Our Guide to Creating a Social Media Strategy
SHARE THIS POST
There’s no denying that social media has become an important part of our everyday lives. It’s hard to find someone who isn’t on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn…you get the idea! For business owners, this makes these platforms vital to include in your marketing strategy.
Having a solid strategy can enhance your efforts, making more leads, sales, and followers possible. Don’t have a strategy? You can get one started today by following our simple guide.
Know Your Target Audience.
We highly recommend this as your starting point, not just for marketing, but for your whole branding! When you’re figuring out your marketing strategy, you need to know who you’re marketing to. If you have the perfect strategy, but are marketing to the wrong people, it will have been for nothing.
We’ve created a freebie to help narrow that down and define your target audience.
Establish Goals.
This might go without saying, but before you can reach your goals, you have to set them first. It can be hard to define one specific goal, especially when getting started, but this will help to focus your marketing efforts. Figure out what you want to accomplish through social media, what you expect it to do for you – that’s the first step.
The second step is to confirm that the goals you’re setting are realistic and achievable. Can you reach 100,000 followers in your first six months of posting? Possibly, but it might not be likely. You want to make something that will push you, but isn’t unachievable.
Examples of some goals are:
- Increase leads from 10 to 25 in six months.
- Boost engagement by 25%.
- Increase brand awareness by reaching 10% more profiles.
- Increase traffic to brand website from 100 visits to 300 visits in one year.
- Increase sales from 5 orders to 10 orders each month.
Keep Your Eyes on the Prize.
The best way to know what is working is to do three things:
- Track it.
You can look through the metrics and see what your audience is responding to. Which posts reach the most people? Which post is getting the most engagement (likes, shares, comments, saves, etc.). Which hashtags are targeting the most people? When these numbers are high, you know that your strategy is working! That means you should keep doing what you’re doing. If the numbers seem low, it’s time to try something new. - Track your competitors.
If everyone else is doing it…but, seriously, see what your competitors are doing and if it seems to be working for them. We never recommend copying people, but their content could inspire you to do your own thing. Study their hashtags, their content, and what organically they are doing to reach their audience. Plus, if you see what they’re doing that is working, you’ll know how to tailor your own marketing efforts. - Trust the Algorithm.
The last thing you can do for this is to see what time the metrics say to post. This is when your audience is online and most likely to interact with your content. The algorithm tells you when the best publishing times are, which can be used for content ranking.
Get Good Graphics.
Last, but certainly not least, you need good graphics. This is the icing on the cake.
Gather your branding files: the colors, the fonts, and the icons/patterns and get to creating! You can make your own graphics by using Adobe Photoshop, Canva, or Creative Cloud Express (formerly Adobe Spark).
Not the creative type or short on time? You can hire a graphic designer to help with your graphics. We’d love to help you make the best of your marketing efforts with some graphics.
Kick off your new year with a great social media strategy! Follow this guide and let us know what you think: @elevatedbrandhq.
