By Adam

Whether your business is a start-up or an already well-established brand, social media can help in many ways. It’s a fantastic opportunity to connect with your audience and interact with them, as social media is a two-way conversation.

When creating a social media strategy, you must align it with the business goals and know exactly how it will benefit the brand. To make things a bit easier, we’ll share how to develop a powerful social strategy so that you can take your business to the next level with your marketing efforts.

What is a social media strategy & how is it beneficial for businesses?

The definition is straightforward – it is a plan that outlines what you want to achieve with social media and how you will do that with specific and practical actions.

Meanwhile, social media has a variety of benefits, including, but not limited to:

• Brand awareness
• Growing website traffic
• Lead-generation (gated content, newsletter and event sign-ups & others)
• Managing brand image
• Social listening to improve your business offering
• Benchmarking against competitors

Now that we’ve covered the bases of what social media strategy is and why it’s beneficial let’s break down the steps to achieve success.

Step 1. Define your goals

All good strategies start with defining business goals. What is it do you want to achieve this month or quarter? Is it more sales or perhaps developing your audience? Goals should align with broader business objectives, so social media works in tandem with other channels to drive the growth.

When creating a strategy, have specific and measurable goals instead of generic ‘I want more traffic, so I’ll use Facebook.’

Define the timeframe by which these goals need to be achieved and what you’ll do exactly. Keep in mind, many believe that tasks will take a shorter time than they do, so plan for sufficient time to execute them.

Step 2. Pick and mix

Once you’ve established goals, it’s time to select appropriate social channels. For example, LinkedIn is more commonly used by B2B businesses like marketing agencies and is excellent for relationship-building. Meanwhile, Instagram & Facebook is more customer-centric and could be a good fit if you’re an e-commerce fashion brand.

Picking the right mediums is extremely important, as you don’t want to waste time and resources on an audience that isn’t even there. Though some companies opt for being on all the channels and see it as an opportunity to be more visible, so you need to pick and mix and determine which ones will be primary in driving your conversions & goals.

Step 3. Know your customer

If you’re marketing a business online and have no idea what’s your audience like, it’s no better than shouting in an empty vacuum. So before posting on the selected platforms, conduct an in-depth customer search.

You should be able to answer at least these basic demographics questions, such as age, location and occupation. Luckily, you can dig into Google Analytics to check who’s visiting your site and use this data to inform decisions on how to use social media to reach these group.

Break your audience down into major groups, …read more

Source:: Social Media Explorer

Author: Aaron