Every business needs to formulate a social media strategy for their brand. There’s no one set formula for creating social media strategies. It depends on your product, what you want to communicate, and how you want to convey it.
Before you start, there are a few crucial elements of social media strategies that you need to keep in mind.
So, here are 4 elements which are essential to building a robust social media strategy for your brand.
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1. Set Clear Goals
The foundation of any strategy for any business is to have a clear set of goals. A set of clear goals will help your team focus on and achieve your target. It will also help you track your progress and identify gaps where you need to put in more effort.
Before you start creating your social media strategy, ask the following questions:
- What are your overall business objectives?
- How can you leverage social media platforms to achieve those objectives?
- What does your target audience expect from your brand?
- Are your goals measurable?
Once you find the answers to these questions, you can easily identify your social media marketing goals.
2. Identify the Ideal Target Audience for Your Brand
One of the most critical elements of creating social media content is to understand your target audience in depth. To do so, you can develop buyer personas. This will help you target the right people with the right messages and at the right times.
You can also use parameters like age, gender, income, occupation, preferences, and pain points to identify your target audience. Once you identify whom to target, it will help you create a robust social media strategy.
3. Use Social Tools
To strengthen the impact of your social media strategy, you can leverage social tools. Tools will ensure timely engagement. There are social management tools, such as Animoto, Venngage, or Grum, that can be helpful. Grum will help you schedule your Instagram posts. And if you want to create appealing infographics for your brand, then you can use tools like Venngage.
Other than social management tools, you can also leverage the built-in social platforms tools such as Facebook Live, Instagram Stories, and Instagram Live.
Such tools will strengthen your social media strategy and help you get the attention of your target audience.
4. Devise a Content Strategy
Strong content is the key element to creating a successful social media strategy. You cannot use the same content on all social media platforms. You need to plan a diverse content strategy to reach out to your target audience and convert them into loyal buyers.
The form and context of your content are two pillars of your content on social media. You can create your content in various formats, like images, infographics, texts, videos, etc. However, you need to ensure that the content is in-sync with your brand’s voice and message.
Conclusion
You can check out this infographic created by UTM.io to learn more about the steps to creating an effective social media strategy for your brand.
How to Create a Social Media Strategy in 6 Easy Steps
Creating a social media strategy can be challenging. Here are 6 easy steps to follow to organize your efforts.
Step 1: Define Your Goal
Common Goals on Social Media:
- Drive traffic to your site.
- Connect with your audience.
- Reach a bigger audience.
- Sell your products/services.
Step 2: Know Your Target Audience
- Identify which demographics to target.
- What are their interests and values?
- What are their pain points?
- What type of content do they like and consume?
- Which social media platforms do they use?
Step 3: Choose the Best Social Networks
- Choose social networks where your audience is the most active.
- Narrow them down to 1-2 networks to focus on.
Check out the top social networks and their pros and cons:
- It is the largest social network (2.2 billion monthly active users)
- Comes with a host of targeting tools for accurate reach
- Most consumers use it
- More competition
- Organic reach has gone down
- 1 billion monthly active users
- High engagement rate
- Highly visual platform
- Easy discoverability with hashtags and geotags
- No linking option expect in bio
- No room for lengthy, text-based content
- 330 million monthly active users
- Lots of conversations on various topics
- Easy discoverability with hashtags
- Lower engagement
- Too much noise makes visibility a challenge
- 590 million total users
- Great way to reach B2B consumers
- The best platform to find quality B2B content
- Ability to publish an article on the platform
- Hard to reach everyday consumers
Step 4: Perform an Audit
- Analyze your current performance.
- See what’s working and what isn’t.
- What type of content gets the most engagement?
- When is your audience the most active?
- How do you compare against your competition (following size, engagement rate, etc.)?
Step 5: Determine The Right Type of Content
- Analyze the performance of different types of content.
- Test different tones, purposes, and formats.
- Test different calls-to-action and headlines.
- Create polls to see what your audience wants from you.
- Focus your efforts on your audience’s content preferences.
Step 6: Measure Your Results
- Use native analytics to track follower growth and engagement rate.
- Use UTM parameters to track traffic from specific posts, campaigns, and platforms.
- Track your brand sentiment to see how people feel about your brand.
- Use social listening to see what people are saying about your brand.
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