If you want to leverage your digital marketing strategy to attract new prospects online, you need a strategic plan for how to grow interactions on social media that fits your goals.

What a Social Media Strategy Can Do For You

The top three reasons why you need a solid strategy for social media include:

• Reaching your target audiences consistently.
• Creating content that engages them again and again.
• Generating leads with your content.

A social media strategy will help you accomplish all this and more. Not only will it perform for your business, but it can be performed with just your available resources, enabling you to:

• Determine the different audiences you want to reach through social media and gain an understanding of their preferences.
• Establish social content guidelines for how and where to create and publish posts that engage your target audiences.
• Map out an editorial schedule for content as well as the responsibilities of your social media team.
• Create goals for social media that align with the overall digital marketing strategy for your business.

Start Building Your Social Media Strategy Now

We’re sharing ideas and tips for creating a social media strategy that meets your goals and helps your business stand out, too.

1. Identify Buyer Personas

One of the ways to address the specific needs of the people you’re trying to reach through social media is to define your target audience with buyer personas. Buyer personas represent your ideal customers demographically and give you clues about the challenges they face every day. With this information, you can tailor your posts to provide them with solutions.

Define up to four personas who represent most of your customers, get busy engaging them with meaningful social media messages, and watch what happens. Quickly address their questions or comments to keep engagement high and learn from the exchange.

2. Pick Only the Social Channels that Make Sense for Your Business

Start with identifying where your target audience is spending time on social media. Then, focus on those channels that will bring in the highest return on investment for your business. That’s where you should be.

For instance, research shows that 23% of marketers believe Instagram has the most potential to grow their audiences right now. But if your ideal consumers are business professionals, your best bet may be establishing a community on LinkedIn rather than Instagram.

3. Use Social Search

New research shows that people are spending more time searching on social media instead of search engines for products, services, solutions, and answers. That’s why it’s a good idea to optimize your social media profiles, pages, and posts for search. This means that when your target audience searches for your business, your social channels will appear in the results.

Here’s how HubSpot suggests you optimize social media:

• Create an easily searchable username.
• Keep that username consistent across all your social media accounts.
• Include relevant keywords and hashtags in your posts (like you would for your blogs).
• Don’t forget relevant keywords in your company profile, too.

4. Develop a Social Media Template for Guidance

Plan creative for your social media posts, develop a publishing schedule focused on engagement, and choose goals for all your campaigns. Document it all in a social media template. This way, you’ll have something that is tailored to your business, keeps your team working as a team, and helps you post content consistently.

Social Content Tip: Funny, relatable posts help your audience recognize your brand.

People love to laugh, and they say laughter is contagious. When asked what kind of social media content piques their interest:

• 68% of consumers say authentic and relatable is more important than polished and high-production value.
• 50% of consumers say funny content is the most memorable.
• 36% of consumers connect most to relatable content.

5. Create Your Own Social Media Community

People enjoy being part of something. If you create a strong community for your business on social media, you can nurture stronger connections with prospects and greater relationships with your customers. You’ll end up delivering more value to them, and that’s a powerful thing.

You’ll be leveraging a trend, too. More people are joining social media communities to connect about things they’re mutually interested in while you can work on strengthening your thought leadership and authority in your industry.

6. Measure Results and Tweak Tactics If Needed

Most platforms offer tools to help you analyze your social media efforts and set goals for key measurements. One metric to start with is tracking how much traffic social media is driving to your website or blog. You can also track audience responses to specific content and topic or keyword trends that generate the most interest.

Document average traffic, content performance, and other metrics over time and scorecard your progress. Measuring results will take time, but if you think a change in platform combinations, content creative, or messaging style would work better for your audience (based on your metrics), experiment with that. Measure change results, too – so you can adjust your strategy and get more consistent results.

11outof11 Knows Social Media

When you’re ready to grow interactions on social media with a strategic plan for results, connect with 11outof11. Request a complimentary call with an 11outof11 expert. Contact us to learn more.