Social Media Strategy – Where to Begin?

Sahail Ashraf posted on 5 October 2021

Having a social media strategy is now absolutely essential. Here is how to get one up and running quickly.

If you’re right at the very start of things and looking for guidance on how to get a social media marketing strategy underway, you’re in luck. 

We’ve put together a bit of a cheat sheet to help you get going.

Determine your goals

This is perhaps one of the most important parts of the whole process. Only by knowing what it is you want to achieve can you develop a solid social media marketing plan.

This goal could be something as simple as gaining 1000 more Twitter followers by June, but the fact you have created a goal is the important part.

You will need to know what your business goals are first. Are they covering areas such as bringing in new business or custom? Does the business need more conversions? Is paid advertising a huge part of what your business will do?

Once you have identified the business goals you can then relate them to the work you do as a social media marketer. 

To put it another way, you may know that one of your marketing goals for the brand is to turn audiences into people who genuinely love hearing from your brand and engaging with it. This means you need to build engagement so that you have loyal fans out there. This will influence your social media work, which will then be completely focused on engagement, entertaining and informing the audience so that you build up a loyal base that will stay with you as your business grows.

Learn about your audience

Now that you know what you want to achieve with your social media strategy, you now need to focus on what your audience needs.

Spend time understanding your audience and their needs and wants. Their ‘pain points’ are what you will create your content around. 

Thai is just a very logical way of making sure that what you give them in the way of content is targeted and helpful. This will ensure they stick around and follow/subscribe to your brand’s work on social media.

When it comes to your target customer, you should know things like:

• Age
• Location
• average income
• Typical job title or industry
• Interests

We are not just talking about the typical demographics of gender, age, ethnicity, etc. That will only get you so far in the marketing world. What we are talking about is understanding what your customer’s motivations and emotions are in order to convince them to buy your product.

Understanding your customer is the most important aspect of any marketing plan. Without understanding who they are and what they want you can’t create an effective marketing campaign and you will lose customers to competitors who know how to target their demographic better than you do.

Carry out a competitive analysis

A competitive analysis is a process that helps a brand understand its competition. It helps you know the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors. You can then take steps to be able to compete with them in their markets.

A competitive analysis is essential for any business with competition, especially if they are considering entering new markets or new product lines. Competitive analysis tools are now being used by many businesses to quickly analyse their competitors’ products, services, marketing methods, websites, and more.

The best way to conduct a competitive analysis is by using data from yours and your competitors’ websites and social platforms. This will help provide you with a better understanding of how you can be more competitive in the marketplace and more of a threat to their competitors.

Social listening

Social listening is a process where you listen to what is being said on the internet about your brand. It helps you understand your target market and their needs better, and develop a more personalised approach to managing your brand.

There are many ways to monitor online conversations about your brand. Social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter provide free tools for this purpose. You can also use Google Alerts which will send you an email every time it finds a mention of keywords in various public forums, blogs, and news sites.

And don’t forget you can also ‘listen’ to what is being said about your competitors by monitoring their accounts. 

Develop a social media calendar

Social media has become an integral part of the marketing strategy for any company. Marketers are constantly looking for better ways to use social media to promote their content or product. 

The problem with this model is that it is time-consuming and the same things are being said over and over again.

Creating a schedule can help balance your time in order to save time for other work. It also allows you to monitor when you should post content in order to get the most engagement from your audience.

What are some benefits of having a social media calendar?

– It saves time by allowing you to plan ahead

– Allows you to plan when posts should go out

– Helps save money by preventing mistakes

All the above are great starting points for creating a high quality, effective social media marketing strategy.

Are you someone who works in social media marketing? That’s great news. We’re happy for you. However, your life will be a lot better if you try Locowise, for all of your social media metrics and monitoring.