Creating the Perfect Social Media Strategy for Your Brand

With the introduction and popularity of web 2.0 and just recently even web 3.0, it is safe to say that business owners need to hop on the social media train at some point eventually if they want to become successful, especially with the younger generation. 

In this day and age, If you want to establish your brand, social media is no longer optional. It is an absolute requirement and an essential way to not only reach your target audience, regardless of the demographic they belong to, but also communicate with them from anywhere at any time. Plus, with their constant upgrades and updates, big tech companies are making it easier than ever for us to leverage the tools, resources, and features needed to create content and maintain a good social media presence. 

In this article, we will be focusing on the steps you can take to develop the perfect social media strategy for your brand.

Before diving deeper into the topic, let’s first define it. Simply put, a social media strategy is essentially a summary of whatever you plan to do and achieve on your social media accounts. In other words, the goals you wish to reach on the platform and how you plan on doing so. 

Now, let’s share our guide on all things social media strategy. 

Define Your Goals

First things first, ask yourself “Why?” This refers to your goals, both short-term and in the long run. Why is it that you are on social media? 

Below, are the most common goals for the majority of people: 

• Generating leads
• Driving traffic
• Increasing revenue
• Increasing brand awareness
• Boosting community engagement
• Improving your PR 
• Providing customer support 

Note that you can have more than just one goal and that’s completely fine. That being said, it’s recommended to focus on a realistic amount to yield better results. This means the smaller your team, the fewer goals you can add to your plate simultaneously. Keep in mind this first step is crucial for what follows at a later stage. For instance, if your aim is to drive more traffic to your website, then you have to work on making your website as user-friendly as possible. But, if your goal is to boost engagement, then you have to shift your focus to creative content. 

Moreover, when planning them out, make sure that you’re writing down S.M.A.R.T goals. The letters here stand for specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound, respectively. 

Identify Your Target Audience

There’s a famous saying that goes like this: “If you want to please everyone, you end up pleasing no one.” The takeaway here is that you cannot create content that everyone will like. You have to build your niche. So, knowing who your audience is and taking the time to better understand them is key. This way, you can guarantee that you are creating content that they are most likely to positively engage with and it also increases the chance of your page visitors to turn into followers and ultimately customers. 

There are plenty of tools, both paid and free, that you can find online that will help you collect data and analyze it. The utmost basic traits that you should take into consideration are age, gender, and location. Although, you shouldn’t stop here. It’s advised to also take into account things like the economic background, interests, average income, and so on.

How can this help? Think about this instance - you learn from your data that your audience spends only a few seconds on a post, on average. In this case, for obvious reasons, it would be more reasonable to focus on visual content with less text than the other way around. 

An additional rule of thumb to follow is to never make assumptions when it comes to your audience. After all, the truth lies within the data, which is available at your disposal. 

Define Your KPIs 

Again, it’s super important for your social media to be data-driven. This entails that you focus on the metric that actually matters. So, what metric are we talking about here? We’re referring to the numbers by which you will be able to track your success and measure your return on investment (ROI) i.e how close you came to reaching your previously defined goals. Key performance indicators or KPIs for short, as the name implies, tell you how well your social media strategy is performing on these platforms. 

Below, are the most common KPIs for the majority of people: 

• Reach - this can be a post reach to your target audience, for example.
• Engagement - total number of social interactions divided by the total number of impressions
• Clicks - number of clicks on your post, for example.
• Visits - number of visits to your profile
• Views - total number of views on a post 
• Likes - total number of likes (can be organic or paid)

Diversify Your Content

Would you follow a brand that only posts promotional content? We doubt you would. That’s why it’s important to diversify your content as much as possible. Yes, ultimately, we hope to maximize sales and minimize losses, but bombarding or spamming your audience with ads will eventually drive them away, unfortunately. One formula to use is to balance out informing, entertaining, and selling. 

Needless to say, content creation is an entire process requiring a wide range of technical and soft skills. Ideally, you would need team members from different backgrounds such as design, writing, marketing, and so on, to carefully create your social media content.

Additionally, content calendars might come in handy. They are available for free and can be accessed both offline and online. They help you prepare your content beforehand, schedule them and finally, put them out in due time. 

Conclusion

It’s true that hard work pays off but hard work without a proper social media presence won’t pay off as well. Hence, it is well worth it to put in the money, time, and effort and thoroughly plan out a detailed social media strategy that works best for your specific brand. It is an investment that will surely pay off in the end.