Building a Social Media Strategy is the First Step to success for any business. Here is a step-by-step guide to refer to.
Define Objective and Target Audience
The first and most important thing is to understand the business objectives like what exactly you want. what are the results you wish can be increased sales, increase followers or even increase engagement?
Now after you choose a business objective it’s time to decide who is the ideal audience that you should target. Remember social media is not a number game in fact in most cases 100 targeted organic Followers is better than 10000 followers.
So, Make a persona or all audience that your business or if you are an individual influencer then those you can be your loyal followers.
You can predict their age, gender, location, income profile, interest, etc. Also their relative interest.
Let’s take an example of a general offline sports apparel store in Mumbai.
Then their objectives will be to attract customers to their shop and increase their local following and their target audience will be sporty, health-conscious people in their location it can be something like this:
- Any gender
- Generally 16+ Age (As small children don’t go shopping)
- Interest: Sports, Health, Any specific sports interest
- Location: Mumbai
- Apart from that, you can target related industries like sports fashion or even schools and colleges in your area.
Choose Perfect Social Media Platforms
Choosing the Right social media platform is also important you cannot work on every platform. The easiest way is to choose one or two primary social media focused on that and repurpose that content on other relevant social media.
Here is the list of all famous social media platforms that you can target according to location and niche
Let’s take the previous example: So, it’s an apparel brand also local and in Mumbai, India.
So their primary platform should be Instagram and Google my business profile and then they can also repurpose that on youtube, Facebook, WhatsApp, or any local micro-content app as they are some famous platforms and audiences there.
Optimize Profiles
Many people even agencies ignore this step. When a user first interacts with any of your social media the first thing that they see is your profile so make sure it’s 100% completed professionally.
Mostly Profile should be well designed and Copywrite and also uses all the features available on that platform if you take our example they should make Instagram a business account and make sure the location, business name, and what they sell are available.
Apart from that, they should use all features like reels, highlights, stories, and even shop and page modifications for their store.
Plan Content Creation
Planning content is subjective according to you but here are some points to consider with our example:
Consistency: Having consistency is important in social media marketing, especially in the organic approach but it doesn’t mean per day 2 posts or 1 post per day instead it means a proper schedule.
Using all Features: Use as many as features possible like short videos, live, carousal, text, posts, stories, etc according to needs.
Plan your schedule:
You have to make a schedule for what will be posted ahead it can be like on Wednesday I will do live or Friday like to make a before-after carousel, etc and it should align your business objective and target audience.
An example of our sports apparel store can be like:
- Monday (Photo wearing apparel)
- Tuesday (Story asking for reviews)
- Wednesday (Carousal of reviews)
- Thursday (short reels showcasing apparel)
- Friday (Advantages of sportswear)
- Saturday (Maybe a sale coming soon post)
- Sunday (Discount or sales Post)
Apart from that can advantage of any special occasion or event trending and happening or even humor content in between works well)
Execute Properly
At the time of posting any content make for it is well written or designed and also check if is it optimized for algorithm and SEO.
It depends from platform to platform on how you should optimize your content but SEO and algorithm tips remain the same like including hashtags, Keywords, and trying to increase engagement with descriptions or captions.
- Also, add alt tags to images wherever possible, etc.
- Using trends based on your location and leveraging memes and UGC content is also a way.
- Posting at the correct time is also important for your audience when they are using social media the most.
- In the case of our sports apparel shop some of the tips can be:
- Giving brand, location, and relevant keywords
- Using Fashion Trends
- Making caption open ended
- Posting in the evening according to Indian time is the best time or using holidays or Sundays can be an option too.
Engage with Your Audience
Creating engagement and making sure you reply to as many as comments possible have the most benefits so make sure you or your manager reply to as many a comment as possible and use some engagement-increasing tactics.
Some of them can be:
- Open-ended questions
- Liking back
- Ask for a review or share
In sports apparel case it can be solving all doubt, giving the address and contact so they can visit the store, asking them for product reviews and sharing photos wearing it, etc.
Analyze your data
Once, You get some traffic and engagement you should see analytics for data and see what’s working and what’s not also check all data available and you should find a winning way to increase your sales and following.
Let’s say you find that bottom wear sports apparel is in trend and people engaging with that then promote it more or you find a specific sportswear demand is increasing or decreasing what’s the perfect age from what people are coming, etc.
This simple data can also reduce inventory costs and marketing costs that’s why data is king nowadays and social media is the best place to gather data.
Conclusion
Apart from this, there are many external ways to reach new followers like paid ads or influencer marketing or collaborations, etc.
Hopefully, You have got all your answers regarding how to make a perfect social media strategy that works like a charm.
