5 steps to creating a killer social media strategy
Did you know?
“Facebook accounts for 50% of total social referrals and a further 64% of overall revenue”
Robert Gavin, Awario (May 2019)
The facts say it all – social media continues to sell products and services. However, without a carefully constructed social media strategy, even a business with an exceptional product could soon fail in the social realm of the digital world.
This guide will talk you through the steps to create a successful social media strategy that will help you stand out from the crowd.
1. Understand your main demographic
Understanding your target audience and undertaking customer profiling is essential when creating your social media strategy. Without fully understanding your typical customer, how will you create the right forms of content, present interesting messages, or choose which social platforms to target them on?
To define your customers and better understand your target market, you should start by creating a ‘persona’ for them. A customer’s persona could include:
- Psychographics – their personality type, preferences, etc.
- Demographics – their age, gender, income, etc.
- Behaviour – their similar likes and dislikes, sports, hobbies, etc.
And for B2B companies, consider:
- Number of employees
- Geographic scope
- Budget
- Revenue
- Type of business
- Decision-making
To do this correctly, you’d need to create a persona for each segment of your market – which may be a lot!
The customer persona would ultimately guide the content that you create as well as help know the demographic and preferences that could be used to target in social advertising.
2. Create strategic, company aligned goals
Think about your end goal, what is it?
If you’re focused on reaching a certain amount of followers or securing more comments or shares for example, then finding out your return on investment (ROI) from these measurements would be incredibly challenging.
Try and base your social media marketing strategy on tangible business goals instead. This could be the likes of increasing the sales of a product, boosting your revenue from a particular service, or focusing on growing the number of customers who purchase cross-products.
3. Break your goals down to form a strategy
If you align your end-game commercial goals, you can then break these down into goals for your social media strategy.
For example, a free eBook download promoted through a social pay-per-click (PPC)campaign could lead to 100 people downloading the eBook, which could then lead to 5 customers converting from the campaign.
Help your customers enter your sales funnel. Having clear step-by-step goals as part of your marketing strategy is the most effective way to use social media.
4. Give the tasks to the right people
It’s important to bear in mind that the role of social media marketing goes far beyond the marketing department.
A successful social media strategy will demand a variety of differing professions. This could vary from needing a creative writer to create engaging social content to graphic designers and talented videographers to put together infographics and professional how-to videos or promo videos.
5. Tweak and change your social media strategy frequently
It’s key to remember that every business, every industry, and every target market is different.
Social media strategy is often about trial and error, hit and miss – learning from your failures is just as important as taking note of your successes.
That’s why tracking your every action is vital. Keeping a record of the types of posts that get the most engagement and the amount of profit generated from a promoted product, will help you know what’s working and what’s not.
Try incorporating the points mentioned above and you’ll be creating a successful social media strategy in no time!
Speak to a social media expert
