Tips For Successful Social Media Marketing For Your Business
Chidiogo Akaelu
If you’re looking to brush up on your social media marketing strategy for more productive sales, then thank heavens you stumbled upon this article. With the rate at which the world is advancing in digital technology and becoming a global village, social media has become a must-have tool for entrepreneurs and organizations.
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Most people have a misconception of how social media marketing works, as they believe it is just about posting random content every now and then in their profile. Well, that’s not enough. Truth is, it’s not going to get you anywhere.
The online space is saturated with more competitive content and networks than you can ever imagine. Therefore, adopting a social media marketing strategy focuses your attention on areas that would be profitable towards achieving your goals.
Let’s backtrack a bit. What’s Social Media Marketing? This is the process of promoting the sales of a product or service using social media channels. A social media marketing strategy, on the other hand, is a documented outline containing your social media goals, methods of achieving these goals, and metrics that would be used to measure the progress of the process.
In clear terms, it is a brief overview of what you tend to achieve, using social media, and actionable steps to employ in achieving them. This plan should clearly define and explain the roles of team members towards meeting your online goal, account for each social media platform of the organization, and the goals expected of each platform.
The success of your organization’s social media marketing strategy would determine your level of brand awareness, customer satisfaction towards your brand, level of sales, and your company’s level of credibility.
Step By Step Method To Creating A Productive Social Media Strategy
Align your Strategy with your Business Goals
This is the first and crucial step if success is to be achieved. Creating and implementing a social media marketing strategy that is different from your business goal simply means setting yourself up for failure. This is because your social media marketing strategy and your business goals would become two parallel lines that will never meet to achieve your goals.
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Gather Audience Information
The next step is to find out who your target audience is. There is no room for assumptions or guesswork in this. You need to know who your audience is, what they like, where they can be accessed online, when they look for your type of content, how they consume those contents, etc. Always remember that different platforms attract different customers.
Competitor Survey
Chances are, your competitors are already maximizing social media platforms, so you can take a cue at what they are doing. This will help you get a sense of what’s expected of you in the industry, and loopholes in their strategy. This doesn’t mean aimlessly copying your competitors’ style, as that will make you lose your grip on originality. You can achieve this by using social media and listening to find out what they are sharing, and people’s thoughts about them.
Choose The Right Communication Channel
With the information gathered above, you can go ahead to decide which social network to use, and create a profile for your organization, or adjust your profile to enhance your strategic plans. The social media platform to use solely depends on the nature of your brand, and your target audience.
Develop Appealing Content
In creating content, ensure it has a – Hook, Story and Offer. Create content that will not only attract and hook your target audience but would push them to take action as well. Work with a content calendar to organize your content; keep track of all holidays, as well as schedule your posts. Think of content that will suit your chosen social network.
Analyze/Track Progress
Social media marketing strategy doesn’t end at creating content, it progresses to monitoring the effectiveness of your strategy in achieving your goals. Knowing the perfect strategy for your organization is a matter of trial, and therefore, you need to keep track of your strategy, so you can know what works and what doesn’t.
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