6 Tips to Develop a Social Media Strategy

Don’t have a social media strategy?

Many businesses are using social media networks to promote their businesses, but successful social media marketing requires building a strategy and plan for your business. Without a social media strategy, you may feel like your efforts are wasted.

Answering questions such as, how will you utilize the social channel to connect with your customers and potential customers? Or what are your goals for using the social network? Possibly, what resources are needed to accomplish your goals with social media marketing? Before getting started with social media, or if you need to revive your existing social media marketing, a social media strategy is required.

Here are some tips to help you get started building your social media strategy:

1. Understand your target audience – Knowing where your customers and potential customers are geographically, what age range and interests in your business and other interests can help you define reaching this audience. You can target these potential customers with precision -like advertising to have them connect with you on the social networks. This information will also help shape the tone for your content plan.
2. Understand your market potential – what share of market does your business receive in your defined market area? How much potential is there for you to grow your business? Knowing your goals and market potential can help you determine how much to invest in your social media marketing efforts based on your growth goals or to retain existing customers and raise the value of a customer within your business.
3. Evaluate your existing assets – How is your website currently performing? Have you dug into your Google Analytics? Are you mobile enabled? Social enabled? What about your existing social channels? How many connections do you have? How many people are engaging with your business? This is a good time to baseline your existing program and set goals for growth based on your strategy.
4. Keyword Research – What keywords are used by your customers to find information about the products and services your business provides? Knowing this data will help you define your content plans, your business descriptions on social networks and search engine listings.
5. Messaging tone & Content Theme – What kind of business are you? Formal or casual, friendly, educational? How do you want your customers to relate to you? Creating the appropriate tone for communication with your social connections will be a critical element in your social strategy.  Don’t be afraid to bring in the personalities of key employees into your messages. This is a good time to determine best practices for frequency in messaging.
6. Resources needed – After determining your audience, potential & goals, keywords and messaging. Determine how to approach getting the plan into place. What resources are needed to execute your strategy? Will you keep your social marketing in-house or outsource? (be realistic about the time/skills needed) If you are creating a content plan with blog articles, cross promoting through social networks, posting content daily on social channels, an email marketing program and online advertising program, how much time and money will be necessary to accomplish your goals.

Building a social media strategy can serve as the roadmap for your social media marketing efforts. They are typically a great reminder to make sure that you don’t get distracted by all the noise and keep you focused on your goals. Your social media marketing strategy can be fluid as your customer behavior and technology changes. Knowing your goals and measuring to those goals will help you to determine what works for your business.

If you are interested in building your social marketing strategy but don’t know where to begin, contact AdMix Social to develop your social media marketing strategy, this can be your roadmap to success.