Social media marketing a well known media used by both big brands and small businesses to reach their audience even though it is well known for its success and a wide range of users we should have in mind that success can not be achieved without a proper strategy. Also note that without a strategy, you might be posting on social media platforms for posting sake without actually understanding what your goals are, who your target audience is, and what they want, it’ll be hard to achieve results on social media.
Whether you want to grow your brand through social media or to level up as a social media marketer, developing a social media marketing strategy is essential.
How to develop a social media strategy
One the simplest ways to go about this goes thus:
- Why do you want to be on social media?
- Who is your target audience?
- What are you going to share?
- Where are you going share?
- When are you going share?
Click here to get a template for your social media strategy.
Why does your business want to be on social media?
The very first question to answer is the Why.
This relates to your social media goals. Are you on social media to promote your products? To drive traffic to your website? Or to serve your customers?
In general, there are the nine social media goals you can have:
- Increase brand awareness
- Drive traffic to your website
- Generate new leads
- Grow revenue (by increasing signups or sales)
- Boost brand engagement
- Build a community around your business
- Provide social customer service
- Increase mentions in the press
- Listen to conversations about your brand
How about your content?
When you see this question, you might be thinking about the types of content to share. For example, do you want to share videos or images?
But hold on for a second!
We’re talking about your social media marketing strategy here so let’s take a step back and think on a higher level. Instead of the types of content to share, “theme” might be a better word.
Here are a few brands and their theme(s):
- MeUndies, an underwear brand, shares photos from their customers and photos of their products on their Instagram profile.
- Huckberry, an outdoor and adventure brand, shares their editorial content and high-quality photos of the outdoors on their Facebook profile.
Who is your target audience
Where are you going share?
The next step is to determine where you are going to share your content. In other words, which social media platforms does your brand want to be on?. Always know that your brand can not be on every social media platform, so it’s best to know which social media platform works best for your brand by having an account on various social media platforms, monitoring the results and focusimg your efforts on the ones with the best results.
Share that social media marketing strategy that increased your leads, sales or even website traffic.