Here’s how an effective social media strategy can transform your business!
Why does your business need a social media strategy? Isn’t it just one more thing to add to your ever growing to-do list?
Well, yes and no. It’s really vital that if you’re going to use social media as a business tool, you have a strategy for doing so, and a way of measuring how well it’s working for you.
What is a social media strategy exactly?
It’s a plan you put together which includes ideas about how your business can use social media platforms and apps to promote and share relevant, good quality content. You set your own goals, but in general the purpose of having a social media strategy is to:
- Increase reach
- Create engagement
- Improve communication
- Increase sales
I’ll be looking at exactly what you need to include in your social media strategy in another blog post, but in very general terms, a social media strategy is something that helps you to focus your mind on exactly how you’ll use different platforms and content to communicate with your key customers and achieve your goals.
If you’ve been using social media for a while, do you know how well it’s performed for your business in the past year? Have you had the results in terms of sales, reach or engagement that you wanted or expected? Could you have done better? Put a well thought out strategy in place and next year you could have your social media working seamlessly to promote your business.
How can a social media strategy help you plan ahead?
You’ll find that even if it seems daunting to start with, the very fact that you’ve taken steps to set out your goals and objectives for the next month, six months or year in social media will help you achieve them. It’s a cliché perhaps, but you really can’t expect to achieve a goal without knowing what it is in advance!
Social media is sometimes seen as being reactive, but that doesn’t mean you can’t think ahead. If you’re clever, you can plan to include important events and calendar dates in your social media strategy so that you get coverage on social media that’s current and relevant too.
If you know about regular trade shows and annual events for your industry in advance, a little thinking ahead can earn you advance coverage and get you seen by influencers and industry names. Plan some pre-event social media activity in advance and you won’t have to panic the week before the event you’re attending, because you’ll have scheduled it all in months ago and managed to organise and schedule everything ahead of time during quiet periods.
A well-defined audience
The most effective social media strategies are clearly targeted at their audience, and that’s something you can get really specific about with the help of your social media strategy.
Taking the time to look really closely at your target audience and ideal customer will help you to get a really sharp focus on where and when you need to be posting your social media.
With new social platforms being created all the time, the way people use social media changes constantly, but rather than randomly post on every platform and hope for the best, if you know who you’re ‘talking’ to, you can make an informed decision about whether you need to use Pinterest or LinkedIn (for example) as part of your marketing. This doesn’t just save you time, it also ensures that the people who most need to know about you will see you and start to engage with you.
So, how do you create a social media strategy, and what do you need to include? Well look out for the next blog where I’ll be taking you through the elements you need to include…
Case study
This is exactly what I do with my clients, and they’re smashing their sales targets out of the park, and regularly achieving over 1,600% return on investment. If you’d like to find out more about how I could help you turn your business around by attracting more sales than you’ve ever seen before, do get in touch.
I’d love to know your thoughts on this & whether you struggle with the strategy side of things, so let me know in the comments..
Until next time, Sarah xx