Do You Have A Social Strategy For Success?
Do you have a social strategy or are you posting and tweeting blind? Having a plan and measuring outcomes can help business owners save time and money. But, don't worry having a social strategy is not as complicated as you might first think. In fact, you can cover everything on one page!
If you taking part on social media networks for business having a plan, even a one page one, is a worthy investment of your time. Having a plan will help ensure you are posting and tweeting with purpose and allow you to easily monitor whether your content is having a positive impact.
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I think the fact social media is so widely used and mostly free to do so, is actually where business owners fall down. It's all too easy to get excited and jump on the social media bandwagon and set up and account without really considering how it can help to add value.
The solution? Yes, you guessed it a plan! To help you achieve your business vision, your social strategy needs to be aligned to your business goals. If it's not, it won't help you achieve what you need it to, you'll likely be scrabbling around for content and get disillusioned with the results.
But before you start planning, you need to make sure you have a clear idea of the customers you want to reach. Believe me, this step is crucial if you want to ensure your social media efforts help you reach more of your desired customers and reduce your advertising spend!
If you don’t understand your customer you’ll fail to reach them physically, offline or online, and spend plenty of money in the process, but you’ll also fail to reach them mentally.
One way to better understand your customers and what makes them tick is to develop robust buyer personas. Personas can help bring your ideal customer to life and serve as an effective reminder of who you are trying to target and the best way to reach them with your messaging.
Once you clear on who you want to reach with your social media activities you can get down to business. Here's a one page template for a basic social strategy I have created to help small-to-medium business owners plan their approach for participating in social media.
If you would like a free download of this template, feel free to email me and I will send you a copy no strings attached! Alternatively, you can join my FREE Marketing Masterclass Facebook Group for small business owners where I have uploaded it in the document section.
7 Tips for Creating A Simple Social Media Strategy
#1 Write your business goals down to focus you on why you are doing this.
#2 Write down the social media goals i.e. grow following, boost engagement, empowerment, win sales, brand advocacy.
#3 Write down the social media activities that will help you achieve these goals i.e. campaigns and engagement, monitor and engage, promote sales, research, nurture relationships.
#4 Write down the social media channels that will help you.
#5 Next, consider the tone you want to adopt on that channel i.e. professional, chatty etc and the frequency which you will aim to post.
#6 Write down what you want people to do – your call-to-actions i.e. follow, like, share, comment, read, watch etc.
#7 Finally, write down the metrics you will use to measure how your efforts are performing i.e. reach, impressions, engagement rate, traffic, click through rate, leads generated, conversions.
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I really hope this post has helped you see that having a plan and measuring outcomes, is worth investing some of your time upfront in order to help you save time and money in the future. And, that putting together a social strategy is not as complicated as you might have once thought.
If you do request a copy of my template and give the planning exercise a go, please do let me know how you find the exercise and let me know what results you get from monitoring the outcomes!
Lisa-Marie Mallier
No Fluff Founder
Marketing planning support and help
Join the FREE No Fluff Masterclass Group on Facebook for marketing advice and resources at your fingertips 24/7! Designed with start-ups and small business owners in mind, the Group provides online access to support, tips, templates and guides, and an opportunity to collaborate with others.
