Social media is one of the most cost-effective ways to start marketing your business. If you aren’t on social media, this year is a great year to start!
A great social media marketing strategy is an important part of any digital marketing plan. Despite this, many businesses fail to use social media as a tool successfully. Social media requires a new set of skills that might seem overwhelming. It all starts with getting to know your target audience.
Today, we’ll take a look at actionable social media marketing strategies you can implement for your business in 2021.
1. Set realistic goals for your social media
Before we begin doing the heavy lifting, the first thing you will need to figure out is what goals are important to you and your business. The plan that you build will be based off of these goals, so it’s important to keep things realistic. Some examples for goals include: increasing brand awareness, generating leads and sales, or growing your brand’s audience.
2. Research your target audience and get to know your existing audience
Don’t make assumptions about what you think your audience wants to see. Use the tools at your disposal to learn who your audience is and what they are interested in. Keep in mind that different platforms are great for different types of audiences so base your marketing efforts off of that information. It’s also crucial to keep tabs on your current audience.
3. Develop an effective content marketing strategy
Once you set your goals and know your audience, you can create an effective content marketing strategy. Always remember that content is king! You need to post quality content that will keep your audience coming back for more. Your content can follow a theme to create a cohesive image on your social media page. You can also make posts that are time-sensitive and it’s a great idea to incorporate video, as video sees high levels of engagement on social media.
4. Study your competition
It’s also a great idea to keep an eye on what other brands in your niche are doing on their social media platforms. You can use them as a standard to compare your own performance. Take a look at what they’re posting on Facebook or Twitter, keep an eye on their followers, monitor the types of engagement they receive, and then use that information to optimize your own social media strategy. Then rinse and repeat!
5. Engage your audience by creating a community
It’s important to create a dialogue between your company and your audience. People no longer want one-sided conversations with their favourite brands. Social media allows us to connect with our customers better than ever before, so you should make sure to take advantage of it! Ask your audience questions, gather their opinions, and like and share some of their posts instead of the other way around.
6. Timing is everything
While you should aim to put out fresh content every day, this can be hard if you only have a small marketing team. Instead, focus on maximizing your schedule when your brand is able to engage and interact with your customers.
This is because it’s critical to interact with your customers as you post. So it won’t make sense to post at times when your team is not online, and leave your audience hanging. It is essential to respond to customer questions and shout-outs as soon as possible. In fact, you should be responding in real time, as things happen.
7. Create cross-platform content
You can repurpose content across your platforms. Sometimes, small tweets, or other one-off posts do really well for engagement and garner plenty of likes and comments. This indicates that your audience likes that type of content, and is willing to engage with it. It would be a good idea to take those smaller posts and turn them into bigger content, like a YouTube video or blog post, for example. This gives you a chance to drive traffic back to your blog or your YouTube channel where you can garner more views and hopefully more conversions.
8. Focus on creating content that offers your audience something
Instead of making posts only about your products and services, you should be aiming to create content that offers your audience entertainment, education or inspiration. This creates a much more genuine social media space, and it shows that your brand has a personality outside of selling something. What other topics or information are related to your products or services? You can take these topics and create engaging content that entertains your audience or helps them out by giving them insider information.
9. Don’t stretch your social media strategy too thin
Instead of creating accounts on every single social media platform out there, you should choose one specific channel to focus on. Especially if you are just getting started with social media. It might be tempting to try your luck at tapping into all of these resources, but it will only spread your efforts thin and you might not see results before getting burnt out. It’s tough when you have a limited budget, time or a small team, to get everything done. If you really want to see results on social media, spend time curating content on one or very few social channels. This way you can manage your time better and get solid results.
10. Always assess your efforts and keep improving your strategy
At this point, you should have a good grip on your social media strategy and understand how it works. However, you can’t keep the same strategy forever! You should constantly be checking and analyzing your efforts to make sure you’re reaching the goals you set yourself at the beginning. A lot of social media strategy is trial and error, so monitoring your metrics is a key component that allows you to make small tweaks to your strategy here and there until you perfect it.
