An effective Social Media Strategy for small businesses
The importance of social media
- Marketers confirm Social media marketing is essential for their businesses
- More than 90% of marketers are engaged in Social media marketing
- Sales teams using Social media reach their target quotes with these channels of outreach
- More than 50% of purchasing consumers use Social media to investigate a product before buying
- More than 50% of marketers use social media networks for lead generation.
- More than 4 billion active users on social media networks
Creating a Social media marketing strategy
1: Define your target audience
– Age, gender, demographics, income and education level – Resources to acquire: Google Adwords & Facebook insights
2: Research buyer Personas
– Age, location, interests: – Resources to acquire data: Google Analytics, Facebook insights.
3: Identify influencers
– Bloggers, forums, facebook groups – Resources to acquire: Google Analytics, Facebook insights & Buzzumo.
4: Identify Social media platforms used by your target audience/ buyer personas
– social media channels to focus on – Resources to acquire data: Google Analytics, Facebook insights & SEMRush.
5: Research competitors Social Media networks
– monitor their presence and campaigns and frequency of posts – Resources to acquire: SEMRush and Social media networks
6: Create a content strategy and social media calendar focused on your target audience
– research what, when and where they are searching for – Resources to acquire data: Google Analytics, Quora and on forums.
7: Collect and create content and media for the social media campaigns
– hire content writers, create video’s and other forms of media like white papers, infographics, ebooks and pictures
8: Schedule frequency posts on your chosen social media network.
– Based on your Social media calendar
9: Monitor user engagement and engage whilst building a relationship
– Document/track engagement metrics – Resources to acquire: Google Analytics, Facebook insights & SEMRush.
10: Maintain a systematic publishing schedule
– Schedule a post frequency you can maintain with useful content to keep the audience engaged and interested in the brand
– Resources to acquire: Social media calendar
11: Advertising budget
– Investigate the target audience and data collected to plan a ad campaign to increase user reach in targeted area
– decide upon which goals to achieve; website traffic, follower increase ect.
– Resources to acquire data: Google Analytics, Facebook insights & SEMRush.
12: Consider automating social media posts
– investigate which social media platform best suits your business needs – Resources to acquire: social media platforms
12: Analysis the user engagement data collected to plan future campaigns
– Consider advertising to increase social followers to increase brand awareness and to identify new audiences – Resources to acquire data: Google Analytics, Facebook insights & SEMRush.