Social media is a way to reach out to millions of people just with the click of finger. Businesses are using social media as a way to market. Their goals could be to gain new customers, to receive customer feedback, to increase the company growth and revenue, or to establish new markets. In order for a business to be successful in social media marketing they must have a strategy. A social media strategy can be broken up into 5 easy steps.
- Plan It
- Know Your Targeted Audience
- Execute It
- Participate
- Review Results
Plan It
This is the step that kick starts your social media marketing strategy. It is very important that you plan out what exactly your purpose is before even beginning. You can ask yourself these questions:
- What are measurable goals your business can achieve?
- What social media sites do you want to use?
- What topics do you want to cover?
- How do you want people online to perceive your business?
- How are you going to make visitors into customers?
When setting goals you want to make sure that you begin small and then build up to bigger goals. With this method you will reach your goals in smaller increments and feel success instead of discourage. Once you’ve established your goals think about what social media platforms you want to use. Will you business best fit in by posting pictures on Instagram, tweeting short and simple content on Twitter, or posting on Facebook? When you decide where you best fit in you can get the ball rolling by thinking ahead to the content you want to post. Try and make your topics and tone more positive than negative when presenting online. These questions discussed only cover a few things you should think about when creating a strategy for your business.
Know Your Targeted Audience
Who are you trying to reach out to? Now however you answer that is going to give us more of a direction when thinking about strategy. If your audience is strictly business men, you want to cover content that business men will find interesting. Now lets say your targeted audience is kids, you are going to want to present your content to be appropriate for their age. One way to determine your targeted audience is to write a few personas down on paper. Personas are useful because you are able to create an ideal customer.
Think about which sites your potential audience spends the most time at. You want to determine this so you are able to only post on the social media sites that will be effective to your business and reachable for your audience.
Execute It
Executing your plan, the step in which your journey begins. You now know who your audience is and what they are looking for and you’ve established your business’ motive, its now time to begin posting. Keep in mind that everything you post will influence your audience in one way or another. Your goal is to turn visitors into customers. You want them to return to you. In order to do that you must make sure your social media content follows these guidelines:
- Tell audience what you have accomplished.
- Use appropriate vocabulary and terminology.
- Set tone as more positive over negative.
- Be personal with audience.
- Educational information (not promotional).
Participate
Participation is a step that often gets skipped when a business is using social media as a marketing tool. Your audience wants to see that you care about what they have to say. There are fairly simple ways in which you can participate and engage online. When you get feedback from someone, make sure to reply in a tasteful manner. By just replying shows the customer you value their opinion. You can also get involved by subscribing and commenting on blogs that are useful to you. Another way in which you can participate is by sharing other blogs that are relevant to your audience. Showing that your active online will benefit your business in a countless number of ways…
- Receiving customer feedback.
- Get an insight to your competitors strategy.
- Gaining customers leads to increased revenue.
- People will most likely share your information if they feel important to you.
- See what people really think about your brand.
Review Results
Once you’ve put your content on social media you can begin to analyze it. You can do this by taking a step back and determine when you get the most response. During what time of the day is your audience most active. This is important to know so in the future you are able to post you content at a time in which it will receive maximum viewing. See what topics get the most involvement. Once you know that don’t be afraid to test out other topics, just be sure to include the topics your audience likes. Analyzing the results is just a way for you to understand your audience and then take that information and test and establish new strategies.
Don’t ever be afraid to try new things, just keep in mind the do’s and don’ts for social media marketing. Now that you understand the structure that goes into a social media marketing strategy, check out Top 5 Blogs That Every Social Media Marketing Student Needs for some great examples of other business’ strategy in action.
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