Are you a business owner looking to increase awareness of your products and services? Or, perhaps, you were put in charge of your company’s social media page but aren’t sure where to start? In this article, we’ll discuss the importance of creating your social media strategy, choosing the right platforms, incorporating your marketing plan, and analyzing your performance.
Define Your Social Media Strategy
The first step in raising brand awareness is defining your social media strategy. A social media strategy helps you choose a target audience, the type of content you plan to create, and how often you will post on your social media platforms.
Firstly, you will need to select a target audience – remember that “everyone” is not a sufficient target audience. To help choose your target audience, you can consider elements such as:
- Your potential consumer demographics
- The type of information you want to publish
- Your brand’s voice and goals
- What social media sites you’re active on
- Your intended posting schedule
In order to create a strong social media presence, you will want to create SMART goals. These are:
Specific – is unambiguous, well-defined, and clear
Measurable – has specific criteria to measure your overall progress toward reaching your goal(s)
Attainable – not impossible to achieve and realistic
Relevant – within reach and relevant to your industry
Timely – has a clear timeline with a start and end date
Setting SMART goals will help focus your efforts and increase the likelihood of achieving your goal(s).
With your social media team, think of goals such as how to gain more Social Media Followers, Increase Brand Awareness, and Drive Traffic.
Not only is it important to identify the type of content you will post, but also how often you will create content for your page(s). Posting often on your social media pages has the power to keep your audience engaged and draw in new followers as well. Will you post professional photography, inspirational quotes, how-to guides, tips and tricks, or memes?
Choosing content that best aligns with your company’s voice and target audience will ensure greater success for your business.
Choose Your Social Media Platforms
The next step is to choose your social media platforms. In today’s digital world, there are a wide variety of social media channels available to help you increase brand awareness – at minimal cost too! These include Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and many, many more.
Even though there are many social media platforms, it is important to select the ones where the majority of your target audience are.
Billions of people use Facebook and Instagram, therefore your social media presence on these platforms is a no-brainer. Certain types of content are usually correlated to specific social media platforms. For example, photography is usually associated with Instagram, informational videos are usually associated with YouTube, strong opinions are usually expressed through tweets on Twitter, and silly videos are mostly streamed through TikTok.
If you are not creating relevant content that your audience can engage with, you are likely subject to wasting time and resources. Furthermore, you probably wouldn’t want to use Facebook to target Gen Z (people born between 1997-2010), as they tend to engage more on Instagram and TikTok.
Looking at current social media trends will help you stay up to date on the type of content you should be posting in order to be the most effective. You can also look at your competitor’s social media platforms to see what is/isn’t working for them.
How to Incorporate Social Media Marketing
Now that you have selected your social channels, how will you incorporate your social media marketing strategy?
From your different social media platforms, which will you focus on, and what type of content will you create for each one? Will you create fun videos for your Instagram stories? Educational infographics on Facebook? Or maybe silly memes to create laughter and engagement?
Whichever you choose, it is helpful to use a social media planner to schedule and plan the content and posting date of your posts, even weeks in advance. This will help you stay organized and aware of what you have posted in the past in order to prevent repeated content.
A marketing strategy also includes social media campaigns. Maybe you want to promote a new product or feature that your company just released. Or perhaps you are having a huge winter sale that you want your followers to know about. Your social media team can create a series of social media ads to enhance your digital marketing objectives and hopefully increase brand awareness and engagement.
Whatever your campaign may be, proper social media marketing will help you reach your business goals!
Analyze Your Social Media Marketing Strategy. What Isn’t Working?
Once you have
- 1. Developed your social media strategy
- 2. Created your social media accounts
- 3. Started to post relative content targeted to your audience
it is time to analyze the efficiency of each of your social media platforms.
There are a large variety of analytics tools such as Hootsuite, Sprout Social, Zoho Social, Semrush, Meltwater, Brandwatch, Agorapulse, and Dash Hudson that can assist you in analyzing your social media pages.
These social media analytics tools measure your performance and allow you to see whether or not you are receiving new customers, getting positive reviews, reaching your target audience, and receiving engagement and conversions. You may notice that your videos get the most likes, shares, and comments – so you decide to create more videos. Or maybe you observe that your Facebook page isn’t reaching your target audience. From there, you can work with your social media team to determine what needs to change in order to reach your social media goals.
Another way to assist you in deciding what and when to post to better reach your social media goals is to complete a competitive analysis each week. A competitive analysis is an assessment of current and potential competitors in your industry. By taking a look at your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses, you will be able to solidify your social media strategy.
How Social Eyes Marketing Can Help
The team at Social Eyes wants to help you reach your social media marketing goals!
Creating an effective social media strategy, finding time to schedule posts, and creating the right content that will bring people to your business pages can be overwhelming. A lot of businesses don’t have the time or resources to effectively manage a social media page. That’s where we step in.
Together, we will develop a digital marketing strategy, select the best social platforms, and produce quality content to bring the most engagement and awareness to your social media site(s). We use the most current social media management tools to bring out the best results from your marketing efforts.
Take the worry and stress off your shoulders by allowing us to help you run your social media accounts. We are here to help with quality content, more engagement, and an increase in revenue!
