Writing and establishing a successful social media marketing strategy can be tricky. It’s an ongoing process that takes trial and error. But, by setting goals, knowing your customer base and doing a little market research, you can easily create a social media strategy that will help you successfully connect with your audience.
Follow these key steps, so that you and your business can stay on target and get the most out of your efforts:
- Establish Business Goals: You can’t create a successful marketing strategy and move your company forward without knowing what you’re working toward. Figure out exactly what it is that your company wants to accomplish, and decide how you want to use social media to help you reach those goals.
- Establish Marketing Objectives: Marketing objectives are the parameters that help you define how you get from one point to the next. They should be specific, measurable and achievable. For instance, if one of your goals is to generate more sales, then you need to know how many sales that you need to make before you can say that you’ve successfully completed that goal.
- Identify Your Customer Base: You must be specific in establishing your customer base – know your audience’s interests, income, age, occupation, likes and dislikes. Once you understand who you’re talking to, planning and strategizing is much easier.
- Know Your Competition: Research your competition and their activity so that you can get a better idea of what is and isn’t working. Pay attention to which social platforms they are using and study their content strategy. This way, you’ll get a better idea of how to integrate the more successful processes into your own strategies.
- Choose Your Channels Wisely: Don’t waste time posting on unnecessary social channels; know where your customers are networking and target those channels.
- Develop a Content Strategy: Type of content, time of posting and frequency of posting define a successful content strategy.
- Assign Roles: It is important to assign roles so that each person knows exactly what they are responsible for, for maximum productivity.
Developing a successful social media strategy is a process and may continue to evolve as you learn what works and what doesn’t. The important thing is to learn from what doesn’t work and keep moving forward.
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Image courtesy of Hubspot. Used with permission.