Like the key ingredient to baking a pie is flour, well for social media its strategy. Without a strategy you could be posting millions of pictures without gaining anything out of your efforts.
It is important to understand your goals, target audience and what you want to achieve through social media.
Here are some quick tips on how to level up as a social media marketer or grow your brand through social media
Asking yourself the simple 5W’s will help you create your social media marketing strategy
- Why the need to be on social media?
- Who is your target audience?
- What are you going to share?
- Where are you going to share?
- When are you going to share it?
Each of your social media platforms can have a different marketing strategy which together will make up your overall social media marketing strategy.
When we talk about the overall social media strategy there are a few questions we must ask.
1. Why the need to be on social media?
Is it to promote your products or to drive traffic to your website? Or serving your customers
The first question that needs to be answered is why? And the answers can be numerous. It is more likely you could have more than one goal and that’s fine.
To generalize the same, here are some of the goals you could have:
- – Increasing brand awareness
- – Driving traffic to the website
- – Generating leads
- – Increase in the number of signups or sales depending on the type of business you run.
- – Brand engagement boost
- – Building a community around your brand
It’s advised to focus on a handful of goals unless you have a team, where each group can take on different tasks and focus on different goals.
2. Who is your target audience?
Once you have figured out your ‘Why’, it’s time to move on to the ‘Who’, which in simple words mean understanding your target audience. This will help you answer the questions on what, where and when.
For instance Kilowott knows that its target audience is looking for ways and tips to grow their social media presence , hence we share such content on our blogs and on our social media profiles.
The best way to figure out your target audience is creating user personas.
If your business has been in the market for a while you already have a good sense of your target audience.
Sharing the details with your team can be helpful and can be used for future reference.
3. What are you going to share?
The first thing that comes to your mind is probably the types of content to share a video or an image, but hey! Hold your horses.
Since we are talking about social media strategy let’s take a step back and go one step higher. Instead of types, let’s talk about the theme or concept to create content around.
Listing down a handful of themes is perfect as it gives you the flexibility to play around and share a range of content to keep your audience glued.
4. Where are you going to share?
Your next step is to determine where you are going to share your content. It’s not necessary for your brand to be on every social media platform. The big guys (Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, You tube) are good enough to start with.
Here, knowing which platform your target audience is most active will come in handy. Another thing to consider is making sure your brand has an ‘X factor’ and stands out from similar brands.
5. When are you going to share?
The final piece to the puzzle is figuring out when you want to share your content. The first thing brands would jump in to do is research for the best time to post. Google search might infer your decision about the universal best time to post.
Relax and take a breather. Before deciding what time and which days of the week to post, try to understand the behaviors of your target audience.
When would your audience look for the type of content you share?
Focus on the behavior patterns of your audience and the best way to answer this question is to test and experiment.
Here! Your pie is ready to serve.
But wait, that’s not the end of your social media marketing strategy. A strategy is where you’re heading but the plan is how you’ll get there.
The final lap – focusing on the bigger picture developing a social media strategy can be tough because it requires looking at the bigger picture.
You have to shift your mindset away from your daily activities but the results are rewarding and definitely worth the trouble.
So step out of the scheme of posting for the sake of it and have a social media marketing strategy to achieve your social media and business goals.
Need help with crafting a winning social media strategy? Let’s talk!
