A business's social media strategy relates to the actions and efforts made by business owners to promote or market their products, services, and brands. They take advantage of the relevant social media platforms on the Internet to promote their business. Different social media platforms are suitable for promoting different types of business products. For example, Instagram is the most appropriate social media platform for promoting products through photographs.
When you are building a social media strategy, business owners must understand the market they are looking to penetrate. Next, they look into the attributes of the target audience they plan to target. For example, let's assume you own a firm providing recruitment services. You can implement your social media strategies via LinkedIn, while another organization selling arts and crafts can promote their work on Instagram.
Social media strategy planning depends heavily on the business phase a company finds itself in. For example, a business startup with a limited marketing budget would go for organic social media strategies. On the other hand, a well-established business tries to enter new markets and offer a product line extension. Regardless of your plans, your social media strategy would improve the overall marketing plan of your business.
Importance of Social Media Strategy to Your Business
1) Gives a Direction to Your Business
If you have an appropriate marketing plan, your business will have direction to focus on the marketing budget and efforts. The marketing plan of a business today is incomplete without a social media strategy. You are targeting your customers' smartphones when you use social media to promote your products and services. You must be aware that customers check their wallets and smartphones all the time and check them every few minutes.
Image taken from Facebook
An effective social media content strategy helps you understand what and where you should promote your brand. Most businesses are familiar with all the popular social media platforms and choose the best ones to do their marketing accordingly.
A social media strategy part of your business also directs your social profiles. For example, if you are a business owner and want to market your products, you shouldn't just create a Facebook page because of its popularity. You should also make it presentable. For that reason, you must set your profile picture, publish social media content, and include your contact details so that everything will be tailored to attract customers for your business.
2) Easy to Market Your Products
When you promote your business products through your social media strategy, you can also visualize the social media statistics. For example, if you are running a Facebook group, you can see your reach for every group post. Likewise, if you are running a Facebook page or a group, you can see how many people have reacted to your post, commented on it, or shared it on their timelines.
Image taken from YouTube
The comments posted on your Instagram reel or Facebook posts make you understand how customers feel about your brand. Customers usually give honest feedback about your business because they know their friends and relatives would rely on their perspective about the brand.
Hence, when you create a social media strategy, you can track the results of your online performance through social media statistics. You can also check the website analytics and other marketing data for your performance.
Best Social Media Strategies in 2022
1) Set Strategic Goals and Establish Metrics
Building a social media strategy with the end in mind is a great way to ensure that your social media team drives measurable value for the marketing team. You can take advantage of the following social media metrics to promote your business:
- Increase Brand Awareness: Brand awareness refers to how recognizable the branding strategies are for a company. For example, if you see a logo without any other information and recognize its brand name immediately, it shows strong brand awareness. You can find many search engine optimization (SEO) tools on the Internet to see how many people are searching for your brand name on Google.
- Increase website traffic: Website traffic will help you understand how many people are moving from your social media campaigns to your respective website. The best way to check your website traffic is to create unique landing pages for your SMM campaigns.
- Improve customer engagement: SMM is a fantastic way to improve customer engagement because social media is where your target audience participates in online conversations. Not only does customer engagement create hype about your brand, but it also allows your people to feel involved with it. People who feel connected with your brand will tend to buy more from your online store.
2) Research Your Target Audience
Once you have strategic goals, it is time to define your target audience. The basic step of getting this right is identifying the right customer data. If you cannot do so, you can prioritize a real-time and robust customer data platform (CDP). It will help you build accurate personas that reflect real users.
Your marketing team likely has buyer personas, but they must be redefined for your social media strategy. Individuals expect to make personal connections on social media, so your communication with the audience must be targeted and personalized. Demographics, such as age, gender, and location, can help you narrow down who your target customers are. The more information you include while determining your personas, the better it will be for your social media strategies.
3) Choosing the Correct Social Media Channels
The world of social media doesn't have a 'one size fits all' approach. People use different social media platforms to attract different types of audiences. For example, a young startup founder may check out Instagram stories or TikTok, whereas the experienced B2B executive may use Facebook for updates. Therefore, you must know your best social media channels while building a social media strategy. Here are some of the channels that you can consider for your social media strategy planning:
- Instagram: This platform is ideal for target audiences under 40 and females. E-commerce and lifestyle tend to find the most success with this platform.
Image taken from Facebook
- Facebook: Unlike Instagram, Facebook is ideal for target customers aged 40 or above. According to research on Adobe, people over 40 tend to be the most active on this platform.
- Twitter: According to research on Adobe, 67% of the users on Twitter are male, and 63% are between the ages of 35 and 65.
4) Create Compelling Content
Once you have determined your social media channels, you must shift your focus toward social media content. An ideal SMM strategy helps you to create engaging, compelling, and targeted content. However, if you want to create strong content, you must understand the following types of content each platform hosts:
- Twitter is about sharing short forms of text and links. The longer thoughts are usually converted into shorter pieces in the form of threads.
- Initially, Instagram was image-focused but is now moving toward video.
- Facebook is arguably the most popular social media platform on the Internet and uses images/videos to attract users.
- YouTube attracts users via longer video content.
People will focus on different content specified for different platforms. For example, there is a chance that the images you post on Instagram won't find a way past the new algorithm because the platform has become more video-focused recently. You are responsible for publishing the right type of content across all channels.
Integrate Social Media on Your Strikingly Website
Allowing your users to log into your eCommerce website or online store via social media accounts will make it convenient for your visitors to sign up with you. Integrating this feature as part of your social media strategy can boost your subscribers and members list. However, if you want to have a professional website that allows you to create a social media strategy successfully, you must rely on an effective website builder, such as Strikingly.
Image taken from Strikingly User’s Website
Strikingly is a top-class website builder that allows you to build your desired websites within next to no time. You don't need programming or coding skills when you build a website on Strikingly. Our team will help you with all the technical-related issues and guide you until your website is up and running. In addition, we will ensure that your website corresponds with your social media strategy.
Image taken from Strikingly User’s Website
Strikingly's credibility can be seen from the fact that thousands of entrepreneurs and startup owners have built a website on their platform to start their business plans. To start your journey with us, you must sign up for a free Strikingly account and select a website template. The Strikingly website editor will help you to customize the selected template according to your business needs. In addition, we provide users with a drag-and-drop feature to place the website elements according to their needs.
Conclusion
A modern social media strategy helps in engaging both current and new customers. It helps to build brand awareness, take action on constructive feedback, increase website traffic and boost online sales. The best thing about it is that you don't need to invest much time and money in building social media strategies.
You can start your social media strategy planning by gathering all the stakeholders. But first, you must identify what goals are important for your company. If you start by having the end goals in your mind, you can move forward and build an exquisite social media strategy for your business.
If you start your business for the first time, you can head to Strikingly and build a professional business website without any investment. If you cannot understand the website development phase, you can talk to our Happiness Officers and submit your queries.
