Strategy. It’s a nice buzzword, but is it really necessary to create one for your business’ social media marketing activities?
Absolutely!
It’s all well and dandy to slap the odd post on Facebook or Instagram here and there. I mean, anyone can do that. But if you truly want to grow your business’ online presence, build relationships with your audience and smash some business goals, then you’ve got to have a social media marketing strategy… and execute it.
A strategy will outline where your business’ social media is at now, where you want to be, and (most importantly) how you’re going to get there. The road-map from A to B, if you will.
What’s more, a great strategy will link your social media goals to meaningful business objectives and outcomes.
One way you can plan + link these together is to set your objectives out like this:
- Business objective (e.g. become the go-to source of information for your niche/industry)
- Marketing goal related to the business objective (e.g. Increase traffic to the website by 10% over the next 2 months)
- Tactics you will use to achieve this goal (e.g. Create valuable content-rich blog posts on your website. Share these blog posts on your various social media channels so they link back to the website)
- Measurement / metric of success (e.g. use native social media analytics, UTM tags and Google Analytics to measure the % increase of referral traffic from your social media channels and these specific posts, then analyse the bounce rates, time spent on page, how many pages are visited subsequently, what pages are visited etc.)
When forming a social media strategy, you can use current business insights, social media insights, audience analysis, competitor analysis and other market research. This will also help in deciding on the content you’ll need to help execute it – and reach the overall business objectives.
Of course, life happens and you may stray from the strategy at times, but it’s also meant to be flexible and should be reviewed at least quarterly.
To summarize, having a social media strategy will not only give you the peace of mind of having a plan in place, but will in the long term help with measuring growth, ROI, impact on your business… and seeing just how far your social media marketing has come!
Feeling overwhelmed? Don’t have the time to put a strategy in place, let alone execute it?? Lucky I’m a Social Media Manager with a penchant for strategy. Flick me a message via my contact form and lets see how I can help.