Through digital marketing and social media, businesses and brands have the ability to directly reach customers and prospects in unprecedented ways, with greater reach and more specific targeting than ever before.
Creating a social media strategy shouldn’t necessarily replace other digital marketing and inbound marketing methods like email marketing, SEO, content marketing, events or public relations, but instead, should complement them - offering another marketing channel for you to build your brand, engage with loyal fans and attract new customers.
What are the benefits of developing a social media strategy?
- It will help expand your other digital marketing efforts so your content, like blogs and website pages, have the chance to be seen by a wider audience.
- Build brand awareness. Gone are the days when your only way to build awareness is through billboards or magazine and television ads (otherwise known as traditional marketing). With social media marketing, you have the ability to bring your brand content directly to your ideal customers and prospects (otherwise known as customer personas).
- One of the most powerful ways to connect with your audience is word of mouth. Nielsen reports that 71% of consumers who had a good social media service experience with a brand are likely to recommend it to others.
- Social media can help you attract buyers to your products and services giving you the ability to directly have conversations with those individuals at the time and place of their choosing.
How do you develop a social media strategy?
- Develop your buyer persona. This is the core of not only the social media strategy but any digital marketing strategy. Understanding who you want to reach will guide your social media in a variety of ways from choosing the right social media platforms, creating the best mix of content to share, and target advertising to the right audience.
- Align your social strategy to your business objectives. Having business goals and objectives in place will make it easier for you to create social media goals that will transform audiences into buyers and loyal fans. It is recommended to utilize the SMART goals method: specific, measureable, achievable, relevant and timely.
Having your buyer persona and business objectives in mind will be helpful as you traverse your way through building your social media strategy.
To build your social media strategy, you’ll need to be able to:
- Explain each social media channel and how each one is best used for social media promotion
- Understand the impact of social listening and engagement
- Develop a social content strategy for your social media plan,
- Identify ways that metrics are crucial to understanding the success of your digital efforts
- Integrate social media into your other inbound digital marketing efforts, like your website, email marketing and blog posts.
There are a lot of moving parts in developing a social media strategy but mapping out the actions you’re going to take will get you one step closer to achieving your business goals.
Get a free social media strategy template to quickly and easily plan your strategy.
