How to come up with a great social media strategy and make it stick.
You’ve probably realized by now that social media isn’t something that you can ignore if you want your business to prosper in Ottawa, not to mention simply survive. However, having a company page on something like Facebook isn’t quite going to cut it. Your social media pages aren’t just substitutes for a basic website – they are platforms on which you can market your brand and engage with your customers.
So how exactly do you do that? Well, there are dozens of social media strategies aimed at increasing brand awareness, increasing brand loyalty, attracting attention to blog content, generating leads, providing customer service and much more. However, before you begin establishing a social media campaign, you’ll need to have a social media strategy in place.
Figure Out Your Company’s Goal
One of the most important steps for creating a social media strategy is establishing what your company’s goal is. Without a clear goal in mind, you’ll be wandering blind through the social media wilderness. Decide what the needs of your company are. Once you understand your needs it will be easier to figure out how you are going to use your social media platforms to fulfill those needs. And remember – you can have more than one goal. In fact, having a few primary goals along with a couple of secondary goals is a good way to get the most out of your social media use.
Decide Your Marketing Objective
In order to know if you are succeeding at reaching the goals you have set, you need to define what your marketing objectives are. For example, if your primary goal is to generate leads, then you’ll want to set an objective that establishes how many generated leads by a certain date will be considered a success. Just don’t set objectives that aren’t realistic. Base them on what resources you have.
Establish a Buyer Persona
One of the most common problems that smaller businesses have when they first begin using social media is that they are marketing to everyone. They have a goal, and they have a marketing objective, but they are wasting resources by not marketing to their buyer persona. To increase engagement on your social media page, you’ll need to research your buyer persona in order to create a more accurate ideal customer profile. This will allow you to target the right social media followers at the right times and using the right messages. The buyer persona consists of information such as age, income, occupation, gender, interests, problems, obstacles, likes, dislikes, motivations and more. The more specific you can make your buyer persona the better the chance you have of converting users via the social channels you are using.
Learn What the Competition is Doing
There tends to be a lot of trial and error involved when it comes to implementing social media strategies into your campaign. So why not eliminate some of the error by looking at what works and what doesn’t work for your competition? Find out what social media platforms your competition is working on and analyze things such as their content strategy, how many followers they have, what social platforms are working best for them, what time of the day they are posting, how frequently they post and more.
Choosing Your Social Platforms
There are hundreds of different social media channels to choose from. Don’t just choose one – you should have three at the minimum to make your social media strategy as effective as possible. However, the last thing you want to do is use a social channel that your target audience simply does not use. This is a huge waste of resources. Also, some social channels may simply not suit your brand as well as others. For example, if your company sells word processing software (or something along those lines), then a social channel such as Instagram or Vine may not be the best option. However, something like LinkedIn and Facebook would work well because you could post instructional video content about your software and more. Figuring out what social channels will work best for you will take some research.
Establish a Team
Don’t make the mistake of having one or two people in charge of your entire social media strategy. To get the most out of social media marketing, you’ll need an entire team dedicated to your strategy. For example, you’ll want someone dedicated to content creation, someone dedicated to advertising, someone dedicated to customer service, someone dedicated to the technical management of your social profiles and more.
Be sure to follow these steps when creating a social media strategy for your business.
