Having a social media strategy can help you grow!

Having a social media strategy can help you grow. It can help you grow by helping you to generate sales.

Social media can do this by…

• putting you in front of new audiences;
• creating opportunities;
• targeting specific audiences; and
• building relationships.

There are 42m active social media users in the UK and the average daily use on social media is 1hr 48m with 5.5hrs being spent on the internet daily.

Improving your marketing will help you get noticed on google!

Define your goals

You should already have business goals for your business. Whatever your business goals are you should translate them into specific digital goals with clear and measurable KPIs.

Focus on making sure that each of your social media posts supports a strategic goal.

Your goals might relate to:

• giving better customer service;
• growing your brand awareness and adding value to your brand by making it more visible;
• generating more sales/getting new customers;
• getting more traffic/people onto your website; and
• connecting with influencers;
• engaging with your followers and building a community.

Whatever your goals make sure that they can be tracked and measured. This allows you to focus your efforts and quickly pivot as things change. Is it working? If not, why not?

Define your success.

Define your audience

Start by defining your audience:

• Who are they?
• What are they into?
• What/Who influences them?
• When are they usually online?
• Which social media platforms do they use?

Have you got a customer persona? If not, you should write out and identify your customer persona and figure out their demographics. To be successful you will want to be targeting a niche audience and generally speaking the more niche you can get the better as it will be easier to reach them and engage with them.

If your definition of your audience is wishy-washy you won’t get anywhere the more information you know the better.

So how do you find your audience?

There are many ways – you might find your audience through paid ads, perhaps organically, perhaps through a targeting email marketing strategy or even a specific platform such as youtube.

and don’t forget – not only can you find your audience on social media – you can also find influencers.

You find your audience by engaging with them on social media. Simply approach and reach out to people in a positive and friendly way. Follow people. Start two-way conversations, show a new side of your business and ultimately build a community.

Which social media platform?

Once you have defined and identified your audience you should be able to identify the social media platform you should be hanging out on. Social media is time-consuming. It is unlikely you will have enough time to dedicate to do doing them all well. So pick your social media platform based on where your audience is hanging out.  Use your target customer and their online behaviors, to determine which networks will work best for your products and/or services.

Create lots of quality of content

Once you have identified the social media platform that you will be focusing on the next step is optimising that platform and creating platform-specific content that aligns with your goals.

Ask yourself:

• are my posts on SM driving people to my website?
• what kind of updates should I post?
• who are my most influential followers?
• when is the best time to engage with my audience?

Examples of the types of content you might want to post/share include:

• Announcements (e.g. new product)
• Non-promotional (e.g. behind the scenes, insights)
• Product or brand related (e.g. product tips or tricks)
• Responses (e.g. engaging with customer or influencer)
• Operational (e.g. job openings)
• Recurring Content (e.g. seasonal sales).

Need some prompts check out our 30 days of social printables.

Have a Social Voice for your brand

As well as producing content you will need to have a consistent social voice for your brand.

As part of your social media strategy, you should develop brand guidelines, rules for your logo use and visual identity including fonts, colours, style of images and your tone of voice/personality.