Social media marketing strategies for your business!

Social media is now a viral marketing channel for the business of all sizes as India is moving towards digitalization.  The most frequently asked question nowadays is “How can we grow our business using social media marketing?”.

Here are few steps your business must take to create an effective social media marketing strategy.

STEP 1:  Know Yourself

Before you strategize your plan you need to know your current situation. It is must to know where do you stand right now before moving ahead.To know your current business standing in the social market you must consider the following.

• Which networks are you currently active on
• Are your networks optimized (photo and cover images, bio, URL, etc.)
• Which networks are currently bringing you the most value
• How do your profiles compare to your competitors’ profiles

STEP 2: Know who your ideal customer is

You will want to get as specific as possible with this part. You should always market to the right audience.Even the best marketers will fail if they are marketing to the wrong audience. Answer the following questions to help you come up with a highly focused buyer persona:

• Age
• Location
• Job Title
• Income
• Pain Points (that your business can solve)
• Most Used Social Network

Step 3: Create A Social Media Mission Statement

Your social media mission statement will drive your future actions, so make sure you put some thought into it. To create this statement you should keep your ideal customer in mind so that the statement directly attract your customer towards your business.

Step 4: Identify Key Success Metrics

How will you determine if your social media marketing efforts are successful? I am not just talking about gaining more followers, I am talking about making money. Afterall, it is hard to rationalize spending time and money on something that isn’t improving the bottom line.So the mantra is to identify the time you spend on your site and the value you are gaining from it.

Step 5: Create and Curate Engaging Content

Mostly people jump to this step directly but as mentioned you have the follow those steps before.

The list of content ideas goes on and on, but make sure you focus only on forms of content that align with your mission statement, as well as your skill set. Content is the major element that fuels your social medias, so it is crucial that you consider creating high quality, engaging content as most important element. .

A good idea would be that you create a content calendar that outlines how often you will post to each network, which topics you will share and when you will share them.This will be effective and efficient for your business.

Step 6: Use Social Media Management Tools

One of the main benefits of a social media management tool is the ability to schedule posts ahead of time. Remember that content calendar you created? To make your plan effective you should make sure that scheduled posts in your social media management tool align with your content calendar always.

Step 7: Track, Analyze, Optimize

This may be the most important step when it comes to succeeding on social media.A great social media strategy is never set in stone. It is a constant work in progress that changes when necessary. So to fuel your business, create a strategy and start optimizing it as you continue to grow and learn more about your business and your audience.

Source:Shreya Vijhani