“If you don’t know what you want, the chances that you’ll get it are extremely low.”
Ambiguity is the enemy when it comes to achieving social media marketing success. To derive the most value from social media, you’ll need to develop a calculated social media plan that clearly contributes to your business’s wider strategy, goals and objectives. Second-guessing will result in second-rate results: you need a strategy.
To help you develop this well-considered, effective strategy, we have created a basic tick-list as follows:
1. Identify Your Business Goals
Once you are able to identify your business’s overall needs and targets (e.g. 50% growth in market share within a specific time period), you will be able to identify how social media can contribute to supporting them.
2. Create Your Social Media Marketing Objectives
In order to support your wider business goals, you need to develop SMART marketing objectives, complete with metrics and key performance indicators that allow you to gauge success and adjust your approach accordingly.
3. Identify Your Ideal Customers
Social media success is governed by how successfully you can resonate with your audience. If you haven’t effectively segmented your audience and developed buyer personas, how are you able to target them, let alone engage them and convert them into customers?
4. Research Your Competition
Researching competitors is a fantastic way of learning what does and what doesn’t prove effective in engaging your industry’s audience. By assessing the strategies of others, you can hand-pick the most successful aspects of their campaigns and incorporate these into your own.
5. Decide On Your Channels and Tactics
It is important you carefully consider the correct channels for your audience (testament to the importance of buyer personas). The last thing you want to do is needlessly invest time and effort into a social media platform for no return on investment. The final point within this guide covers this in greater detail.
6. Develop A Content Strategy
Content is a fundamental part of any social media strategy, it is what draws your audience to your online presence and delivers them value. In order to ensure you consistently deliver this value and address your audience’s needs, you’ll need to develop a strategy with a clear rationale that takes into consideration the type of content, frequency of posting and time of posting.
7. Allocate Budget and Resources
As with any marketing campaign, return on investment should be central to determining budget allocation. Every aspect of your social media strategy should be framed in these terms to ensure you can effectively assess your investments. Remember to prioritise tactics that offer the fastest ROI, this will help you maintain a sustainable cash-flow.
8. Assign Roles
To increase productivity and militate against mismanaged expectations, it is imperative you assign specific roles to staff. Employees should be absolutely clear on the aspects of the campaign that they are accountable for, making it much easier to coordinate and plan a collective execution process.
Whilst these tips will undoubtedly help propel you toward social media success, we know all too well that the demands of running a business can sometimes become overwhelming.