5 Steps to Building a Great Social Media Strategy

Social media marketing has become a hugely important part of brand building, connecting with the right target audience, and driving more traffic to your website. That's why you need a solid social media strategy that will help your marketing campaign stand out from your competition. This post discusses five steps to help you build the ultimate social media strategy for your business.

Step 1. Know Your Audience
Who is your ideal customer? By defining your target audience early enough, you will be strategically placed to determine the best time to market and sell your product.

For example, if your ideal customers are young adults aged between 18 and 29, you would be wise to focus on social sites like Facebook or Instagram. On the other hand, if your target audience is composed of graduate-educated and business persons, you would be better off using LinkedIn.

Your ideal customers also determine the type of social media content you'll be advertising.

Step 2. Choose the Right Platform
There's no doubt that all social media platforms have their strengths and limitations. That's why you'll find some businesses thrive best when using some social media platforms over others.

The trick is to find the social media platform that your target audience hangs out on the most. Understand the demographics of your target market and see if that fits into the most prominent demographics that use each platform. Make your decision based on this and you will not fail when choosing the right platform for your brand. And remember, you don't have to boil the ocean and be on them all. Choose one or two platforms and commit to posting regularly on them. 

Step 3. Know Your Brand and Products
Before starting a social media content strategy for your business, you must first identify your brand and products or services your target audience finds most valuable and make them the central focus of your posting efforts. Know how to describe your offerings well and provide consistent descriptions of them. Understand why your brand's products or services will fulfill the pain points that your prospects may be experiencing. Feature your differentiators and what makes you better than your competitors. 


Step 4. Create Your Content
All your social media planning and advertising strategies should be based on what your target audience is looking for. Great content is the backbone of any impactful social media strategy. But sadly, many businesses skip the first three steps and jump straight to content creation. This strategy is seldom successful, and many professional marketers don't encourage it. You can have the greatest content speaking to the wrong people. So don't skip any steps.
Now that you know your ideal customer, have picked the best social media platform and understand how to describe your brand and products or services, you can create content that sends a statement.  Identify those pain points your prospects are experiencing so that they can first relate and then lead them down a path of describing how your products and services will ease that pain for them. Provide educational and/or entertaining content and only promote or sell your products once in a while. No one likes to be sold to all the time. If you provide great, beneficial content to your target audience they will believe you are a thought leader in the industry and will begin to trust in your brand.  Down the road it may turn into a sale!
Once you've created a great content plan, start posting! Start with posting at least 5 days a week. The more posting the better as long as you are providing quality content.
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Step 5. Review Then Improve Performance
Finally, you'll want to check the stats of your social media campaign frequently to see how it's performing. This will allow you to see which strategies are working and which ones aren't and use this data to update your marketing approach accordingly. If something isn't performing as expected, pause it and take action. Maybe you missed something.

By following these steps, you can build a great social media strategy and bolster your marketing campaign significantly. If you would like to use your social media strategy to its full potential, make the first step: Call Clairant today to see what we can do for your business.