New Business Social Media Marketing Strategy

As with any other aspect of business, having a strategy is essential if you want to get your social media marketing right. Without one, you’ll most likely end up posting just for the sake of posting, making it difficult to understand your goals and achieve any tangible results.

Whether you want to increase your brand’s social media presence or become a better social media marketer in general, developing a well-thought-out social media marketing strategy is a must-do first step.

We talked about it with some friends from a top New York web design company, and we came up with a few social media marketing strategy tips and tricks. Take a look at them below!

[Photo courtesy of Unsplash]

How Do You Develop a Social Media Marketing Strategy?

You’ll need to figure out a few things before you can begin developing your social media marketing strategy. Consider asking yourself the five questions listed below:

• What is the point of social media?
• What is the demographic of your intended audience?
• What are you going to post?
• Which social media platforms do you intend to use?

We’ll go over each of these questions in greater depth below. Let’s get started!

1. What Motivates You to Use Social Media?

Like most things in life, the first question you must answer in your social media strategy is “why?” Aside from philosophy, the question in this case is about your social media objectives. Are you looking to serve your customers, increase website traffic, or promote your products? What about doing all of the above?

There are roughly eight social media goals you can strive for. They are as follows:

• Increasing brand recognition
• Increasing website traffic
• Creating leads
• Boosting sales and signups
• Increasing participation
• Creating a strong community
• Offering customer service
• Listening to what people think about your brand

Don’t be fooled into believing that you must choose just one goal. In fact, we strongly encourage you to have more than one, but we also believe that focusing on a few at a time is preferable. You can probably take on more than two or three goals at a time if you can afford to outsource your social media marketing efforts or have a large enough team, but we recommend starting small.

You could, for example, begin by focusing on increasing brand awareness and driving more traffic to your website content. You can eventually broaden your efforts to include customer support and other services.

2. Who Is Your Target Market?

Once you’ve determined you “why,” it’s time to consider “who.” It is now time to answer the question, “Who is your target audience?”

Understanding the people you’re trying to reach with your marketing will be critical in answering the questions that follow, such as what you’ll post and which networks you’ll use.

If you’re starting a travel agency, for example, your target audience will most likely be interested in reading about travel tips and interesting places to visit. Posting infographics and destination photos on Instagram is probably the best way to reach this audience.

To truly understand your target audience, create a few marketing personas. These are your “ideal” customers, and the best way to create them is to answer the following questions:

• Who exactly are they? — Take into account their age, job title, location, salary, gender, and so on.
• What do you have to offer them? — Consider what they might be interested in and what you might be able to provide through social media. This can include new product information, case studies, educational content, entertainment, and so on.
• Which social media platforms are they active on?
• What time of day do they spend the most time on social media?

Even if you’re starting a new business, chances are you won’t have to start from scratch. You can probably get a good idea of the type of people who will be your target audience by looking at your competitors. Don’t be afraid to look through the social media profiles of the companies in your niche to learn more about their most engaged followers.

3. What Are You Going to Post?

When you see this question, your first thought may be to consider the type of content you’ll be sharing, such as images, text, or video. However, since this is your social media marketing strategy, you might want to take a step back and look at things from a higher perspective.

Consider the theme of your social media channels rather than the type of content you will be posting. We’ll use the following examples to demonstrate what we mean:

• Burrow, a luxury couch brand, uses its Instagram profile to post memes in addition to stylish photos of its products.
• The adventure and outdoor brand Huckberry’s Facebook page is brimming with high-quality outdoor photos and editorial content.
• MeUndies, an underwear brand, shares photos of its products as well as user-generated content in the form of photos of its customers wearing the underwear on Instagram.

Obviously, none of these brands adhere to a single theme for each post. There are some general ideas, but diversifying your profile is also important if you want to keep your audience interested. Three or four themes are ideal because they allow you to share a diverse range of content while remaining relatively focused.

A clear understanding of your target audience will be a huge asset in this situation. Examine your marketing personas again and consider the following questions:

• What are their objectives?
• How can your product or service assist them in achieving these objectives?

Assume you own a fitness clothing company, for example. In that case, it is perfectly acceptable to place a heavy emphasis on your products across all of your social media profiles, as your audience’s goal is likely to be to stay up to date on the latest fitness apparel.

4. Which Social Media Platforms Do You Plan to Use?

The last step in this guide is to decide where you’ll share your content. Remember that your brand does not have to be present on every social network available. Your presence on a platform should be entirely dependent on whether or not your target audience uses the platform in question.

Having said that, you should probably have a presence on the social media Big Four — Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. Aside from your website, these frequently appear on the first page of SERPs when people search for your brand by name.

We’ve already mentioned how important it is to understand your target audience. Consider which platforms your prospects use the most and why. For example, if you’re looking to reach teenagers and young adults, you should look into TikTok, as this network is extremely popular among this age group.

However, you must also consider your ability to create content for the platform you intend to use. Different platforms are better suited to different types of content. For example, if you excel at photography, you should set up a profile on Instagram, whereas if you excel at long-form videos, you should set up a profile on YouTube.

Although social media platforms are evolving to accommodate almost any type of content, this distinction remains important, so think about your strengths and weaknesses ahead of time.

Final Thoughts

It is not easy to develop an effective social media strategy. It necessitates taking a step back and looking at the big picture, shifting your focus away from individual tasks such as responding to comments, scheduling posts, and so on.

However, if you can pull it off, a well-executed social media strategy can be extremely rewarding, as it will assist you in achieving specific business goals rather than simply posting for the sake of posting.

Learn more from business and read Why Hiring An Accountant Is Essential For All Small Business Owners.