What You Need in Your Social Media Strategy

Social media marketing for businesses can be very overwhelming, especially if you do not know where to begin. A couple of times I have interacted with businessowners who have informed me that their social media campaign is not working for them. So what constitutes an effective social media campaign?

Social media marketing is one of the most important marketing tools that a business can have to promote their brand presence and reputation. There are approximately 2.8 billion social media users across all networks. The choice of a social media platform depends on the nature of your business and the kind of engagement you want to have with your audience. Social media is one of the platforms where you do not necessarily need to outspend your competitors in order to beat them. Rather, you can develop a coherent strategy that helps you differentiate yourself from the competition. The following tactics when done correctly can help you maximize conversions at the lowest possible cost.

1.????? Goal Setting

Just having a business page, posting information and boosting a post is not enough. A couple of times I have met businesses that have just two or three posts and boost them over and over again. While this could be working, the strategy could be made better by engaging and communicating to the community. It is important for a business to build goals and strategies to determine if they are meeting their targets. Key performance indicators should not be an afterthought but should be at the forefront of the social media strategy. At Ciriz Digital Services, we help our clients craft different strategies for improving goals. A summary of the goals could be:

Engagement: Likes, shares, clicks, comments, and mentions

Reach: Impressions, followers, web traffic

Conversions: lead conversion rate, sales revenue, non-revenue conversions

Customer loyalty: issues resolved, costs per lead, and customer lifetime value

Your goals need to be SMART. That is they need to be specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound. What you measure determines what you do. So from the measurement, you can evaluate whether or not you are on track with your social media strategy.

2.????? Understand your Customers

After you have your goals in mind, the next step is to break down your customer details. You need to understand who your customers are, what they are interested in, and where you can find them. Do not get lost in the data because it could be overwhelming. You need to be detailed and specific in this. Some of the customer characteristics you can consider includes: age, gender, education, occupation, needs, hobbies, and location.

Irrespective of the size and nature of your business, it is important to have a general understanding of your buyer persona. This will help you create a picture of your ideal customer and develop strategies of engaging your customer. You can have more than one persona to capture different insights, pain points, and demographics.

3.????? Competitor Analysis

This is an important step that many businesses forget. At Ciriz Digital Services, we usually take time with our clients to help them identify their main competitors. We take time and effort you analyze what the competition is doing better than our clients and how we can better the clients' social media strategy.

It is important to check your competitors' messaging, the content they produce, the time and frequency of their posts. The competitors' analysis can help you understand how your competition is engaging with the audience and the success of their engagement.

4.????? Social Media Channels

Choosing the right channel for the right content helps improve the efficiency and effectiveness of your campaigns. Do not make the mistake of being present in all the social media platforms just for the sake of it; rather, the content you post on the platforms should suit your unique business needs and context.

Facebook: This is one of the oldest and most used platforms. Facebook is a platform that can help boost sales and conversions. Many content types perform well on this platform.

Instagram: Instagram is a platform that has gained popularity, especially among the younger generation. When posting on Instagram you should consider design, branding, and photography.

LinkedIn: LinkedIn is a network of professionals. This means that the platforms can be used for business-to-business (B2B) marketing even though there is still an opportunity for business-to-customer (B2C) marketing. Some of the content that works well on LinkedIn includes whitepapers, blogs, eBooks, and industry-related content. LinkedIn has search engine optimization (SEO) tools that can help your brand content rank on search engines if they are well written using relevant keywords.

X (Formerly Twitter): This is a real-time platform where content should be timely and relevant. This platform can be used to offer great customer service to clients as it allows brands to respond to hashtags and discover new trending content.

TikTok: This is one of the fastest-growing social media channels. TikTok is great for short video content. TikTok can also be effective in influencer collaborations.

YouTube: YouTube is a platform that allows marketers to connect with clients by providing information in form of entertainment.

5.????? Strategize your Social Media Campaigns

Now that you have what you need to get started, you are ready to strategize and execute your brands' social campaign.

Develop a tone for your pages: Tone is how you want your audience to see and speak to your brand. Are you formal or informal? Do you use humor or is your business more serious? Each of the social media platforms has its personality, meaning you want to communicate differently across the platforms.

Create content themes or content buckets: The content bucket or content theme is influenced by your nature of business.

Have a content calendar: the content calendar will help you be orderly in your posting. The calendar can help you anticipate what you need early so that you can be proactive in your graphics, videos, reels, and any other content type that you need for the different platforms.

Schedule your content: Our company Ciriz Digital Services has a tool that can help you determine the optimum posting time. Through this, you can schedule the posting times to ensure maximum organic traffic and engagement.

6.????? Manage and Engage your Community

The benefit of social media is that it can help you build connections. These connections can become communities. Communities are important as they build engagement and drive brand awareness.

One of the important elements of community management is being responsive. Be quick to respond to customers' questions or comments. Be helpful to the needs and expectations of the customers. There are times when there could be negative feedback. Make sure you respond positively and find out how you can better the experience to avoid a negative run. Engage the community through surveys or polls. This makes the audience feel part of the community and also helps you find more information about your customer base.

7.????? Grow your Following

Growing your audience is an important element of the social media strategy. You can grow audience organically or through paid advertising. A word of caution is that you should not fall prey to unscrupulous people who want to increase your audience base by a big number overnight. You can promote one platform on another.

Need more advice on these strategies, contact Ciriz Digital Services for more information.