How to create a social media strategy for your business

With the help of key employees, determine the main goals of your social media presence. Are they to attract more customers? Boost recognition of your brand? Improve customer service? Based on your goals, decide how you’ll measure your social media success (e.g. number of visits, number of followers and comments, how much your content is being shared, number of new sales leads, etc.) and set targets. Determine your target audience social media marketing strategy and its receptivity to various social media platforms. Focus your initial social efforts on platforms your audience likely uses most, experimenting as you go. Think about what kind of content will appeal to your target audience. Shoot for a balance of entertaining and educational material. Above all, avoid being overly self promotional—hard selling is a huge social media no-no. How do you develop your key messages? Use your market knowledge and research, organize a focus group, or seek professional advice. But don’t rely only on intuition, which could be misleading. Your content should encourage your fans and followers to engage with your company and ultimately become or remain your customers. To do so, it should present the human side of your business and provide followers with benefits such as information, advice or entertainment. Periodically, you can go further and make direct calls to action—asking people to purchase a new product, take advantage of a special offer or sign up for your newsletter. Now you’re ready to create your action plan. Who will do what? Tasks to assign in your company include monitoring social media traffic, creating content, social media marketing plan and posting to your sites and other social media sites. Allocate adequate resources to employee training, and consider hiring a social media manager. And be sure to communicate your social strategy to employees, working to secure the buy-in of staff, from top managers on down.

Social Media Marketing Plan

A social media marketing plan should not pose any major challenges to a small business. As in any growing business with a great product or service, the marketing team or person is most likely to be working on different tasks at different times and these tasks social media marketing companies can change rapidly depending on the business needs. However, even with taking this into consideration, social media is now so vital to business success there are some tasks that need to be planned as part of the daily marketing routine. Every article, news release, research or whitepaper are assets in a social media strategy to serve the goals that have been set. As with any business strategy you must know what you are working toward. Is it drive brand awareness, customer acquisition, generate new sales drive traffic, build up your network, reduce the cost per lead. Whatever of any or all of these you need goals and associated objectives clearly defined. When it comes to marketing the product or service, social media marketing success depends on the content strategy a business decides upon. Prior to writing, commissioning or publishing any content, a business needs to understand, what audience(s) are going to be targeted?, What type of voice (expert, commentator, industry) will you use social media marketing services to communicate? Who are you trying to influence? What specifically do you want to achieve (leads, likes, traffic, views or authority)? Allot of strategy answers are to be found in questioning the content strategy so everyone involved in the marketing and sales efforts need to know the why, what and who, understand it and is always in their minds. Content marketing strategy can then be tweaked and optimised as necessary.

Make sure there is new quality content to post

Fresh, quality, informative and relevant content is at the core of every social media campaign to reach target audiences and ensure engagement. To be seen as an influencer and sector expert it is vital to share new content consistently and regularly. New content social media marketing university when well written (not self- promotional or product articles) and engaging can propel a business forward. This is why the person in charge of the social media plan needs to make sure there is always some new content ready to be shared. There is no hiding the fact that writing content does take time and continuous effort so it needs to be planned. The social media plan needs to have a schedule when content will be shared so all social marketing activities tie back into other marketing events or business plans. Also a schedule will take account for any external events, key word targeting, launches, promotions or seasonal trends what is social media marketing that impacts your industry. This is why the content sharing calendar is so important for deciding what social media activities are in the pipeline. While not all content can be created and planned for weeks in advance of sharing, the core, and keyword targeted content pieces that demand more care and effort should be.