How to Create a Good Social Media Strategy for your Small Business

Most social media marketers usually face three major and daunting challenges in their social media marketing activities. These are, achieving business goals, measuring returns on their investments, ROI and reaching their audience. A good social media strategy comes handy for marketers to take on these challenges. With increased adoption of social media use by millions of people around the world, it has become imperative for small business owners to create a viable social media strategy if they want to take advantage of this huge market social media now represents. Admittedly, this may appear overwhelming for many small businesses, but for those who get it right, it is worth all the bother on the long run. The more reason it is important for small businesses to create a social media strategy that can help them focus more on what is really important and to take the guesswork out of their marketing activities. These here tips come in very handy in that quest.

Set SMART Goals

Goal setting is essential for any human endeavor worth undertaking. It is virtually impossible to have a successful social media strategy without set goals. And, these goals must be SMART to boot. If you don’t have set goals in your social media marketing campaigns, it will be very difficult if not impossible for you to correctly measure the success of your marketing strategy and the return on investment, ROI for your efforts. However, if you adopt and adapt the SMART goal framework, it can help guide you to produce the desired results. In social media marketing, the best SMART goals must revolve around, growing an audience, getting traffic, getting leads, increasing brand awareness, getting more customers, increasing sales, boosting community engagement and suchlike goals.

Regularly Create High Quality and Engaging Content

If you are unable to create good quality content, you have no business in social media marketing. This is because in digital marketing, content is king and it is more so in social media marketing. On social media, the content you create and share must have a direct bearing on your set goals and brand identity to be effective. Social media is all about interaction and engagement, the reason you must make sure to promptly respond to all comments to further engage with people who are engaging with your content. To enhance engagement, your content strategy must be clear and with some focus on social media stories and time-sensitive posts, educational and informative content, related posts to your business/industry niche and suchlike content ideas. Social media posts characteristically attract more engagements if laced with high quality photos and short-form how-to videos to enhance the visual content.

Understand Your Audience

A good understanding of your audience of followers/friends on social media is vital to your promotional efforts because assumptions are not helpful to a good social media strategy. Granted that most social media platforms attract different types of audiences, whatever platform you are marketing on, understanding its type of audience is crucial to your success in the platform. Knowing your audience will help you create a buyer persona which will in turn help you to decide which social media platform your marketing messages can be most effective. It is thus advisable to deliberately focus your marketing activities on social networks where your audience is. In addition, major social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter and LinkedIn have in-house tools marketers can take advantage of to effectively market to the audience on the platforms.

Set Out Your Key Performance Indicators, KPIs

Experienced digital marketers like to advise other marketers to always have Key Performance Indicators, KPIs for their marketing activities on social media and it should be data-driven. That means you must be clear on the metrics you want to measure and how you’ll measure them. Recall, that your social media strategy is inclusive of SMART goals. Attaining these goals requires data-interpretation and analysis. Some of the most important metrics for successful social media marketing include:

1. Sentiments: This evaluates the reaction of your followers to your shared content or hashtag. It is one great way to find out how people perceive your brand.

2. Reach: Your reach defines the number of users who saw your post. It gives a clear estimate how far your content goes.

3. Clicks:  This helps pinpoint what encourages users to buy.

4. Engagement: Engagement helps to estimate all the social interactions in your post, particularly likes, comments, and shares.