An effective social media strategy can help brands find their true vision, map out goals, and strategically optimize their audience for results. With the social media world constantly changing and new algorithms and features being put in play, it seems almost impossible to keep up with times.
In today’s digital age, social media is becoming one of the most powerful marketing tools and is essential to a successful campaign. Below are five key steps to help guide new brands or brands looking to further build a stronger and effective social media strategy.
Step 1: Implement a Social Media Audit
Before you can set goals and start planning, you need to evaluate your current online presence on your social media platforms. This is important because it not only allows you to understand your brand’s core values and standards, but also helps show your progress and figure out where you want to go as a brand – now and in the future.
Here are some questions to consider asking yourself:
- Who do you think you are?
- Who are you in the eyes of others?
- Who do you want to be?
- What does it take to achieve this?
- How can you differentiate your brand to competitors?
Of course, these are just common questions to kick-start your social media audit. By doing this, you can determine strengths, weaknesses and opportunities to take advantage of when building or enhancing your brand.
Step 2: Identify Your Target Audience
Once you have evaluated your online presence, it’s important to understand how to target your audience. A target audience determines the type of content needed in order to promote your brand. It dictates how to promote on certain social media platforms, the way brands convey a brand’s ethos, and appeal to different demographics. All of these factors play an important role when establishing a key audience. Some questions to think about when narrowing it down include:
- What type of people care about this?
- Where do they live?
- How old are they?
- What are their lifestyle habits and interests?
If you have no idea who your target audience is, there are a couple of different ways to figure it out. Take your current followers and group them into buckets to find similarities. Another way is to use the features on social media to start quizzes and polls to better identify your current followers’ interests. Lastly, if your budget allows for it and depending on the platform, some social media strategies are specifically targeted to a certain group of people through ads. You can do A/B testing to figure out which group best responds to the message.
Step 3: Establish Goals
Setting goals may seem easy, but you have to make sure your goals are measured to track progress. When setting marketing goals and objectives, you can use the ‘SMART’ formula to make sure it is:
- Specific: Make sure your goals are specific and narrow for effective planning.
- Measurable: Define what evidence will be trackable to prove you’re making progress.
- Achievable: Make sure you can accomplish your goal in a certain timeframe.
- Realistic: Your goals should align with your values and long-term objective.
- Timely: Set a deadline for talk prioritization and motivation.
Writing these out and having creative brainstorm sessions can help make sure the goals are aligned with your strategies.
Step 4: Create Engaging Content
Content is key when it comes to effectively promoting your brand on social media. This means your messaging must correlate through the image as well as your caption. An engaging and effective content strategy contributes to your brand’s overall success.
Some assets that make effective content include:
- Captivating and aesthetically pleasing visuals
- Compelling multi-media content to promote your brand
- Building a social media editorial calendar
- Utilization of relevant hashtags and geotags
- Consideration of partnerships with brands and/or influencers
Remember, you do not need a budget in order to create engaging content. There is still a way to produce content with little to no expenses. iPhone photography is becoming more popular as technology and editing apps advance. There are also ways to partner with key influencers while making sure both parties benefit.
Step 5: Measure Success
Measuring success depends on your objectives. For example, if you are promoting content to obtain engagement then track for total likes, impressions, comments, clicks, etc. If your social media objective is to simply boost awareness, track metrics for profile visits, audience or reach.
Additionally, all social media platforms have insights that allow you to track metrics to analyze and optimize numbers. Each week, look at post performance and analyze the reach, impressions, shares, etc. You may notice a pattern in the top performing posts which will help you identify what is working and what isn’t.
Commonly used social media metrics:
- Audience
- Likes
- Impressions
- Reach
- Profile Visits
- Clicks
An effective social media strategy can take months to accomplish and starting out will be a lot of trial and error. It takes time to see improvement so do not get discouraged, but these key steps will lead you in the right direction to get started. I am always here if you have any questions!
XO,
Shelby Jolly
