Essential Factors to a Successful Social Media Strategy

If you’re unsure of where to start, or what to include in your Social Media Strategy, the following goals and objectives will guide your very own Social Media Strategy to help you better connect with your clients. Include these in your strategy and it’ll work from the point of execution!

Know Your Business Goals:

• Each strand of your Social Media Strategy will identify the goals to be set. “One does not simply move forward without understanding what one works towards.”
• If you inspect the needs of your company, it’ll soon become easier to decide how you want to utilise Social Media to help achieve those goals.
• I have no doubt that you’ll soon think up some personal goals – but that’s not a bad thing! Companies that include a few personal goals in their strategy successfully: raise their brand awareness, retain their customers and above all, reduce their marketing costs handsomely.
•  Define two top-tier goals (primary, if you will) and two second-tier goals (secondary) set your sights on; too many goals set results in zero goals achieved. 

Identify Your Perfect Customers:

• If a typical business suffers from poor social engagement, it’s generally given to the fact that their ‘ideal customer profile’ is inaccurate.
  
  

• A typical ‘buyer persona’ will help you target the right markets, in the right places at the right times – with the right content.

• What you know about the specifics of your target audience, such as: age, occupation, income, interests, issues, habits, obstacles, likes & dislikes, motivations etc, make it easier and cheaper for you to target them on Social Media!

Research The Competition:

• In the world of Social Media Marketing, competitor research doesn’t only serve as a means to keep you aware of their movements, but give you a slight idea of what works – enabling you to use those proven methods as your very own!

• To begin with, collect 3-5 main competitors, and do some simple research into the social networks they use – yes, that’s right… analysing their content strategy. Take particular notice of their fans/followers, the frequency and timings of their posts.

• Engagement (likes, comments, shares and alike) is of the utmost importance. Although page admins analyse engagement on a regular basis, you can still get a pretty good idea of what they see. Let’s say you decide to analyse a main competitor’s 20 most recent updates. Their total number of engagements can be divided by the page’s number of fans. This just gives you a general ideas of how your competition is performing, so that you can compare your performance against theirs.

Choosing Your Channels:

• Businesses all over will soon get so excited at the idea of social media leads, that they will create accounts on every network (popular or otherwise) without investing the proper research into the main benefits of each to them – especially when working Agency side with clients as I do.. An SME selling Exterior Lighting has little need for Vine. Make sure that you avoid wasting your time (and budgets) in the wrong areas. Use the aforementioned ‘buyer personas’ to establish which channels are best for you. For example, research tells you that customers and prospects spend 30% of their online time surfing Facebook and 15% on Twitter – you have your primary and second networks to focus on. Having said that, if your customers flock to a specific network, stick to what works.
  
  

• Your Social Media tactics for each platform are hugely reliant on your goals and objectives, not to mention best practices.

Content Strategy:

• If you haven't already, work on a separate Content Strategy. Social Media and Content go hand-in-hand; without exceptional content, social media is meaningless and without Social Media, your content is useless. Used together, you’ll be sure to reach and convert.

• Needless to say, the three main components of ANY Social Strategy are: Content Type, Time & Frequency of Posting. The areas of your published content heavily depend on the context and ‘form’ (the presentation; text, images, video etc). 

Budget & Resource Allocations:

• Some of Google’s more recent data states that 30% of survey respondents believe that Social has its very own budget, and of that 30%, 8.8% said that their own Social budget is taken from other pots, such as Traditional Offline Marketing (TV, Radio, Print etc.)
  
  

• Look at your achievable goals and objectives. Compile a detailed list of the tools that you’ll need: social monitoring, email marketing, CRM), outsourced services (graphic design, media production) and other purchasable advertising. For each of these, forecast the annual cost to give you a bird’s-eye view of your investments and the overall impact to your Marketing budget.

• Most businesses dedicate a budget early on, and select the tools needed that fit the budget. This may leave you without in the long run, and by ‘cheaping out’ on resources, your strategy may not be as effective as it could be. The more successful companies establish a strategy before they agree on a budget.

Role Assignment:

• This may seem obvious, but planning who’s responsible for each area will inevitably increase the team’s productivity and will avoid role confusion. This is sure to take some time in the early stages, but when everything settles, productivity will soar!

• If Mr A, Mr B, Ms C, Miss D assume the responsibilities of Visual Content Production, Video Content Production (and Post), Social Media Management and Social Media Paid Advertising respectively, less conflict will occur and team efforts won’t overlap.

• Tools are available to manage teams and assign resources, such as my personal favourite – Microsoft Project, Outlook Tasks or even Shared Calendars on Exchange… Okay, maybe ActiveCollab.

These points aren’t set in stone, and some may not work for you as well as expected. But adapt your own changes to your strategy, and everything will be fine!