So you’ve started using social media to promote your business but aren’t seeing enough growth. Your competitors are already tapped into the world of tools, templates and analytics that optimise their social media presence… and you should be too.
If you’re new to using social media for your brand or business, you might not even realise how simple and cheap marketing can be for social media strategy.
Implement these tips into your social media marketing strategy and start reaping the rewards:
- Save time and money
- Reach your target audience
- Increase engagement
- Outperform competitors
1. SMART Goals
Make your goals realistic and achievable by following the SMART acronym.
- Specific: What exactly is your goal? What steps can you put in place to achieve it?
- Measurable: Track your progress with quantitative results (E.g. Downloads, followers, sales)
- Attainable: Identify any obstacles or constraints and plan scaling up or down accordingly.
- Relevant: Does your goal align with your broader ambitions? Is it the right time?
- Time-based: Set a final deadline with micro deadlines at regular intervals.
Get started on your business’ SMART goals with this free SMART goal template.
2. Target Audience
Get to know your target audience by placing yourself in their shoes first. Create a buyer persona using a free template.
Once you understand who your audience is, you can effectively strategise how to target them based on their schedules, online behaviour and pain points.
For example, if your target audience is young children, Tik Tok could be your best social media option for reaching them.
- According to Social Pilot: “Children between 4-15 years spend 75 minutes [per day] on the app.”
With this insight, you can reverse-engineer your social media strategy to focus your efforts on the right demographic in the right place at the right time.
3. SMO (Social Media Optimisation)
Not to be confused with SEO (Search engine optimisation), SMO is all about adjusting your content and accounts to consistently fit your brand.
Some ways you can optimise your social media strategy are:
- Accounts: Making all your accounts across different social media sites visually consistent – it makes your brand more recognisable to your customers no matter where they see it.
- Search visibility: Use the hashtags and keywords that are relevant to you and your content – Make use of keyword search tools online.
- Content: Ensure your brand voice is present in all the content you produce and get your calls to action nailed.
4. Content Creation Tools
Some of the best content creation is the easiest, and it’s made easier by the excess of tools available to you online. They will ultimately save you time, money and resources without sacrificing any control over the content you publish.
We’ve narrowed down 3 simple content creation tools that you can start using to create content today.
Graphic Design – Canva
Graphics don’t have to be complicated and time-consuming. Using Canva, premade layouts, templates and design elements cut out the need for outsourced graphic design.
Video Creation Software – Animoto
All your audiovisual content can be created in one place on Animoto. Editing video, image, music and text together quickly and efficiently will allow you to create unique videos as part of your social media strategy.
Hashtag Search Aid – Hashtagify.me
Once you’ve got your content ready to publish, finding the perfect captions and hashtags is essential. On Hashtagify.me, you can research the popularity of a hashtag before you even post it, saving you from underperforming posts.
5. Social Media Content Calendar
Would you believe that 63% of businesses don’t have a documented strategy for their social media marketing?
Predicting trends in your industry could be the difference between a viral post and tumbleweed rolling by.
For example, if you run a bakery business, world cupcake day on 15th december should be pinned in your calendar. Planning content around when your industry has potential trending topics is perfect for jumping on the bandwagon and targeting potential new customers.
Plan your content with a free social media content calendar template.
6. Scheduling Software + Key Times to Post
Now that you’ve got your content calendar in place, how do you put it into action? That’s where scheduling software such as Hootsuite can take away the manual work.
If you’ve used the tools and techniques already mentioned, you’ll have a good idea of your next steps. Knowing when to post is just as important as what you post.
Combining this with your scheduling software will automate your social media presence, meaning you’re free to run your business rather than waiting to press send on a tweet.
7. Social Media Competitor Analysis
It pays to know what your competitors are doing well… or badly. If you can discover their pain points, you can fill the gaps that they are leaving for potential customers.
Sprout Social makes competitor analysis easy with the click of a button.
Some of the benefits of competitor analysis services are:
- Save on time and resources with no manual searches for competing accounts
- Track multiple social media sites at once – see what competitors are posting across Facebook, Instagram and Twitter at the same time
Are your competitors doing something that you’re not?
Can you take inspiration from that?
Or can you capitalise on their mistakes?
8. Social Media Listening Tools
Tracking what is being said about your business and related topics can be priceless for managing your brand reputation.
- Get live insight into what customers and prospective customers are talking about
- React to negative engagement quickly and communicate with your audience
- Encourage positive engagement to strengthen your brand image
- Filter specific areas to hone in on specific social network sites or keyword searches
Businesses of all sizes can take advantage of social media listening tools too. Brand24 offer cheap packages for small setups and more expansive deals for larger businesses looking to delve deep into reputation management.
9. Consistency
Unless you want to invest in paid ads, consistency is going to be your best friend for maximising the organic reach of your content.
So it would be counterproductive to blast out 50 posts in a day then go silent for a week because you’ve run out of content.
Ideal post frequency for each social media platform (Source: Hootsuite)
So it’s best to start out small and keep consistent with a schedule that you can stick to.
10. Multimedia
Your audience doesn’t want to read War and Peace before they finally find the link to your website, so take advantage of the multiple types of digital media.
You’ve got tonnes to choose from and combine:
- Video
- Audio
- Image
- Quizzes/Polls
- Graphs/Tables
With the demand for visual content, especially short videos on sites such as Tik Tok, make sure that your content’s digital form is varied and engaging for your target audience.
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