The Road to Creating a Social Media Market Strategy

    Social media continues to grow and now, it has turned into a vital part of any marketing strategy. However, you can’t just post things online and hope you get traction from it. You need a plan in order to reap the benefits social media has to offer. How do you come up with this plan? Well it can actually be broken down into 10 steps that tell you exactly what you need to do when using social media to reach your goal. 

1. First, you need to figure out what is your target audience and create personas. You won’t be successful if you just post random content. Once you know the type of audience that you want to target, you will need to figure out their different behaviors, trends, and interests. By collecting this data you will better understand your consumer and what they want to see. 

2. The second thing you should do is conduct a social media audit. This will help you to analyze information about your competition, what platforms you should use, what sets you apart from others and so much more. This may be time consuming but it is a crucial step for any successful marketing strategy.

3. The next step in the process is to figure out what your goals and objectives are. What do you want to gain from your social media platform? It could be more sales, a good reputation, stronger brand image or anything else you want to accomplish. (This is the fun part in my opinion)

4. After that, you will need to figure out what resources you have and the roles you want others to have. You may be on a smaller budget and have to take that into consideration. 

5. You are halfway there! Now you need to establish your tone of voice. This is all about the message you are trying to send to your audience. An example of this would be to post funny content to make your audience laugh.

6. It is time to select what platform/platforms you want to post on. This will entirely depend on your industry and target audience. Ask yourself what you are going to share and figure out what platform is best for you.

7. The next step is to create and optimize your social media networks. This means taking steps like adding links to your other sites, creating a bio, and adding your profile pictures.

8. Now lets create a distribution and content strategy! How many times are you going to post on each platform? What type of content goes on which platform. These are questions that will help when figuring out how you want to distribute your content.

9. Get ready, because you get to create a content calendar. This is where you will organize all your content for each platform. It will help with keeping your posts consistent and you can even schedule when you want the content to be shared.

10. Now that you have been uploading content, the last step is to analyze and tune. Look back at what you’ve been uploading and make the changes needed depending on your traction levels and comments. Overall, creating a social media marketing strategy is worth the time and effort it takes. As a marketing major, I plan to use these steps to help my future company once I graduate. What will your plan look like?