- \n
- Your social media efforts should be thoughtful and backed by demographic and psychographic research of your audience.<\/li>\n
- Casting the widest net doesn’t equate to reaching the greatest amount of potential customers. Start small.<\/li>\n
- An effective social media strategy will help you build deeper customer relationships, improve your customer satisfaction and provide clarity around your brand.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
So what does a successful social media strategy look like?<\/p>\n
Benefits of an effective social media strategy<\/h2>\n
We all know that social media is crucial today for businesses<\/a>. But social media alone isn’t enough<\/a> to drive growth. By building an effective strategy, you’re increasing your brand’s<\/p>\n
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- Awareness<\/li>\n
- Authority<\/li>\n
- Authenticity<\/li>\n
- Engagement<\/li>\n
- Efficiency<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
Social media platforms have blurred the lines of communication between businesses and customers. You can only maximize on the benefits of social media if you’re actively breaking down the walls and showing up.<\/p>\n
Here are 8 steps to help you create one:<\/p>\n
Step 1: Understanding Your Audience<\/h2>\n
The foundation of a successful social media strategy is understanding who your target audience is and why they care about what you have to offer. To do this, you need to observe a combination of demographics and psychographics.<\/p>\n
Demographics<\/h3>\n
Demographics are statistics and descriptions of a group of people, such as their location, age, gender and occupation. Keep in mind that not all of these statistics and descriptions may be relevant for your business.<\/p>\n
If you have your own website, there are several ways you can determine your audience\u2019s demographics. One helpful tool is Google Adwords<\/a>. If you don\u2019t have a website yet, find a competitor or similar site and use that for your analysis.<\/p>\n
Psychographics<\/h3>\n
Psychographics explain your audience\u2019s lifestyles, values, opinions, interests and attitudes. You should try to answer these questions about your audience when doing your analysis:<\/p>\n
- \n
- Why do they want to learn about your product or service?<\/li>\n
- How important is your product or service to your audience? For example, is it part of their job or is it a personal interest?<\/li>\n
- How do they like to learn and get their information from? Is it video, audio, text, etc., and on what device or channel?<\/li>\n
- What questions do they typically have about your product or service?<\/li>\n
- How knowledgeable are they about your industry and product or service?<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
Psychographics play an extremely important role in the success of your social media strategy, so as challenging as this may be, you want to make sure you do this part really well before moving on to the next step.<\/p>\n
While there\u2019s no tool that can directly get you the psychographic information you want on your target audience, there are a few places you can go to do this, such as:<\/p>\n
- \n
- Interview existing clients<\/li>\n
- Investigate website analytics<\/li>\n
- Utilize subreddits<\/a><\/li>\n
- Join community forums and focus groups<\/li>\n
- Read social media and blog comments<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
As you find valuable information about your target audience, record these observations as they could come in handy when it comes time to content creation!<\/p>\n
Step 2: Targeting Your Channels<\/h2>\n
If you’re already active on social media, do an audit of what’s working well for you (and be honest about what’s not moving the needle).<\/p>\n
Consider the following questions:<\/p>\n
- \n
- What’s working for you? Look at your insights and business analytics on each platform.<\/li>\n
- Who is currently engaging with your posts? Is it your target audience?<\/li>\n
- How do you compare to your competition? Are they growing at a rapid rate?<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
If you’re just starting out, you may be eager to get on every available channel out there. But it\u2019s a good idea to start with 1-3 channels and focus all your efforts on those (or even master 1 before moving onto the next). Like any plan, your social media strategy needs to be sustainable in order for it to work.<\/p>\n
You will get quicker and better results if you focus your time and effort on your 1-3 key channels, then expand as your business and team grow.<\/p>\n
So how do you determine which social networks you should start with?<\/p>\n
You need to find out where your audience hangs out, then start narrowing down your options.<\/p>\n
Remember, age doesn\u2019t give you the full picture though, so you want to look at your competitors and see which top social media platforms you should focus on. You can try to do this with BuzzSumo or Ahrefs.<\/p>\n
Not every business CAN or even SHOULD be everywhere. Focus your energy on the platforms that will drive the most impact for you.<\/p>\n
Step 3: Developing Your Content Strategy<\/h2>\n
Now that you have a better understanding of your target audience and the channels they use, it\u2019s time to build out your content strategy<\/a>. Think blog posts, videos, photography, quotes, quick tip.<\/p>\n
The right kind of content will depend on your target audience and the channels you choose. It\u2019s also important to share content produced by others as you don\u2019t want to seem overly self-promotional.<\/p>\n
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