What if your small business could have the market penetration of a much larger business?
The key to building your brand and truly growing your business is social media. Unfortunately, many small businesses don’t have a solid social media strategy in place. And without such a strategy, a small business can never reach its full potential.
Wondering how to evolve your own social media marketing game? Keep reading to discover the answers!
Setting SMART Goals
The goals for your business form the cornerstones of any social media strategy. In order for your goals to be successful, they need to be SMART.
In this case, SMART is an acronym for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-Bound. By making sure each of your goals meets these criteria, you can be successful in marketing on a variety of social media platforms.
A goal is specific if it is tied to a particular outcome (such as increasing customer conversions), and “measurable” means you can quantify the results (such as increasing conversions by a certain percentage). “Attainable,” of course, just means that the goal is realistic for your business.
“Relevant” means assessing (or reassessing) that the goal is relevant to your business, your mission, and your other goals. Finally, Time-bound means you tie your goals to a target date. This way, you can continuously measure whether your business is moving closer to the goal within an acceptable timeframe.
Building a Marketing Persona
In order to understand and market to your customers, it is important to create buyer personas. This provides additional insight that can help you and your team improve your marketing efforts.
But to really transform your marketing, it’s equally important to build a marketing persona. The marketing persona is like the embodiment of your brand, and creating such a persona requires a deep understanding of your customers as you craft the right tone.
One of the more famous (or perhaps infamous) examples of a social media marketing persona is Wendy’s. In order to increase their appeal to younger demographics, Wendy’s adopted a sassy and sarcastic marketing persona on Twitter. And that account regularly teases everyone from random users making jokes to major competition like McDonald’s.
On paper, it sounds quite strange. In practice, the persona is appealing enough to help Wendy’s stand out from the competition.
Realistic Timeline
Earlier, we talked about the importance of creating time-bound goals. While you are setting these goals, it’s important to make sure that the timelines you set for the goals are realistic.
For example, certain goals may be measurable and attainable, such as increasing traffic to your site by 25%. But while that goal is measurable and attainable, it is not something you are likely to do within a week or within a month. In order to make progress towards that goal, you need to give yourself a reasonable timeframe.
That is why your social media strategy should include a mixture of annual and monthly goals. And you can measure those goals by focusing on the right KPIs.
The Right KPIs and Analytics
A goal is SMART if the goal is measurable and attainable. But the best way to measure that is to create KPIs and tie those to shorter schedules. For example, someone looking to increase traffic by 25% in a six-month time frame needs to aim for increasing traffic by 4.17% each month.
If you fall short of that monthly goal, you may need to go back to the drawing board. Try some new social media marketing techniques for the following month to improve your site traffic.
On a related note, you need to focus on the right analytics for your social media platforms. While it’s great to have a number of followers, that measurement is pretty hollow in and of itself. It’s much better to focus on clicks instead: this measures actual engagement and can easily be tied to CTAs related to your SMART goals.
Next-Level Content
No matter who your audience is on social media, they all want the same thing: killer content. And the kind of content you provide should be tailored to your exact audience.
However, don’t make the rookie mistake of making a hard sell through the content you share. If it looks like all you are ever doing online is trying to sell something, it will drive prospective customers away.
Instead, as with blogging, you should try to craft useful and relevant content related to what you do actually sell. If you own a furniture store, customers don’t necessarily want posts where you try to sell furniture. But they will love posts about how to restore old furniture or how to redecorate the living room.
Creating the content your customers actually want builds trust and builds your brand. In turn, this will increase your sales because customers now trust you as an authoritative and helpful source of information.
Get the Timing Just Right
By now, you’ve hopefully created some awesome content for your audience. And bonus points if any of that content includes engaging multimedia such as video. But for this content to really make an impact, you need to know when to share it.
Here’s a basic example: if you share a post at midnight, only the night owls are likely to see it. And your basic goal here is for as many people to see your content as possible.
For that to happen, you need to consider your audience and think about when they are likely to see your content. Perhaps you have an older audience that is likely to see your posts while they have their morning coffee. Or you have a young professional audience trying to squeeze in some social media time on their lunch break.
Remember to check your analytics each and every month. These can help you make small tweaks to your posting schedule that will have a big impact on your social media strategy.
Your Social Media Strategy: What’s Next?
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