iThe biggest problem that most small and medium-sized businesses have with social media marketing strategies is creating them in the first place. However, no social media activity will be truly useful unless it is directed toward achieving a goal. In other words, if you have no strategy, you’ll probably get a small amount of lift just from the interactions, but if you want to achieve business goals, you need a plan.
Step 1: What Are Your Goals?
Remember to start with SMART goals: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bound. Otherwise, your goals may be too loose or to nonspecific to build a strategy around or to determine whether you’ve achieved them or not.
A common goal for businesses is to connect with people so you can get more customers. Make this goal SMART by seeking to acquire five new followers a week or to get one new qualified lead per week from Facebook. Some other common goals include increasing brand awareness, driving traffic to your website, boosting brand engagement, and building a community. Each of these can be made SMART depending on your specific needs.
Step 2: Start Small
We’ve found that SMBs do best on social media when they start small and build their strategies incrementally over time. It’s always better to be a rock star on one platform than it is to have a mediocre presence across several sites. For most people, this means starting with Facebook as it’s the biggest and most universally-accessed site, but not always. For example, some industries will do exceptionally well on Instagram, especially for consumer goods relating to health and beauty, and this may make a better starting point.
Starting small will also help you get an idea of how much time and effort will be needed to see results from your strategies. Most social media marketing strategies take time to work, and progress is often slow in the beginning as you build momentum and find what works for your specific audience.
Step 3: Create Your Calendar
Knowing how often to post is frequently a major roadblock for people who are new to social media marketing strategies. Some experts suggest several posts per month; others recommend several times per day to get results! Most of us don’t have the time and resources for several posts every day and give up because they think it’s useless to continue.
We recommend starting with three posts per week and building from there. Frequency does play a role in how many people see your posts, but what’s far more important than the number of eyes you get is how consistently you post, and the quality of the content of your posts. Once you get the ball rolling, you might be ready to load up a Twitter feed with 50 posts for a week, but no need to overwhelm yourself trying to do that right out of the gate.
Keeping in mind how important consistency and quality are, another reason we recommend a 3-per-week starting point is because idea burnout is real. If you come up with a hundred great ideas in the beginning, it’s because you haven’t used any of them yet! It becomes far more challenging to think of something new to say after you’ve been at it for a while, and if you set the pace of a hundred new ideas every month, it will be unsustainable almost immediately.
Better to spread those hundred ideas out and focus on creating excellent content around those ideas instead.
Step 4: Get a Month Ahead
As tempting as it may be to put your ideas and content to work right away, there’s value in working ahead and having a bit of a buffer between when the work has to be done and when it’s meant to go live. If quality and consistency are your goals when creating content for your social media marketing strategies, then rushing and feeling pressured are going to kill that goal.
For us, we like to start with a super simple outline of 12 post ideas. They are typically built around a common theme, especially for businesses with seasonal fluctuations, but they don’t have to be. Once you’re happy with those 12 ideas, we create the actual posts and then make sure you’re satisfied with them. If we’re working a few weeks ahead, there’s plenty of time to make changes. The last step is to schedule the posts, and we use a variety of tools and information to find just the right day and time for your posts.
Another benefit of working ahead is to make sure you have time and resources to include timely posts and up-to-the-minute updates without impacting your long-term strategy. For example, if you know you’ll be hosting an event two months from now, we can work on a plan for promoting that event well ahead of time. If something comes up at the last minute, you won’t be scrambling to do promotional posts while trying not to impact your long-term goals.
Simple, Consistent, Quality
One of the best reasons for including social media in your marketing strategy is because a little bit can go a long way. And, when you’re ready, scaling up is easy once you have a solid foundation, routine, and audience large enough to justify dedicating additional resources.
If you’re ready to jump into the social sphere but don’t have the time to deliver a consistent presence of quality content, we can help! From building an audience to getting better leads, our social media marketing strategies are designed to help small and mid-sized businesses make the most of these powerful tools.
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Social Media Marketing
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social media marketing strategies