Has social media sunk to the bottom of your business to-do list?
Maybe you started a social media strategy in the past. Still, it fell by the wayside as other priorities took hold. Or perhaps you are a brand new startup looking at social media afresh.
Either way, you can’t avoid social media marketing if you want a promotional strategy that will stand the test of time.
So we have put together this post to help you. This comprehensive, step-by-step guide will tell you how to go from zero to hero with your social media, whatever your starting point.
Step 1: Figure Out Your Business Goals
Step 1 is the bit that most businesses forget. Still, it is the most important task to master if you want to get the most out of your social media strategy.
Social media is only valuable if it helps your business grow. So before you put together your marketing plan, you must first know what you want to achieve.
That starts with a close look at your high-level business goals for the next 12 months.
Are you looking to reach a new market? Maybe you have a new product launch? Or perhaps you have an established small business but are looking to generate more online sales. The Greenfly software platform helps organizations collect, organize, and distribute digital media to partners and advocates to build social awareness, brand loyalty, and revenue growth.
Sit down and figure out these goals, and create some measurable targets. In 12 months, you can see how your social media strategy fared against those goals you set.
Step 2: Identify Your Customer
Social media gives you access to an audience of billions. While that might sound attractive, you risk getting lost in the noise if you don’t know whom you want to reach.
You can find the answer to that conundrum by creating a customer avatar. A customer avatar is a descriptive profile of your ideal customer. If you only made one sale in your business, this person would be your customer.
Start with obvious information such as demographics (age, gender, occupation, and income). From there, develop a more in-depth insight into your avatar by considering the customer’s interests, tastes, desires, and fears.
Once you’ve completed this exercise, you’re going to have a profile of your social media audience.
It’s a way of reverse engineering your social media strategy because that avatar will illustrate what messages you want to get across on social media and how to get that done.
By this stage, you should understand your audience, what you want to say, why you want to share, and how best to communicate.
Once you’ve done that, it’s time to do some detective work and discover where your customer avatar spends their free time.
Step 3: Shortlist Your Social Networks
A bit of customer and industry research (based on your customer avatar) should indicate what social media networks your audience use.
The critical thing to mention here, and something that may come as a surprise, is that a successful social media strategy doesn’t mean having a profile on every platform.
Instead, it’s about having a prominent online presence on the ones that fit your customer demographic. Is your business targeting a young audience who spend most of their time on TikTok?
Do you have a female customer avatar who loves interior design and spends hours on Pinterest? Or are you targeting retirees who follow golf fan pages on Facebook?
Get to know your customer intimately. Do some digging. Find out what networks they use, why they use them, and how frequently they log on to these networks.
Once you’ve done that, it’s time to create an account on your shortlist of networks.
Step 4: Know Your Brand Identity
If you want to stand out on social media, you need strong brand awareness. When thinking about your brand, go several steps beyond a logo and business name, and think about what sort of image you want to project on social media.
Consider the tone of voice. Are you a fun and informal brand? Or conservative and trusting? Do you share funny viral content, or is that not in keeping with your corporate service offering?
Think about this upfront before you create content, as this will help you avoid getting sidetracked or off-brand.
Lastly, remember that one of the best ways of creating a unique brand is by being consistent. So decide on standard colors, fonts, taglines, and call-to-actions that you can use on social media.
These will be your brand guidelines and valuable if you ever decide to outsource your social media management.
Step 5: Create a Winning Profile
The average business will create a generic social media account with a short description of what they do and some content that features their products or services.
However, the savvy business owner does something somewhat different. A business with a winning social media strategy creates a unique social media profile that speaks directly to its target audience.
If you’ve followed our guide up until now, you’ll know how to speak to your audience because you’ll understand whom you are targeting.
Now your focus should be on speaking to them in a way that taps into their needs, instead of simply telling them in dry corporate-speak what you do (or what you sell).
To understand this in greater depth, take a look at these two profiles.
The Average Social Media Profile:
We are a market-leading toy company and make a variety of science-based educational games for children. Visit our website now to browse the entire product range.
The Savvy Social Media Profile:
Do you have a super-smart kid in your family? Are you struggling to find a way to keep those growing brains occupied in the holidays? Check out our award-winning, highly addictive science games that children find educational and fun.
Don’t Forget About Your Call-To-Action
You don’t simply want customers to view your profile. You want to take it a step further and get them to visit your website or landing page.
When creating your profile, make sure you have a crystal-clear call to action.
If you want people on your email list, ask them specifically in your profile to sign up to your email list. If you have a special offer for first-time customers, tell them to click on your website to add that offer into their basket.
A more precise call-to-action translates into higher conversion rates. That means you’re achieving a much more significant impact on your business goals with your social media strategy.
Step 6: Produce a Content Plan
Now it’s time to start putting together your social media content. But before you get creative, start thinking about the types of content you will be publishing and how each post will help your business goals in some way.
After all, you don’t want fillers on your social media feed as that will put off your target audience. Each post needs to be relevant, captivating, and high quality.
Begin by brainstorming a few categories for your content. Here are a few ideas to help you:
- Entrepreneur selfie
- Behind-the-scenes footage
- Customer testimonial
- Product in action (ideally, on video)
- Customer competition
- Question to your audience
- A poll
- Sneak peek at future products
- Sale or offer
- Special event (e.g., Black Friday)
- Fun facts
Update this list with your own ideas, and don’t feel you need to have content for every time on this list. It depends on your target audience and what best matches their interest and your brand identity.
Once you’ve decided on your categories, you can start producing content.
To make life easier on yourself, create plenty of content in advance to keep your social media feed going for the first month (somewhere between 30-100 posts).
Suppose you intend to promote your business on multiple social media networks. In that case, you’ll need to alter your social media content to fit each platform.
That might mean, for example, turning an image into a short video for TikTok or changing the image dimensions when moving from Instagram to Twitter.
Step 7: Choose a Scheduling Tool
If you’re worried that social media will zap your every waking hour, here’s the good news. There are some fantastic scheduling tools on the market nowadays that will do most of the heavy lifting for you.
These scheduling tools will post your content at a time you set. You need to upload your posts at the start of each month and let the platform do the rest.
A good tool will also provide you with analytics to see what type of content is working best with your target audience.
What scheduling tool is right for your business will depend on your own needs and budget. However, here is a list of some of the best schedulers on the market in 2021:
- Hootsuite
- Iconosquare
- Later
- Sendible
- MeetEdgar
- TweetDeck
- Agorapulse
- SocialBee
- Buffer
If you plan on outsourcing your social media in the future, make sure you choose a social media scheduler with collaboration features.
Those features will help you manage the account while delegating smaller tasks to an employee or external freelancer.
Don’t forget to pay special attention to what networks a scheduler supports. Some tools specialize in one specific social media network, whereas others support a more extensive range.
If you are only targeting one platform, a specialist tool might be a better option.
Step 8: Decide on Your Publishing Times
One of the best tricks of the trade to maximize your social media engagement is to post when your target audience is online. If you have an audience in more than one part of the globe, posting at the right time is particularly important.
Most scheduling tools will provide data on when your audience is most active. You’ll get graphical information on your peak posting time and can use that to create a timed schedule.
Don’t forget to post the same piece of content repeatedly if your audience spans more than one time zone.
Your timing schedule must also optimize the frequency with which you post content. Do you get more engagement when posting once a day, or do you get the best attention when posting 3-4 times?
There is no definitive answer. It will depend on your specific audience and the platform you are using.
Step 9: Grow Your Audience
Now it’s time for the big challenge: growing an audience! That can be daunting for new businesses starting with zero followers and must compete against companies with tens of thousands of followers.
The truth is, growing a following takes time. There is no secret to achieving a social media account. You need to post consistently, frequently, and publish content that is unique and interesting.
Using automated scheduling tools will help you improve your follower accounts. But if you are starting from scratch, it is also worth considering a service to help you grow followers.
These services differ by platform and depend on the platform’s terms and conditions for gaining followers. For more information, check out this helpful guide on how to get more followers on Instagram.
Step 10: Analyse, Optimize and Scale
Growing a social media account takes perseverance.
If you want a profile that will benefit your business, you must constantly revisit your strategy. You should aim to consistently improve a social media strategy if you aspire to achieve impressive results.
To do that, spend time reviewing your social media analytics each month to find out what went well and what didn’t. Don’t forget, too, to examine analytics from your website and anywhere else you are sending traffic.
When you spot a post that has performed exceptionally well, look at scaling that strategy. Focus your efforts on repeating those tactics that have already proved they will get you results.
Likewise, if you find a strategy that has performed worse than expected, either drop it from future schedules or look at how you can make a few improvements.
Maybe the content was acceptable, but it needs a tweak in the timing, call to action, or branding.
A Social Media Strategy Is a Long-Term Investment
When you launch a new social media strategy, it’s easy to feel like you have an uphill battle. Going from zero to thousands of followers doesn’t happen overnight.
But social media is here to stay, and it’s a proven marketing strategy for new businesses and the more established ones. So the time you take to create a solid social media presence will serve you for many years to come.
If you enjoyed this article and want to learn more about how to maximize your efforts on social media, click on our business section now for our latest tips and trends.
