6 Things to Consider When Crafting your Social Media Strategy

If you’re considering adding social media to your company’s marketing strategy or if you are looking to adjust your current strategy, there are 6 things to consider when crafting your social media strategy that are essential to the successful implementation and results of your efforts. Social media comes with its pros and cons but if you’re running a business, it is important to understand how to use it professionally as a tool for advancing your overall marketing strategy and meeting business objectives.

Before creating accounts or posting content, here are tips that will help you implement a more effective social media strategy:

1. Identify and understand your audience

Knowing your audience and the target market you are trying to reach is a key factor for developing effective social media strategy. To start, here are a few valuable questions to research: 

• What social media platforms are they on? 
• What are the demographics of the audience – geographic location, age, gender, are you trying to reach? 
• What content do they engage with? 
• If you are in retail, what are their shopping habits?

2. Research the competition

Many people ignore their competition or focus on just trying to beat them. To get ahead, it is valuable to spend some time benchmarking or comparing efforts against your company’s competitors. If your competition is active on social media, analyze what they are doing and evaluate if it is effective. What platforms are they on and are people engaging with their content? We are not recommending that you copy your competitors, but knowing what they are doing and saying can help you differentiate from the competition. It can help you formulate your own brand messaging and determine how to integrate it into your social media strategy.

3. Choose social media marketing goals that align with business goals

Social media strategy should be in tandem with your overall business objectives. For example, if your business objective is to sell a certain product in a given month, how can social media help you do that? For your efforts to be successful, the social media goals need to be aligned with the company’s overall marketing effort. 

4. Set up accounts and build profiles

It is a common misconception that you need to be present on all social media platforms “just because.” Quality over quantity holds true when it comes to social media accounts and should be considered when rolling out your social media strategy. For example, if you are e-commerce focused and your audience is a female teenager, LinkedIn and Facebook are not the best place to invest your resources, as research shows that the demographic active on those platforms does not match your customer profile.

5. Create engaging content

Once you’ve identified the platforms, created company profiles, and identified who you are going to target and why, the next question is how? The simple answer is content. But not just any content, it needs to be engaging content that speaks not only to your audience but with your audience. The days of being salesy online are long gone, now it is all about providing your audience with content that is engaging, relatable, or otherwise valuable to them. If your audience is that female teenager, we’d strongly recommend considering TikTok to provide entertaining content that the demographic relates to and enjoys. Instagram may also be a good place to focus with images, videos and reels that appeal to younger females. 

6. Track performance and adjust strategy accordingly

It’s true what they say, numbers don’t lie. But keep in mind that numbers alone don’t tell the whole story. In order to know if all of your efforts are working and your social media strategy is paying off (literally), you must track analytics. We know content creation can be overwhelming and now we are suggesting examining data analytics too. Fortunately, scheduling tools like Sprout Social or Social Pilot can help you manage both. We recommend using the analytics that your scheduling tool provides and regularly tracking and reviewing results monthly or quarterly to help understand what is working and what isn’t. Then you can make adjustments as needed. If you are not using a scheduling tool, keep in mind that each social media platform has its own analytics tool, which allows you to take a deeper dive as well.

Crafting your social media strategy is no easy task if you want to do it correctly. It is a lot more than creating accounts and just putting posts out there. In today’s world, consumers have gotten smarter and more particular about how they want to be marketed to. If you’re still not sure of where to begin, you need some guidance or you’d like to outsource your social media efforts altogether, we would love to chat. Please feel free to contact us to schedule a complimentary meeting.