The Ultimate Way to Build an Active Social Media Strategy

[Guest Contributor: Stella Nasso]

Social media is the ultimate way to do inbound marketing and a clear strategy will help expand your marketing efforts, build brand awareness, connect with your audience, and attract buyers effectively. When considering social media and its numerous benefits, it is vital to optimizing this cost-effective marketing outlet, especially in our current technological state; Mapping out a clear and effective strategy is the key to successful social media marketing. Where do you begin?

1) Set Goals

Before you start creating your social media promotion strategy, it is essential to first set out the goals you would like it to accomplish. Business and social goals should be planned for one to three years in advance in order to plan and provide time to effectively accomplish these goals. When setting goals, it is necessary that a clear buyer persona is set out in order to determine who your ideal customer is. After goals are set, you should develop a timeline for reaching these set-out goals and building your team.

2) Create a Brand Voice and Tone

A critical aspect of your brand is the ability to humanize. The voice of your brand is the consistent personality it holds and tone is the moods and attitudes of your content pieces. By humanizing and utilizing tone and voice to its fullest potential with your brand, you are creating additional opportunities to build trust with your customers. This helps to create a sense of familiarity, reliability, and brings a human aspect to your brand. For these prevalent reasons, it is important to consider and incorporate tone and voice in your social media strategy. 

Brand personality and context are key as people would rather hear from a person than a digitized presence. People want to talk to people and not brands and that is why engaging directly with your target audience is at the heart of your social media strategy. This direct contact can help grow your brand, build loyalty, and drive brand awareness. It is also extremely important, to be honest, transparent, and personal to further build trust and loyalty within your brand and audience.

3) Set a Budget 

A budget is a large determinant of many decisions that will be made regarding your strategy. Your budget ultimately shapes decisions and there are many budgetary aspects that need to be taken into consideration. You need to start by asking the simplistic question of what content you need to create. From there, you can start considering more complex factors, such as, if you need an agency, paid advertising, influencers, a larger team, or services and tools to help you achieve your goals. 

Pitching to Upper Management?

Once you determine your need, if you need to pitch the idea upstream, this can be the most difficult part. An effective way to position your ideas is as an experiment.  By connecting the business goals to how your social media promotion strategy can help, a leadership team will be more open and receptive to your ideas. Senior leaders highly value new avenues for revenue, cost-saving, efficiency, and competitive advantage. Therefore, If you are able to confidently prove why your goals can accomplish this, you will be more successful in its implementation.

4) Utilizing Social Listening Effectively

Staying a step ahead, keep track of social media platforms and the components that surround them. This will help gauge how well your social media strategy is working and to help you pinpoint areas that need pivoting. Below are some of the ways you can practice social listening:

• Review comments, mentions, and hashtags: These factors can help determine reach and engagement regarding the performance of your social media platform.

• Track of influencers, customers, and new customers: This can help monitor possible new opportunities to further grow your social media presence and obtain business.

• Follow conversations relating to your brand: This will help you make sure that you are able to respond accordingly to anything relating to your brand and make sure everything regarding your brand remains positive.

The ability to effectively track, analyze, and respond to conversations across the internet highlights social listening skills that can improve your use of social media. 

According to in-depth social media research performed by Sprout Social, 83% of people like when brands respond to questions. This showcases the immense importance of social listening. Social media is a remarkable listening device that can help you improve your own social media strategy. Social listening has a multitude of other aspects that can improve an abundance of influential aspects of your promotion strategy.

It can be challenging to measure the performance of your social media strategy, social listening allows you the opportunity to measure. It also helps with managing your brand’s reputation, identifying your biggest fan, discovering new ways to enhance your existing products, learn from competitors, find leads, and set strategic benchmarks for your future. All these influential reasons showcase the vast importance of incorporating social listening into your social media strategy.

Finally,

Building a winning social media promotional strategy can be daunting, you don’t need to do it alone. We are here to help if you have questions or would like a partner to run alongside you to help in creating and setting attainable social goals, build your voice and tone online, consider your audience, determine a budget, and put the plan into practice. 

Source: Hubspot Acamedy Social Media Course

At SEVENmarketing, we pride ourselves on helping business leaders build strategies around communication, collaboration, and authenticity using a variety of technologies and techniques.

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