How to Create a Social Media Strategy

Building an active social media presence takes time, but it doesn’t have to be overwhelming to create an Instagram marketing strategy! This step-by-step plan can help you build your business presence on social media platforms.

Step 1: Align business and social goals

A business can be a powerful, positive force for good in the world.

It provides goods and services that improve lives and generates income for employees and shareholders.

If a company’s business practices do not align with its social media objectives, problems can arise.

Social media content sharing, engagement, and reputation are all negatively impacted by a company whose actions do not match its words or whose main purpose is to make a profit.

What actions help create alignment between business and social media objectives?

In this article, we will discuss some examples of how companies can create alignment between their business practices and their social media content.

Business Action: Price Transparency

One of the most effective ways for a company to align their brand with social media is to come clean about its pricing practices. This includes publishing prices on the website as well as responding promptly to customer requests for pricing information.

Social Media Objective: Visuals

Visuals are an important consideration when it comes to the relationship between social media and business objectives. Consumers want to know that they are dealing with an honest, reputable company and your social media presence should reflect that.

Step 2: Identify buyer personas

Creating content-based on your buyer personas is a great way to attract an audience. These will be people who are likely to be interested in what you have to offer.

What are Buyer Personas?

Buyer personas are fictional characters that represent your ideal customer. They are based on extensive research about the target customer. This can include demographics, psychographics, behavioural data, and many other factors.

Identifying buyer personas is an important step in creating content that will attract and retain customers.

If you want to build a profitable and sustainable business, you need to start thinking about what your target audience wants and how they behave.

To create content for your target audience, you first need to identify who they are. You can then use that information to create content that is relevant and valuable to them.

Step 3: Define S.M.A.R.T Goals

A SMART goal is specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time-bound. It is a type of objective with a set plan to reach it. SMART goals are important because they make sure your goals are clear and you can see your progress towards them.

Social media is a powerful tool for marketing and branding your small business. However, the true value of social media only becomes apparent when you set goals and objectives that will help you measure success and develop strategies for growth.

The following tips will help you and your small business to capitalize on this great marketing tool:

• Define your objectives. You run a business, not an online popularity contest. Define your objectives for using social media as a marketing tool. What do you want to accomplish? Do you want more traffic, more qualified leads, or more sales?
• Establish criteria for expected results. How will you measure and refine your strategy? Set quantifiable goals that you can measure over time. Take into account the type of business you run and how social media fits into it.
• Set a deadline for obtainable goals. When do you expect to achieve your social media goals? Be realistic and remember that social media requires commitment and time investment on your part, but will likely pay off with increased awareness of your company and its products or services in the long run.
• Assess the resources at your disposal before starting on any social networking site. Know how much time you can realistically devote per week to managing your accounts on social media.

Step 4: Conduct Social Media Audit

Social media is a powerful tool for any business to reach customers, advertise, and build brand awareness.

Unfortunately, many businesses still do not take advantage of this marketing channel. The reasons vary but the following are the most common:

• Not sure which social media platform or channels are right for your business
• Unsure how to measure success
• Too busy running their business to manage social media accounts
• Lack of resources (time, people) to maintain active accounts
• Not sure what to post on social media (and when)

If you are experiencing any of these problems or concerns, then it may be time for your company to conduct an audit of your current social media presence.

The audit should cover all of the platforms your company currently uses. It should not only look at which platforms are used but also how they are used.

At this time, you should also evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of each platform’s opportunities for brand awareness and customer engagement.

How to Conduct a Social Media Audit?

The first step is to create a list of your current social media platforms. This list should include Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, TikTok, and other social networks that your business is currently using.

Once you have the list of platforms compiled together, it is time to evaluate your business’ presence on each network.

For example, how many followers do you have? How often are you posting to each network? Is there a presence on the network at all? Are there any competitors on each network? Are their profiles active? Which networks are performing better than others?

Make note of what you find during the evaluation process so that you can either improve or eliminate poor-performing channels. Once you have evaluated your current social media presence it is time for you to define social media objectives. These objectives will help you decide which types of content you can utilize for your social media content.

There are four main types of content that you can post on your social media accounts:

Self-promotion: Put your company’s message front and center on your social media channels. A self-promotional piece is a great way to get the word out about an exciting announcement, upcoming event or new product. These items don’t have to be boring — think of them as an opportunity to showcase your brand’s personality and connect with your audience.

Information resources: Use content to provide helpful information that will educate or entertain your audience. This could be a “how-to” video, a list of top tips for a particular topic or even personal experience stories. Make sure you’re providing value with each piece of content by including links back to your website where appropriate.

Featured customers: Showcase happy customers in their natural habitat using pictures or videos. This helps put a human face on your brand, which in turn makes it more relatable to people considering purchasing from you. 

Short videos: Include short videos in your social media posts to show what life is like at your company reveal interesting facts about products and services. Instagram Reels and TikTok videos are the upcoming trends for small businesses that can allow you to gain lots of reaches organically.

Step 5: Measuring Social Media Progress

Social Media is a growing and changing animal, and there’s no way to know for sure what will work well and what won’t. You’ll never know if your social media strategy is working unless you can track your progress. 

If you are just starting with your social media marketing, you may have no clue how to find out what is working and what is not. The first step to making social media work for your business is to measure your current performance.

There are several steps you can take to evaluate your progress:

Create goals — These should be measurable and focus on customer engagement, community interaction and brand awareness. Examples might include: “increase Facebook likes by 100 per month” or “increase website traffic from Twitter followers by 20% this quarter.” You should also set goals for each of the platforms that you use — for example: “drive at least 50 new visitors per month from organic Instagram content” or “reach 100 new customers through Instagram Ads.”

Measure — Once you have established goals, you need to determine how you will measure your progress. This may be as simple as tracking the number of followers for each account, but if possible, use more quantitative information such as page views or increased web traffic from those accounts.

Analyze — Use analytics software such as Google Analytics or HootSuite Analytics to examine trends in likes, shares, retweets and other engagement metrics. This will help identify which campaigns are successful,

Step 6: Refining your Social Media Strategy

We all know that social media is a powerful marketing tool, but the problem is that it’s a big platform and it’s moving very fast. It’s important to track what you’ve been doing on social media so you can tell what is working and what isn’t.

What to do:

Analyze your Google Analytics data. This will give you a general idea of which social platforms are driving the most traffic to your site. In the past few years, Facebook has become the best lead generation channel for most businesses.

Make sure that you have a Facebook pixel installed on your website. This will allow Facebook to track any conversions that happen as a result of a visitor coming from a Facebook ad or post, making it easier for you to optimize your existing campaigns.

Next, analyze what posts have gotten the most engagement from your audience. This can tell you what type of content they respond well to and should be repeated in the future.

Then analyze which posts haven’t gotten as much engagement as other posts. If you see certain topics or types of content getting less engagement, try using different approaches with those topics (more images, video vs text, etc.)

Finally, make sure you’re analyzing your data regularly (at least once per month).

To learn more about how you can create an effective social media strategy, contact our digital marketing agency for further insight.