Everything You Need to Know for an Effective Social Media Strategy
Nowadays, social media has become an essential part of one’s business strategy; however, it takes more than just posting content to make effective use of these platforms for your business. This is where a social media strategy comes in to help reach your goals.
Having a set plan of what you hope to achieve and distinguishing organized steps on how to get there, can make all the difference. So where do you start to create your own social media strategy?
In this blog, Bold x Collective discusses the necessary steps you need to take and keep in mind when brainstorming your social media strategy, with their expert team.
First, it’s important to know the purpose of your social media strategy and understand how media marketing works. Social media marketing is when you use social media platforms and social networks to market your brand.
This method of marketing allows brands to reach out to both their current audience, as well as their potential customers. Furthermore, this allows brands to showcase their mission, tone, and personality.
With that said, it’s clear that social media marketing is used as a means of creating brand awareness, advertising, performance tracking, and providing customer service. With all these potential advantages, not implementing social media marketing into your business strategy could hinder your brand’s success.
Now that we discussed how important it is to have a social media strategy, let’s talk about what your strategy should include. Your social media strategy should outline what goals you set out to achieve, how you will go about achieving them, and what metrics will be used to measure your progress.
The strategy itself should be executed to alter it as needed based on status changes of your target audience’s wants and needs, along with the cultural climate, like popular trends. When braining storming your social media strategy, keep in mind the following five fundamental steps:
1. Creating Specific Goals That Align With Major Business Objectives
Having goals is a key component of your social media strategy, as it’s the most accurate method to track your progress and measure your success. Your goals should follow the S.M.A.R.T framework.
- S – Specific
- M – Measurable
- A – Attainable
- R – Relevant
- T – Time-Bound
Following this framework will help you with creating realistic goals that can be measured within a specific time frame. This way, you can track your progress effectively and most importantly, track for areas of improvement.
As for what metrics you should be looking at when tracking these goals, you should be looking at the ones that are most relevant to how your brand is doing.
Sometimes a lot of likes on a post doesn’t particularly mean your brand is doing well. Look for metrics, such as saves, likes, shares, comments, how long a viewer spent watching your video, how long social media users are spending on your website, and more.
The information you get from these numbers demonstrates how well your audience is engaging with your brand. With this information, you can determine whether changes need to be made to the strategy.
2. Defining Your Target Audience
Once you have an idea of the goals you want to achieve, it’s time to think of who will help you achieve those goals. That’s right, your customers! To get good engagement and loyal customers, it’s crucial to understand your target audience, like what demographics do they fall under? Create a customer profile questionnaire that includes the following inquiries:
- How old is my customer?
- What does my customer do for a living?
- How much does my customer make yearly?
- Where does my customer live?
- What are my customers’ values?
- What does my customer do as a hobby?
These types of questions will help you distinguish exactly who you are targeting and how you can better cater your marketing strategy towards them. This can be done by creating a brand persona and tone that reflects this specific customer.
Additionally, to this, on social media, you can even learn about your target audiences’ consumer behaviours based on how they interact with content from brands like yours.
3. Complete a SWOT, PEST, and Competitor Analysis
After you’ve defined your target audience, you can then proceed to further research the industry you’re entering, where you are at as a business and where your competitors are. Investigating further into this information can prove to be very useful for what to include and what not to include in your strategy and marketing tactics.
A SWOT analysis stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. You’ll want to ask yourself – What are some of the strengths and weaknesses your business currently has? What are some of the opportunities and threats you will face? Further to completing a SWOT analysis for your brand, you can then figure out where your strategy needs improvement and areas to maintain.
PEST analysis stands for Political, Environmental, Social a,nd Technological. This analysis allows you to examine the socio-economic factors that impact the industry you are working in. By getting a good general understanding of the social climate, you can use this information to make changes to your strategy where applicable.
Finally, a competitor analysis, which is known to be one of the most vital components to shaping your social strategy, as it highlights what the competition looks like and gives you the necessary information you need to differentiate your brand from them.
From here you can take inspiration from competitors to create tactics that will help you grow and define your style as a brand.
4. Get To Know Your Social Platforms
Part of your social media strategy is to understand which platforms will be most beneficial for your brand, how are you planning on staying active, and how to tailor your strategy to each platform’s guidelines.
This is because what works on Instagram may not work on Twitter or TikTok. Each account that you have on separate platforms must reflect your brand but also be able to work with the features that are unique to each platform.
Quality is better than quantity, so pick a handful of social platforms that you would like to focus on and create detailed strategies on them.
This can be done by researching what content is best received on those platforms, what’s trending on these social media platforms (hashtags, songs, challenges), what content is best received by your audience, and what unique features each application has to offer, such as stories and reels and more.
By knowing what each group of users want and like to see on each platform, you can effectively reach your goals.
5. Staying Organized and Consistent
Staying organized and consistent should be the main part of your social media strategy, as when and how often you post make a great difference. This is something that can be done with a little trial and error to see what your audience engages with the most and what time during the day are they most active on their social platforms. Some of their favourite third-party platforms to use that will help you with your social content organization are:
- Mailchimp
- Hootsuite
- SproutSocial
With the use of these platforms, you can dissect your social analytics and schedule content accordingly. This content should reflect your brand’s ethos while striving for the goals you set out for. For example, sometimes you may want to follow different tactics, like the 80/20 rule, which focuses on 80% of the content being entertaining, educational, and exciting, meanwhile 20% of it focuses on your business’ services or products.
6. Continue to Adjust Strategy Accordingly
If you couldn’t already tell from the previous steps, curating a social media strategy is very much a process of trial and error, by distinguishing what really works best for your brand and what you should stay away from in your strategy.
This means it is important that you are open to accommodating and adjusting to the options available to you and recognize the ones that will benefit your brand and strategy.
Social media can sometimes be unpredictable, you never know what the next trend will be, how long a trend will last, or what new feature will come along that you’ll have to learn, so it’s important to be adaptable!
These fundamental steps are a few of the many necessary steps that Bold x Collective recommends you start with to help formulate your successful social media strategy. They hope this blog helps you get closer to developing your strategy and achieving your goals along the way.
Still not sure how to get started? They’re here to help! Get in touch with their team at Bold x Collective, where they can help you create a bold and creative social media strategy that works for your industry. Their team of expert strategists, marketers, and creatives are here to help.
