Develop a Social Media Strategy

Develop a Social Media Strategy in 2021

 

Why does your business need a social media strategy?

In a previous what is social media strategy blog article I was explaining that social media strategy is like a business plan for all your social media activities. Developing a Social Media Strategy will help you present your business to new prospects, new customers and partners and build loyalty with existing ones.

It’s not enough to simply create a profile on social media if you want to take advantage of the countless benefits these profiles can offer. In today’s hyper-connected world, you need to know how to communicate with your audience in the most productive and efficient ways.

It is important to have a solid foundation in place before you start your social marketing efforts.

You want your blog articles to be seen by a wide audience! With social media, you have the ability to bring that content directly to your customers and prospects. Also, social media helps you attract buyers to your products and services and let you have direct conversations with them at the time and place of their choosing.

 

How you can create a social media strategy in 2021

One of the simplest ways to create your social media marketing strategy is to ask yourself the 5Ws:

1. Why do you want to be on social media?
2. Who is your target audience?
3. What are you going to share?
4. Where are you going to share?
5. When are you going to share?

Why do you want your business to be on social media?

This really depends on your business social media goals. Do you want to increase your brand awareness? Or drive more traffic to your website? Generate more leads? Build your community?

You probably should focus on just a couple of those goals.

Who is your target audience?

One of the most important parts of the social media strategy is to create a buyer persona (this will help you to identify your target audience, or who your ideal customer is). Social Media gives you the ability to find more info about this ideal customer (demographics like age, gender, income, occupation, interests, websites they visit, social sites they like, etc).

Understanding your target audience will help you more easily answer the following questions on what, where, and when you are going to share.

There are different ways of building your marketing personas. The team from Buffer suggests using the 5Ws and 1 H

What are you going to share?

Once you have your buying persona and understands the challenges that they have and the problems you can help them with, is easier to know what you share on your social media channels.

You should have a mix of the following four content types:

• informative content
• educational content
• inspiring content
• entertaining content

Also, don’t forget to write attention-grabbing captions and use high-quality images with your blogs and social media posts.

Where are you going to share?

Depending on your business and on your business goals you need to choose on what social media platform you want to put your content.

When are you going to share?

The last key to your social media strategy is to know the best time(s) to post your content. Some tools like SEMRush advice you when your fans are online on your specific social media channel, so you know when to post.

 

Align your social media strategy to your business objectives

It is important to align your social media strategy to your business objectives. So, it’s important to create business goals and objectives that will transpose into social medial goals that will help you transform viewers and readers into buyers.

 

To build your social media strategy, you’ll need to be able to:

• Understand each social media channel and how each one is best used for social media promotion,
• Understand the impact of social listening and engagement,
• Develop a social content strategy for your social media plan,
• Identify ways that metrics are crucial to understanding the success of your digital efforts, and finally,
• how to Integrate social media into your other marketing efforts, including your website, conversations, and blog posts.

 

There are a lot of moving parts in developing this strategy but mapping out the actions you are going to take will get you one step closer to achieving your business goals.

 

Setting Social Media KPIs (Key Performance Indicators)

 

To ensure that you are not wasting time and resources and to make sure that you are getting a positive return of investment from the social media efforts you need to keep track some social media KPIs.

So, once you have created a buyer persona and mapped out some S-M-A-R-T goals, your next thing is to determine what KPIs you should be targeting in your social media strategy.

A KPI is a quantifiable measure used to evaluate the success of a project in meeting objectives for performance. Knowing what your KPIs are from the start will help you make crucial decisions on content, advertising, budget, and other resources you may need.

 

You need to track the key metrics that help you reach your business goals instead of just vanity metrics goals. And what’s a vanity metric? Simply put, a vanity metric is a surface-level metric made up of numbers or statistics that seem great when viewed in a presentation but don’t correlate to business success.

 

The question is, how do you make sure your social media efforts have the right impact on your target market? The simple answer is data.

It’s impossible to know for sure whether you’re making the right business decisions unless you measure your performance through social media KPIs and metrics. Understanding your core social media KPIs helps you adapt your campaigns to suit your goals and your customers.

 

Dorin

Need help with your social media? Contact us to help you develop a Social Media Strategy for your business and get more ROI for your investment.