Does social media fit your business? If you are into B2C, your answer would probably be ‘Yes’. Similarly if you belong to product industry, you might be more inclined to social media marketing, rather than service industry. Even if some industry people may think that social media would not work for them, but the fact remains, social media is potential for every business, provided you go about with a right strategy.
What’s your business goal:
Your business goal and your social media goal must be in sync with each other. Social media is a marketing effort, so it must be a part of your overall marketing strategy. If your marketing goal is getting more sales, your social media strategy should also be sales.
Know your target audience:
Who is your target group? If you have the answer, half the job is done. But if you don’t know them completely, here are some questions that you need to ask yourself.
- Who would buy your product or service?
- Where do they live?
- Who previously bought from me?
- Who have visited your website?
- What is your revenue model?
Facebook graph search is one of the ways to identify them. Try it differently. Let’s assume that you want to target specific people in a city, who would be interested to visit your new fashion boutique.
Run similar searches on Facebook to identify your target audience.
Identify the platforms:
Once you identify your potential buyers, you need to determine the social networks for you. These two are intertwined with each other. Let’s simplify it with one statement. No matter how big a social network is, if your TG is not there, your valuable content will go in vain.
Here are some pointers:
- If you are B2C, channels like Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest would fit your bill.
- If you are B2B, LinkedIn, YouTube and blog would be good for you.
- If you have any upcoming event to promote, Twitter and Facebook are best.
Understand your audience behavior:
As you know your audience and where they spend their time on social media, it’s time you figure out what is their online behavior. This includes their logged in time slots, duration, social activities etc. You can get a fair idea of your audience behavior if you identify their buyer persona. Create an excel sheet to jot them down.
Create content:
Your content must resonate well with your audience. If you fail to ring a bell with your content, your social media marketing cannot help your business. For example, if you deal with B2B and offer business solutions, you must understand the pain points of your target group.
Hubspot knows its audience and always comes up with content that would attract their fans on social media. You also should create your own voice on social media to establish a brand recall. For example, Nike is always authoritative in its approach, no matter if their audience likes it or not.
Set social media goals and metrics:
You must have set a goal that you want to achieve with your social media marketing efforts, as previously mentioned. Set it practically. Create a strategy and work on it for at least 3 months. Social media success is not a myth, only if you are patient enough.
Set the key metrics that would be right for your business. Not every metric would work for you. For example, if your goal is to create branding, your metrics should be Facebook likes, Shares, RTs etc. If you want more sales, your metrics should be signups, clicks, registrations etc.
Track and measure:
Measure your performance once in every 3 months. The tracking can be done in different stages. For example, track if you have chosen the right networks for you, track if you implemented the right strategy, track if you successfully reached the right audience, track if your content gels well with your TG and track if you are improving upon your metrics.
These are the steps that would help you fit social media into your business strategy. Try them and let us know how the process helped you.
Category