Social media sites now collectively have billions of regular users on their platforms. Businesses simply cannot ignore it as a marketing channel or else their competition will gain an unfair advantage over them. The problem is that many businesses don’t know how to approach social media. With so many different platforms, features and ways to interact with followers, it can be overwhelming. The solution to making social media work for your business is to come up with a solid strategy that helps you achieve your goals. Here is a guide that will help you develop such a strategy.
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Define Your Target Audience
While the process of defining your audience sounds like a simple task, it actually takes a good amount of research to figure out who you should be targeting. What you want to do is to come up with a profile of your three biggest types of customers. Come up with demographics like their age, gender, job, and income to get started. Then, move on to forums, social media profiles, blogs, and Facebook groups to see what kinds of conversations they’re having in relation to your business. Come up with a list of opinions, problems, interests, dislikes, needs, and wants so that you can figure out how to communicate with them.
- Figure Out How Social Media Fits Into Your Business
Many businesses have at least one social media account but they can’t figure out what to do with them. You’ll see them posting a random promotion one day and then see them trying to generate likes for a semi-interesting post the next day. To make social media work, you need to figure out how social media fits into your business. Will you be using it as a branding tool, lead generation tools, or strictly as a revenue stream? Will it be used to support other digital marketing strategies? If you need ideas on how to apply social media for your business, here are some goals to shoot for.
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Create a Content Strategy
One thing that businesses realize all too quickly is that they cannot retain followers by constantly posting promotions on their social media page. In order to keep followers engaged on social media, you must provide value in the form of content. For example, a multi-level marketing professional like a Senegence distributor can see great results from sharing valuable tips on how others can sell more products through hosting Lipsense or other makeup parties. Constantly selling the opportunity would burn out followers very quickly. By going back to the initial customer profiles you’ve created, you’ll be able to come up with many ideas for your content strategy.
- Increase Your Social Media Presence
One of the biggest challenges for many businesses is building up followers to their social media accounts. The first thing you need to do is to promote your social media accounts on your sites. If you don’t have a blog set up yet, then it’s time you create one so that you can use it as a digital funnel for your social media audience. There are multiple things that you can do to grow your presence from using automation tools, monitoring for mentions, to partnering up with other businesses on social media. One unique way to get more visibility is to cross promote your social media accounts. By using different descriptions for your posts, sharing unique content on each social media account and promising unique benefits for following each account, you’ll be able to extend your reach to more social media users.
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Measure and Adjust Your Campaigns
With any marketing campaign, you need to use analytics and pay attention to important metrics in order to see what’s working and not working. You need to constantly see if your posts are producing results. Use the metrics to see what kind of content followers like, what titles they respond to, and what campaigns generate the most sales. Then compare your metrics to see how they’re impacting your big picture goals. Adjust your campaigns based on your data and you’ll see big improvements over time. Most social media platforms will have internal analytics tools but here are a few others tools you can use to measure ROI.
If you haven’t been doing much with social media, now is the best time to get started. You can use this guide to create a social media strategy that aligns with your business goals. With a solid strategy, you’ll be able to grow your brand, develop a stronger reputation with your customers, generate more leads/customers, and get an advantage over your competitors.
