More than half of the world’s population uses social media, 4.70 billion people, to be exact. This created a great opportunity for businesses to interact with their target audience directly while promoting their product or service at the same time.
Simply opening social media accounts and hoping for the best isn’t going to be sufficient enough for gaining relevancy or driving more sales. What you need is an effective social media strategy that will focus on things that matter to your audience the most.
Here is what you need to do to ensure your social media strategy hits the right spot:
1. Define your goals
2. Understand who your audience is
3. Create valuable and engaging content
4. Track your performance
Let’s dig a little deeper!
1. Define your goals
Before you do anything, you need to define your social media strategy goals and align them with your business objectives.
You can focus on one or more of these six most common goals:
1. Increasing brand awareness – introducing your brand to a wider audience. You will typically set this goal if you are launching a new product or making your way into a new market.
2. Managing brand reputation – building trust in your brand to ensure your business has a positive image amongst social media users.
3. Driving more traffic to your business’s website – using your social media accounts for attracting more traffic to your business website.
4. Boosting conversion or sales – using your account as a tool for guiding people towards the desired action (signing up for a newsletter or a webinar, making a purchase, etc).
5. Generating leads – using your accounts to gather as much information about your target audience. You can then use this information to bring more potential customers into your sales funnel.
6. Delivering customer service – establishing customer support on social media. Reaching this goal will help you increase the level of your customer satisfaction.
Establishing your social media strategy goals early in the game will help you have a better sense of direction and organize your actions more efficiently.
2. Understand who your audience is
Identifying your target audience helps you direct your marketing efforts toward the people who are most likely to convert to customers.
Here is what you could do to make sure your strategy hit the mark:
– Collect all the data on your existing customers – extract information about their age, location, interests, etc.
– Apply social listening – keep your eye on the relevant keywords and hashtags that mention both your brand and your competitors’ brand.
– Find out what channels your audience uses the most – you can use various tools such as Google Analytics or Keyhole to discover which social media networks appear in your referral traffic the most.
– Check out your main competitors – use tools such as Buzzsumo to gain insight into what your competition is doing.
Defining your target audience will help you create content on your social media platform that your users want to consume. This brings us to the next section…
3. Create valuable and engaging content
Now that you have set your goals and formed a clear image of your target audience, it’s time to create content that will bring value to both your business and your potential customers.
Here are the top four content marketing strategies that you can use on your social media platforms:
1. Conduct surveys and share the results – people tend to trust numbers more than the written word. So if you organize a survey that portrays your brand in a positive light, make sure you share it on your social media platforms.
2. Tap in the user-generated content (UGC) – it would be best if your audience creates content on your business’s behalf on their own. But there are other options, such as Billo, where you can hire creators to make content about your products or services and post it on your social media platforms.
3. Make the most from influencer marketing – find out what influencers can speak to your audience the best, and hire them to create content for your social platforms.
4. Stand up for social causes – creating content for social media that shows your business’s support for social causes can have a great impact on your company’s image. This type of content can relate to your audience on a more personal level and is more likely to be shared amongst people.
5. Offer more freebies and less promotional content – your content should aim to help your audience and not overburden them with endless promotions of your brand. Try offering discounts or free trials in exchange for follows, likes, or tags. This is a great way to engage your audience on your social media platforms and make them your loyal customers.
You can also post “how-to” tutorials to help your audience understand your product or service better and show how they can solve certain problems effectively.
Since content is the most important part of an effective social media strategy, you might want to consider hiring professionals to help you speak your audience’s language. For example, you can connect with the top global companies offering real estate SEO services to boost your search rankings and become a reliable real estate website.
4. Track your performance
Measuring the performance of your social media strategies will give you clear indications of what approaches work and what are just a waste of your time and money.
Here are the top ten metrics you should keep your eye on to ensure you have an effective strategy in place:
1. Impressions – indicates how many times your post appeared on someone’s feed or timeline.
2. Number of followers
3. Audience growth rate – an indication of follower count changes.
4. Reach – shows how many people have seen your post over a set period of time.
5. Potential reach – reveals how many people could potentially see your post over a certain period of time.
6. Social share of voice – shows how many people mention your brand in comparison to the number of mentions your competitors have got.
7. Number of likes per post
8. Number of comments per post
9. Applause rates – measures the number of positive interactions with your post (likes, shares, retweets, etc.
10. Average engagement rate – shows how engaging each of your posts is by dividing all engagements by your total number of followers.
You can find many valuable tools that can help you keep track of your social media strategy performances, including Twitter Analytics and Hootsuite.
Conclusion
Having an effective social media strategy in place will ensure you give your audience exactly what they want and connect with them on a more personal level. It will help you gain their trust and make your business more profitable on the way.
We hope our article helped you realize what you need to do to create social marketing that aligns with your business goals and converts your audience into loyal customers.
