How can you create a social media strategy that excites your customers?

1 Know your goals

Before you start posting, tweeting, or sharing, you need to have a clear idea of what you want to achieve with your social media strategy. Do you want to generate leads, increase awareness, drive traffic, or foster referrals? How will you measure your success and track your progress? Having specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART) goals will help you focus your efforts and align your activities with your business objectives.

2 Know your audience

You can't excite your customers if you don't know who they are, what they need, what they like, and where they hang out online. You need to do some research and create buyer personas that represent your ideal customers. A buyer persona is a semi-fictional profile that describes your customer's demographics, behavior, challenges, goals, preferences, and motivations. By creating buyer personas, you can tailor your content, tone, and style to suit your audience and appeal to their emotions and pain points.

4 Know your content

Content is the king of social media. It's what attracts, engages, and converts your customers. But not all content is created equal. You need to create content that is relevant, valuable, and consistent with your brand voice and personality. You also need to create content that is suitable for each platform and each stage of the buyer's journey. For example, you might use blog posts, ebooks, or webinars to educate your prospects, case studies, testimonials, or demos to persuade your leads, and coupons, discounts, or free trials to close your customers. You also need to use a mix of formats, such as text, images, videos, or podcasts, to cater to different preferences and learning styles.

5 Know your schedule

Having a social media strategy is not enough. You also need to have a social media plan that outlines when, where, and how often you will post, share, and engage with your audience. You need to create a content calendar that helps you organize your content, plan your campaigns, and avoid repetition or gaps. You also need to use tools, such as Buffer, Hootsuite, or Sprout Social, to automate your posting, scheduling, and analytics. However, you also need to be flexible and responsive to current events, trends, and feedback, and adjust your plan accordingly.

6 Know your results

The final step of creating a social media strategy that excites your customers is to monitor, measure, and improve your results. You need to use metrics, such as reach, impressions, clicks, likes, comments, shares, leads, conversions, or revenue, to evaluate your performance and compare it with your goals. You also need to use tools, such as Google Analytics, Facebook Insights, or Twitter Analytics, to track your data and generate reports. By analyzing your results, you can identify what works, what doesn't, and what you can do better next time.

7 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?