If you want to have a truly engaging social media marketing campaign, then you should go about it in a methodical way. Having a strategy, targets, and goals is critical for any social media marketing campaign to be effective and get the intended results.
Whether you want to launch a new product or test a new customer loyalty management software, you can only do it if you have a robust strategy in place. In this guide, we talk about all the essential questions you need to ask yourself when crafting a social media strategy.
As a first step, as yourself these 4 simple questions:
- What is your social media goal?
- Which people on social media do you want to connect?
- What content can you produce?
- What message do you want to deliver?
Social media is so vast that answering these questions can help you focus your efforts and investment towards a specific product, market and customer needs.
Next, you need to choose your platform according to your content. You can choose one or more depending on your audience profile:
- Facebook: Short, text content for a general audience
- Instagram: Visual content for a young, tech savvy audience
- Twitter: Short, text content for social aware audience
- LinkedIn: Long, text content for a professional, literate audience
Social media goals
You must have a specific goal in order to be on social media. There are many things that a business can gain by being active on social media. What is it that your business can gain? Here are some of the things you should consider:
- Directing more traffic to your online store, blog or website
- Increasing awareness for a new product
- Selling more goods
- Creating a positive brand image
- Building customer loyalty
- Gaining exposure to the press and media
- Managing customer perceptions about your product
List all your goals (there might be more goals other than those listed above) and narrow them down to the most important three or four goals.
Your social media tribe
Your customers and followers on social media make up your tribe, your community. You need to have a clear idea of who is allowed into your tribe before you put out your very first post. You can define your social media tribe in terms of:
- Age
- Gender
- Lifestyle
- Education
- Income
- Family structure
- Interests
Use all of the above information to create a persona for your ideal customer or follower. What do they like to do for entertainment? What kind of food do they prefer? What kind of technology do they use? What kind of jobs do they work at? What are their life goals and challenges?
By doing all of this, you will gain a better understanding of how to approach your audience on social media and what to offer them—in terms of your products and services.
Designing the content
As mentioned earlier in this guide, the choice of content is closely related to the platform you choose for your social media strategy. Your product and usage behavior also plays a role in deciding what kind of content to put out there on your social media pages.
Photos, polls, memes, blog posts, contests, tutorials, product reviews and press releases are just a few examples of the different kinds of content you can publish on social media.
Having a calendar can help you plan when to post the different kinds of content according to various factors. Is your audience more receptive to certain kinds of content at specific times of the day or year?
As a general rule, your content should offer your audience:
- Your understanding of a problem or challenge that they face
- How your product can solve that problem for them
Your message
Finally, you need to set about creating the exact message that will be put out on social media.
Collect all the facts, data and information you need to create a compelling and authentic post.
Use a tone that is compassionate and friendly, but genuine and trustworthy at the same time.
Have a genuine voice so that your audience sees you as a person, not as a business or company.
Spark a conversation around your audience’s needs and challenges, and make yourself a part of their daily life.
A final word
This guide is meant to help you get started on your social media marketing strategy. Use this information to explore your social media goals and audience, and see how you can make yourself a relevant part of your social media audience.
Article by Eliza Megan
