Develop your Social Media Marketing Strategy in 6 Simple Steps

In today’s age of social media, it isn’t enough to just create an account and hope that your customer base will find you. The key to success in this digital age is to routinely reflect and revaluate your business’ marketing strategy. If you have never created a marketing plan before, we understand that the task can be quite daunting. That’s why we created this guide of 6 simple steps for you!

1. Establish your Brand’s Marketing Goals & Objectives

If you’re planning on investing your time into social media - it’s probably a good idea to understand why you’re going to do so. To start, we advise establishing one goal, accompanied by two or three objectives. Keeping the number of your goals to a minimum will significantly reduce the complexity of your business’s social media marketing strategy. The best marketing goals are broad, motivational and left somewhat vague. Objectives on the other hand should be specific, measurable and timely. 

Example:

Goal: I will commit to my career development by learning how to increase my brand’s sales

• Objective 1: I will attend three, one-hour SMC Club sessions each month in 2021 to develop my professional skillset - (we can vouch for this one!) 

• Objective 2: I will increase my brand’s audience of engaged & valuable followers by -% in 6 months by dedicating 30 minutes a day to engaging with my audience.

2. Create Marketing Personas

Marketing personas are composite sketches of target audience segments. Marketing personas are used to help businesses identify what type of content will be best received by an audience. Your marketing personas should be general enough to cover an entire segment, but specific enough that someone could identify these types of people from a crowd. Your personas should include demographics, geography and psychographics. You should also consider their needs, buying habits, and pain points.

3. Develop a Strong Brand Image

In most cases, your brand image is responsible for your organization’s first impression with its audience. Your brand image should be consistent, recognizable, and differentiate itself from its competitors. You should ensure your brand’s colours, fonts and aesthetic is reflected in all of your social account’s content.

4. Determine a Realistic Budget

When budgeting, remember to not only consider your finances but also your time. Be realistic when deciding what resources you can allocate towards your marketing initiatives. For example, how many hours per week are you willing to dedicate to your social media? Can your business afford paid advertisements or will it rely solely on organic reach? Are the premium marketing application memberships worth it, or should you stick with the free version? These are all important questions to ask yourself!

5. Keep Organized

Whether you’re managing a marketing team or just trying to manage yourself, it is important to have systems in place to keep your marketing efforts organized. Lucky for us there are many simple and user-friendly content planning applications to organize your social media content. Some of our favourite content calendar applications are Asana, Canva, Later, and Planoly. Keep an eye out for Alex Toombs at our Everything Instagram Summit, she will be showing us how to batch 30-days of valuable content into our content calendars!

6. Perform Routine Marketing Audits

Following steps, one through five should be enough to begin to see results. However, just like your business, the world of social media will continue to evolve and grow. As trends change, so should your marketing strategy. Ensure you monitor your platform’s analytics regularly. These results should be compared back to the goals and objectives you established in step one. If your marketing strategy fails to meet your expectations, return to step one. What corrective actions might be needed to improve your business’s performance?