Many people entering the digital world believe that using social media marketing for your business is like using it personally, all you have to do is click pictures of your products and post them. That’s it. Let us clearly establish that this can not be far from the truth. When you are having social media plan, there are plenty of other things you can and you must do for your business account like using it for target marketing, understanding customer behaviour, giving customer support, and marketing it through various channels like paid promotion, collaboration, partnership, etc. 

To be able to leverage the boons of social media optimally for your business, you need a good marketing strategy for social media. Moreover, you need a dedicated team to execute those social media strategies and optimally allocate your resources as per your goals. 

In this blog, we shall help you develop your social media marketing strategy that will make it a lot easier for you to gain momentum in your business and quell that overwhelming feeling each time you open Instagram or Facebook. 

But before we move on to those intense analogies of pitching social media strategies, let us understand some basic aspects for the sake of wariness. 

Why does one need social media strategy?

The prima facie challenges that anyone entering the realm of social media for their business face are reaching their audience, harnessing the metrics for ROI, and reaching the objectives they have set for their business. They also help you to: 

• Set your goals and establish clear expectations in terms of creating brand awareness, rebranding, harboring the target audience, etc.
• Track the performance so that you know how effective the particularly executed strategy of social media marketing is.
• Tweak your benchmarks since as your business grows and as the social media marketing strategies start showing results, your benchmarks keep changing to meet the industrial standards, outrun your competitors, and your past performance. 

How can one create a social media strategy?

To create social media marketing strategies, you need to follow these steps:

Identifying your target audience

At this point you must be able to know the demography or persona of your target audience in terms of preference, age, income, gender, occupation, hobbies etc. this helps you create focussed advertising and campaigns that shall suit your target audience’s specific needs. 

Blogging 

To ensure that you commit to create new, relevant and quality content consistently, you can start by addressing what the users are looking for on the web. Pick a topic addressing some of the FAQs and post blog atleast a week. Blogging combined with social media strategies shall help you to reach out to a larger audience base. Social media will divert traffic to your blogs and make it easier for readers to share it on their accounts, i.e expanding the reach. 

You should also create content in the form of downloadable content like ebooks, infographics, checklists and videos through which you address your buyer’s achilles heels in a crisp, clean and concise way. 

Focussing on a few platforms 

Rather than overfilling your basket with tons of different platforms and then getting anxious learning the rules of each network, you should focus only on a few key platforms that support your bandwidth, so that you sustain a quality social media presence, even if on few. 

If you are confused about which platform to go for, you should reflect on your target audience adept. For example, if your target audience is of younger age demography especially as adolescents and teens, you should choose Instagram. Meanwhile, if your target audience is of business professionals, you should choose LinkedIn. 

Create your own recipe

There is no one way of growing towards your success and social media marketing is no science. Rather it is a hit and trial method where you have to create your own unique recipe for achieving your goals, since social media strategies are different for each business. This will also help your team to stay on track without loosing momentum and vision of your goal, and maintain the pace and persistence of your content posting. 

Assess your performance

What good is your strategy if you do not assess the results it yields? To make sure that you re able to keep track of your business and how well social media is able to catalyze it, you can use the analytics tools of each platform like Page Insights for Facebook, Visitor’s Analytics for LinkedIn, Account Insights for Instagram. For YouTube, you can choose among a plethora od options like Sprout Social, YouTube Analytics, Unbox Social, Quintly, ChannelMeter, ViralStat, TubeBuddy etc. These tools shall help you identify what your users are liking and how are they engaging with your social media handle, from knowing the average traffic, post performance, net new fans and followers, number of interactions through likes and comments to visits to your website. 

Conclusion

Irrespective of the boon or bane argument of social media, it is imperative to understand that it is a boon for businesses in this digital age, as it proves to become a multipurpose asset for your brand, be it connecting and engaging with your audience or promoting your products, services and brand. Strategizing your social media marketing plans on a weekly, monthly and yearly basis with real, achievable metrics and consistent, diligent and dedicated efforts will help your business grow in a considerable period of time.