The New Year is upon us, and every year, as with all with new beginnings, we see many small businesses regrouping and formulating their social media plan for the year ahead.
A good social media marketing strategy helps you maintain focus, and achieve the outcomes you need in order to succeed. The more detailed and specific your strategy is, the more effective it will be, but be realistic and put in place some achievable goals.
Creating your social media marketing strategy doesn’t need to be complicated or difficult. Just by answering a few important questions, you can build the base for your strategy and go from there!
Question 1: What are your aims for using Social Media?
Your social media aims and goals should be S.M.A.R.T:
Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Time-bound.
Examples of goals might be to increase awareness of your brand, to increase traffic to your website, to deliver great customer service or to engage with a wider audience – all of which are achievable through consistent social media marketing.
Make sure your aims align with your business, this way you can easily measure the success of your strategy.
Question 2: Who is your target audience?
Get to know your fans, followers and customers as real people with real interests, wants and needs – the more you know about your current audience, the easier you’ll find it to grow this audience and gain new customers. Not only that, but the more you post about the interests of your current audience, the more likely they are to keep coming back for more of what you have on offer.
When it comes to your target audience, you should know things like:
- Age
- Location
- Interests
- Job Industry
Your social media analytics and insights should be able to help with this, but the more you engage with your audience the more data you’ll gather.
Question 3: What key words and phrases represent your brand?
Think about what wording other professionals in your industry are likely to use, and what words your customers use to search for what you have to offer. Once you have a good idea of these, use them regularly in your posts – for example, we regularly talk about social media management, support and training throughout our social media posts, because it’s a service at the core of our business.
Once you’ve got your head around phrases, think about using them in hashtags on Instagram and Twitter too! A hashtag is like a mini search engine for many users, so make sure you’re found by your target audience when you use them! We have a great little graphic from Big Screen Social to help you right here.
Question 4: What events and activities do you have coming up?
Consider creating a social media content calendar, including key dates in the year relating to your industry. We use this website to keep up to date with what’s happening each month, to make sure we’re not missing out on core celebrations.
Plan ahead for big things like your business birthday, Christmas, Halloween, Valentine’s day (you get the drift) so that by the time the day comes, you’re focussed on promoting your business, and not frantically searching for content to post – the more time you have to think and plan, the easier you will find managing your own social media to be (and by default, the more successful your social media marketing will become)!
After answering all of these questions, you should be ready to build your social media marketing strategy, ready to hit the ground running in 2023. But if you’re still struggling with the answers and need a little help, or an expert to bounce ideas off of, Social Progress are here to help!
If you’d like to book a full Social Media Strategy Session in with the team, all you have to do is email info@socialprogress.co.uk!