Undoubtedly, it today’s technological confronted era, social media is the powerful tool embedded in the marketing arsenal of the business. If it is explored properly then it can really create a long lasting and effective interaction with the target customers.
But that is not all! Marketers often commit a mistake as they get to social media tools without having any clear planning. This can lead them to worst disaster of Public Relations with wastage of time. Thus, to get reaped all the benefits from social media, need is to create a crystal clear social media strategy that checks the points of
• What are your goals?
• Who are your customers?
• What the competitors are doing?
Thus, here are a few points that will help you to get started!
• Analyze your goals
Businesses are ongoing activity and first step in this journey, first step is to create a social media strategy that can interpret your goals visibly. These understandings will let you guide as where you want to head to. It also plainly depicts either:
• Your purpose of whole social media marketing activities is affiliated with brand awareness?
• Do you want to increase sales of products or increase traffic on website?
• Do you want to develop customer loyalty and enhanced retention?
However, these goals are not commonly exclusive but businesses should have to focus either on one or two points as spreading the business too thin will not lead to accomplish in time.
• Set considerable objectives
After having a proper understanding of the objectives, get your focus on the SMART strategy to set the goals and make sure that all objectives are the ones that fall in specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time based aspects.
However, once you are done with setting the objectives, make sure that if you are able to measure them or not. Search and explore the right tools for tracking as well as analyzing every objective in order to quantify the progress. It will later help you out in spotting the problems and adjust the course of action accordingly.
• Distinguish your customers
An apparent social media marketing strategy knows who their customers are! The successful strategy knows to target the right people by the right messages in right time. So for doing this, you need to understand the audience of your product or service. It can be done by comprehensively creating a profile of the ideal customer (age, income, family members, like and dislikes) as to penetrate in the right market.
• Check out the competition
Competition exists at every stance of the business operations and obviously social media carries a lot of competitors on and off. So learn from their success stuff and failures as what are really going to work and what could be turn as backfire!
To analyze your competition, first take about four or five top companies and check out their social media tactics as what they are gearing up towards. It will let you plan the suitable social media engagement plans for the target audience.
• Create effective messages
After going through above stages, you have now control on the ideal customers as well as on competition. So start building messages that could resonate your customers as per the persona created by the company.
However, adopting competitors’ few strategies is not a bad idea but creating an original concept to have customers under your umbrella will be a big plus that eventually sets you apart leading to create a distinct brand voice.
• Pick out the suitable channels
There are several channels come under the umbrella of social media but not necessarily all could be considered subtle for your business. So get towards the social media platform that is right according to the products or services.
For instance, LinkedIn is an ideal platform business to business sales while Pinterest is considered good for promoting fashion related business. However, search out for the influencers who can target the audience well and create buzz for your brand via online medium.
• Develop the content plan
Last but not the least; you need to concentrate on the strong content development plan that could engage your customers well. This content should have to be aligned well with the brand message and the respective social media channel. It is merely more than product information, so think about how to deliver an ultimate value and stick with your audience.
However, don’t just put your head in one type of media but sharing a mix of stuff like pictures, videos and info graphics regularly on social media will be best to amalgamate with target viewers.
These are the points that should have to be considered while brainstorming for good and effective social media strategy. Acting upon these pointers will undeniably bring more value to whole social media buzz concerning to your business.
