are the data that tell you exactly how your post or ad is performing – anyone can get likes, but they don’t mean anything if they’re not helping you achieve your goals.
Measure; how much traffic your social accounts drive to your blog, what your engagements are on certain posts, what time of day you posted them at, what the content was etc.
Make sure you choose metrics that can be easily tracked, otherwise it’ll be too time consuming and you’ll, quite rightly, prioritise other tasks before measuring your metrics.
One of the main things to remember, ESPECIALLY when it comes to building your strategy, is that social media doesn’t work overnight. It requires experimentation and dedication to establish a following, stabilise your brand and see the fruits of your labour. If that sounds time intensive, that’s because it is.
When we say ‘experiment’, we don’t mean walking around in a white lab coat and mixing chemicals around the office, (well, we’re not suggesting you do that but if it helps you work then we’ll trust the process.)
No, experimenting on social media can mean something as simple as just tweaking a bit of copy on a previous post, reposting with a new image, or trying a new time of day to dispense your message; all the while keeping track of the changes you’ve made in order to optimise your social media channel and its content.
Create Content That Fulfils Your Mission
Provide examples of the type of content that you’ll post to fulfil your mission for each network. This will help keep your content aligned with the purposes you’ve outlined, and show other stakeholders what kind of content they can expect to see on each channel.
In conclusion, the key to creating a great social media strategy isn’t exactly a cut and dry answer.
It’s more like a recipe card where you adjust to taste. The above are suggestions, not cardinal rules, and the real way to have an amazing strategy for social media is to see it like a living, breathing being rather than a set of commandments etched in stone.
What works for you and your business may not work for the next, and that is part of the beauty of using it. There is so much freedom to experiment, there’s literally nothing to lose and everything to gain by nurturing your social media networks.
Not sure where to start? Brace Creative Agency is made up of marketing experts that will unleash your marketing’s full potential! Don’t miss out now, give us a call on 01452 729953 or email us at hello@brace.co.uk!
