Social media is easily one of the biggest assets that you can use to grow your business and it can be extremely beneficial for any industry. With the popularity that social media has gained throughout the years, it’s become a prime source of marketing for businesses, and as more social media platforms emerge it only gives businesses more stepping stones to connect with their audience. However, although it may be popular by no means does it mean that it’s easy to be successful on social media as a business and to make a difference. Social media marketing can be difficult and exhausting, especially when you’re first getting started and don’t know how to begin meeting your goals.
Building a strong social media plan that serves your goals and learning how to say no to things that don’t serve those goals is hard. But even though it can be complicated, that doesn’t mean that you should give up on your social media goals. You should still attempt to build a social media plan and have a content plan that works for you and your business. When it comes to planning content and making sure that you’re engaging your audience and continuing to post it can be hard to stay on top of things. This is where your plan is important and where you want to schedule your content, sometimes even months in advance.
When you’re building your social media strategy just remember that one of the most important parts of social media is engagement. You need to engage your audience and the more that your content resonates with your audience the more they’ll share and be apt to interact with it. Although there’s no guarantee that your content will go viral or that it’ll be successful, you can do your best to try to plan out high-quality content for the month ahead that will be successful.
Set Goals
Setting goals is the first step to building a social media strategy and perhaps even the most important step. After all, if you don’t have goals then you’re making a plan in the dark which is the last thing that you want to do. You need to ask yourself why your business is on social media to start with and what you hope to gain from it. It’s important to know exactly your goals and why you’re using social media. Your goals are going to be what defines your strategy and what makes the biggest difference with how much time you devote to creating content. However, although it can be tempting to set large goals and get ambitious with your planning, you want to make sure that you’re still realistic about your goals.
The same with any goals in your life, you won’t be able to accomplish them if the goals aren’t achievable. It’s important to remember that you can always build on these goals but you want to start small to make sure that you start on the right path. Some simple and easy goals that you can set are to bring awareness to your brand, grow your audience, and generate sales. Maybe it’s as simple as getting more engagement from your audience, but the most important thing is that you’re setting those goals and making them attainable for your brand.
Know Your Audience
Your target audience is going to be the most important part of bringing awareness to your brand and they’re going to be what makes your social media plan a success. Too many marketers fail with social media simply because they’ve made the mistake of thinking that they know their target audience when, in reality, they know nothing about them. They make assumptions about their target audience and they end up posting content that doesn’t resonate with them. If your content isn’t tailored to your target audience then you won't engage them and your content will be useless.
Not only is it important that you know your target audience and understand what content will attract them, but you also should understand that your target audience may differ on the social media platform that you’re posting on. Remember that different platforms attract different audiences and when you’re thinking about what kind of content you want to publish and when you’ll post it, it’s important that you understand the demographics of the platforms. Depending on your target audience, you’ll want to tailor specific content for different platforms and who uses them.
Make A Plan Of How To Accomplish Your Goals
Once you’ve set your goals and you know your goals, it’s time to start with actually making a map of what needs to get done and when. You need to think of your plan as a map from where you’re at right now with your social media to where you want your destination to be. At the end of your map, at your destination, is where your goals are and you have to map out how you’ll get there. This is a very important part and where you want to make sure that you focus your attention.
The biggest part that you need to focus on is making sure that you have a strategy for creating content, but it’s equally important that you’re thinking about the timeline. You need to have a calendar and make sure that you physically map out how you’ll create and post content to reach your destination. Without making sure that you have these two incorporated into your plan and that you truly focus on them, your social media strategy will suffer and you won’t see results.
Check Your Progress Regularly
If you’ve done your work correctly then you should be able to check your progress consistently and see how well you’re doing. You should be able to accurately tell if your plan is successful by measuring your goals and how close you’re coming to reaching them. If your primary goal was to gain more engagement from your social media strategy then you should be able to measure that easily by looking at how much your engagement has increased since starting.
If you notice that you’re getting more likes, comments, and impressions on each post than you know that your strategy is successful. On the other hand, if you notice that your engagement isn’t moving or that it’s decreasing you know that you need to revise your plan so that you meet your goals quicker. It’s important to figure out what’s most important to you out of all the ways that you’ll measure success and then use that. Remember that you can always change your social media strategy if you feel like it’s not successful.
Know The Competition
Although you might not be able to directly copy your competition you can learn from them and get valuable information that will benefit your own business. You want to assess your social media and see where your weaknesses are. You can look at what strengths your competition has and use that to know how you can overcome your weaknesses and improve in certain areas. Take a look at your social media and see how it compares to your competition.
Look at what their content looks like, how much engagement their posts are getting, and who their audience is. This is going to give you a firm idea of what their social media strategy looks like and will help you to make sure that you stick out from the competition. You want to be different, but you also want to see why their content may be getting more traction than yours and their strategies may be more successful than yours. Overall, looking at your competition can be a helpful way for you to build your social media strategy.
Start Planning Your Content Today
Now that you have a plan, the next step is to use a marketing automation tool that allows you to schedule your content out as far as months in advance so that you can look over your calendar. Stop wasting time doing repetitive tasks and instead get it all done at one time by using Planapost, the marketing automation tool that will optimize your posting strategy to make it the best it can be. Here you can plan and schedule all your content in one location, making things easier for you and your team! Spend less time managing and repeating mundane tasks and spend more time focusing on making your marketing strategy the best it can be. Check out Planapost and see how it can transform your marketing game!