Every social media campaign should have a strategy. These are our top tips on how to construct a social media strategy.
The evolution of social media has created a power shift from the company to the consumer, where consumers can engage with you now more than ever before. Social media used as a tool for business provides a way to build relationships with your current customers and reach new potential customers.
If you are marketing your business online, it is important to develop a strategy that ensures you will work efficiently and have an effective campaign. Here are a few steps you can take to help develop a strategy and identify exactly why and how your business should be involved in social media.
1. Define Your Goals
The first thing you need to do is decide on your objectives. These should be reflective of your real life business goals. What do you want to achieve through social media? Your objectives could be to increase sales, grow brand awareness, create personal connections with customers, or something else. Think about what your long and short term business goals are, and how social media can help you to achieve these. It is strongly recommended to use SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-Bound).
2. Develop Your Approach
Which social media channels will help you achieve your goals? Think about your target market, which social media platforms they use, and why they use them. What are the opportunities and customer expectations with each platform? Match these with your objectives. Once you have your platforms, developing your approach.
- Write a list of post and/or ad categories you could create. For example, you could post about a specific product or service, a link to your website, a video, a testimonial, or a relevant article.
- Create a calendar that outlines your social marketing plan. Include what category your posts or ads will be about on any given week or month. Review and update the plan regularly and allow time to respond to feedback and adapt to changes in the online space.
- As with all marketing campaigns, create a budget. Even if you’re not planning to do any paid advertising, be prepared to devote time and resources towards your social media marketing.
- Develop and implement rules of engagement for posting on social media sites on behalf of your company. It also helps to create guidelines for your brand’s tone or voice. This ensures that there will always be consistency in the way your business comes across online. If you’re not sure on what your brand’s tone should be, try to come up with 3 words to describe how you want to be perceived. Do you want to be formal or informal? Upbeat or serious? Personal or professional?
3. Measure Your Success
There is no point creating a social media strategy if you don’t know how successful it is. Measuring your results will help you determine what works well, what needs to be improved on, and what should not be done again. Social media provides very specific insights on reach and engagement, so make sure you use them! They will allow you to adjust future online campaigns to be more successful for your target audience.
Take advantage of other free online tools to help with measuring online campaigns as well. Google Analytics will help you measure how many website visitors, sales, or enquiries were a direct response from social media. Survey Monkey allows you to create questionnaires and gather customer feedback if your objectives are around brand, or particular product awareness. You can also look at statistics such as sales figures during the time of your campaign, and compare it to a previous time frame.
Keep in mind there are many variables when operating a social media campaign, including choice of platform, post content, objectives, target market, budget, and resource allocation. If your first campaign is unsuccessful, we recommend trying again using different parameters, undertaking some research, or seeking some professional advice. At Dubzz Digital Marketing, we have experience managing social media for a range of different industries.
