Did you know around 55% of customers are researching you online before making a purchase? That is why it is so important to make sure your social media strategy is focused and helping you achieve your goals. Using social media without any plan is guaranteed to cause you to lose money and time. If you need to get your social media strategy back on track, check out these tips now!
Using social media for business without a clear goal is doomed to fail. You will need to sit down and decide on the end goal. The best way to achieve this is to be S.M.A.R.T. about your goals.
Specific – make sure your goal is detailed. Get as specific as possible. Are you going for business transparency? Is it letting people in behind the scenes? Do you want to teach customers about your product? What do you hope to do with your social media?
Measurable – Can you measure the objective? When will you know that you reached a goal?
Achievable – Is this a goal that you can easily achieve? Set small goals so they are reachable.
Relevant – Is this goal relevant to your business? Make sure all your business goals relate to it. It makes it easier to reach those goals.
Time-Based – Do you have a specific time frame to reach this goal? Stay away from open-end deadlines. It usually encourages procrastination.
You must know your competition. It’s not to compare how well or badly you are doing as a business. You can learn a lot about what they do on social media that works, and what doesn’t. It can help you see what to apply to your own social media strategy. Are they getting a lot of engagement from videos? How interesting are their Instagram stories? Do they post consistently? This is all information you would need to know to make your business a competitor to watch out for!
Knowing what type of content to create is largely going to depend on your customers and target audience. Your content can be written blogs, images, infographics, webinars, videos, and so on. Once you have an idea of what type of content your audience will engage in, you can work on a schedule. Consistent posting schedules help customers know when to expect things from you. It helps build trust, authority, and long lasting customer relationships.
Just like any part of an online business, always check in with your social media. Just because you set it up and have content churning out doesn’t mean it’s actually reaching your audience. Find out what is working and what is not. Fix any areas that are underperforming. And, check in every financial quarter so your social media strategy is where it needs to be.
As you can see, it’s easy to build a winning social media strategy that gives you the success you want. Creating the right content, knowing your business’ goals, and looking at data analytics will help you save money and more importantly, time.
