We’ve seen so many businesses going into social media abruptly. They have a basic idea on what to do on social media, but they simply do not understand how to begin or where to even start from. Some businesses just employ an intern and give them access to the company’s social media accounts for them to do whatever they want, because they are young and perceived to be social media savvy. However, we’ve gone past that stage of posting on social media and hoping it gets attention. Every business must have a well-detailed social media marketing strategy that creates a pathway for growth that’s inevitable. Because if you don’t, your competitors will prey on your weaknesses and garner more traction and engagement than you.
Here is our 5-step social media strategy for businesses in 2021.
1. Set a realistic social media goals
A problem most businesses face on social media is that they spend so much time setting unrealistic targets. Today, they’ll like to hit 1,000,000 views on YouTube, tomorrow they want to get 100,000 followers on Instagram While this may be possible, does this fit well into your business planning as a whole? Ideally, you should set strategic goals that can complement your overall business objectives.
Make sure your goals are:
– Specific
– Measurable
– Attainable
– Relevant
– Time-bound
The SMARTer your goals are, the more easy it will be for to meet them.
2. Decide your social media target audience
One common mistake made by businesses on social media is that businesses often think everyone is their target audience and everyone will like them. False. Social media isn’t a merry-go-round where it’s all fun and stuff. Look back at the goals you set in step 1.
There is no point having an audience who can’t engage with your content or help you meet your business goals. Most times, you want your social media followers to be prospective customers. So you need to have a target group (age, location, gender, interest, etc) Check how competitors are using social media A lot of businesses don’t just operate on their own. Of course, there will be competitors who have the same or similar business with yours who also use social media. You’ll need to know what they are doing. What are their content types? Whom are they targeting? What social media platform are they trying to dominate? Feel free to conduct a competitor analysis to help you get a better understanding of their strengths and weakness. By doing this, you’ll be able to understand what potential customers expect from business in your niche. Tools like sprout social and SEMRush can be used to spy on your competitors and find out their best performing content. This will inspire you to create and share similar, but better content. Plan the types of content you will share To be successful on social media, you definitely need high-quality content. Content that organically gets traction and engagement. One mistake business make is that they always thing it’s appropriate to share excessive sales content. Nobody likes being sold to, remember that. People are on social media to have great conversations from content that inspires them. People are on social media to be social – they never intended to be bamboozled with promotional content. Therefore, you need to strike a balance with the content you share on social media. Let there be a mixture of entertaining and educative content, with a very little percentage of sales content included. You can also share user-generated content, so that your audience feels more in tune with your business. By doing all of these things, you start to understand the types of content that works best for your target audience. Create a social media budget Let’s be factual. You need a realistic budget to grow your social media accounts. Because as with other forms of marketing, social media marketing is quite essential for most organizations. Therefore, you should allocate a budget to it. There’s absolutely no way the success of your social media will happen without having some some of budget to run promotions. It is all part of the social media strategy. What you should not is that you don’t need to spend more than your business earns. Make sure you have a KPI for each social media account, and calculate your return on investment (ROI), bearing in mind the goals you set out earlier in your strategy. Just make sure you consider how much you intend to spend on all your digital marketing channels. Then ask yourself how much of that budget you are prepared to devote to social media. ALSO READ: 8 Facebook Advertising Goals and What They Actually Mean
