How To Build Your Social Media Strategy for 2022

Are you struggling to determine your social media strategy? Confused on what to do and what it’s really all about?

Well, you’re not alone, as most small business owners grapple with this same issue. Not to worry, this blog will explain to you what social media strategy really is and how to build a simple and uncomplicated social media strategy for your business without wasting time.

Globally, over 3.96 billion people use social media sites like Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Facebook, and that number is growing. So, it is very important for business owners to work hard on getting more engagement and conversions from their existing social media accounts.

Let’s get started.

Table of Contents

1.  What is Social Media Strategy?

2.  Set goals suited to your business

3.  Research your target audience

4.  Decide what you want to measure

5.  Create engaging content

6.  Post in a timely manner

7.  Analyse your results

1. What is Social Media Strategy?

 A social media strategy is your plan of all you want to do and hope to achieve by using social media to market your products/services. It serves as your guide in any action you plan to undertake and lets you know whether you’re achieving your objectives or not. The clearer you are about your plan, the more effective your results will be.

2. Set goals suited to your business

 The first step to creating your social media strategy is to define your goals and you start by asking yourself this very simple question: “What exactly do I want to achieve by using social media to market my business?” Is it brand awareness? Having another place for direct sales? Creating warmer leads? Creating a community? Positioning yourself as an industry expert?

Once you’re crystal clear about what you want from social media, then set your realistic social media goals. By setting realistic social media goals, you will be able to tackle smaller objectives that will allow you to scale your social efforts in a way that’s both reasonable and affordable.

Some social media goals include:

Increase brand awareness. Brand awareness simply means getting your name out there – helping potential clients find you. The more your target audience can identify your brand from the competitors, the greater your chances of converting them to your business as customers. Use Live Video to Boost Brand Awareness. Create topics that appeal to your target audience. You can build rapport with brand new visitors while nurturing existing leads by scheduling engaging content like educational webinars, ask me anything (AMA) events, and product demonstrations.

When you choose this goal, remember that your aim is to create an authentic and lasting brand awareness among your target audience; so, avoid solely publishing promotional messages. Instead, focus on content that emphasizes your brand personality and core values first.

Grow your brand’s audience. As your brand awareness grows, your next need may be to increase your number of followers on your social pages so you can have more people to connect with and potentially market your products and services to. This requires you finding different ways to attract new followers to your social pages and convincing people to choose your brand.

To do this effectively, you need to discover what type of conversations interest your target audience. Using free tools like Google Trends, ubersuggest or AnswerthePublic, you can search for specific keywords and phrases to see what people are talking about the most or searching for the most. Key in on these trending topics related to your industry and prepare content that will attract your audience to visit and follow your pages. Using relevant hashtags also increases your content’s reach and allows you to reach a wider audience that were not following your pages before. Jumping on trending conversations related to your niche will help you expand your reach and audience much faster.

Generate leads and sales. Another goal for your social media strategy is leads generation and actually selling your products and services on social media. This is very important as it creates a sales pipeline for you, so you don’t run out of customers and ultimately, revenue. Followers don’t buy by accident. You need to design content that will lead your followers seamlessly down the sales funnel so they can progress from leads to prospects and ultimately customers. Every single content designed when using this goal is to ultimately lead your followers to make a purchase from you. Content creation could circle around alerting your audience about new products, promos, offers or exclusive deals. Make it easy for them to take a decision by providing clear Call-To-Action (CTA) buttons so they’re clear on what you want them to do. Integrate your product catalog to your social profiles, update your links in your bio so they know where to go. For your Instagram page, since the links are not clickable within your post, you can use tools such as Linktree to create multiple links and place in your bio. Alternatively, you can create a page on your website for all the links so potential customers can access your products easily. Of course, do not forget to put multiple payment gateways on your checkout page, to encourage more conversions.

Boost community engagement. With index data showing that 46% of consumers think brands that engage their audience are best in class on social, it becomes imperative to keep your customers happy in order to gain their loyalty. Engage with your audience using different creative ways such as user-generated content, polls, etc. Simply put, user-generated content is any post, comment, or image posted by a customer that speaks positively to your product, service, or brand values. Once you find that someone gave your company a shoutout, don’t be afraid to retweet or share their post with your followers. This will make the original poster feel good, and help you build trust with new followers. You can also plan specific marketing events to generate UGC such as hosting a photo contest where visitors are invited to share photos of themselves repping your brand for a chance to win a gift card, free service, or deluxe product from your online store.

Drive traffic to your site. Social media is a very effective tool in driving traffic to your website. Aside from the very obvious SEO reasons, it makes business sense to ensure your website is as well-known as your social media pages as you have no direct control over your social media platforms and should your page be pulled down for any reason, your website, which you have direct control of, could still be used for your digital marketing initiatives such as leads generation and purchases.

To avoid complicating your social media strategy, it is advisable to start with one or two goals, perfect them and achieve your objectives there before moving on to the next goal. That way, you will be better focused to achieve measurable results, having set clear goals to pursue.

3. Research your target audience

Know your customer! To succeed in business, you must have an in-depth knowledge of your customer – understand who they are. When you understand this, you can tailor your marketing message directly for your audience. For your message to stand out and resonate with your audience, you need to go beyond merely knowing your target audience’s age and gender. You must go deeper. You need to understand their desires, their fears, hopes, wishes, and dreams. You need to move beyond the obvious and work out how your audience thinks, feels, and acts. So, how do you identify your ‘dream buyer?’

Well, if you already have customers, look at the top 20% of your customers – the top 20% that account for 80% of your revenue. Then identify the top 20% out of these top 20%; that will leave you with your top 4% - these are the customers that contribute 64% of your business revenue. Once you’ve identified your 4%, then you need to find other people exactly like them as these are the type of people that have the capacity of making you filthy rich! Learn all about them – their age, gender, location, products/services they enquired about, how they found you or what channel they came in from. What are their passions, their dreams, hopes, pains and fears, those that keep them awake at night, tossing and turning and unable to sleep?

Download a free template to build your buyer persona

If you’re a start-up and you don’t have customers yet, you can create a buyer persona, that is, your ideal customer type. You can create this by asking the same questions above. Your answers will help you create your ideal customer that you want to sell to. Use the same form above to complete this exercise and answer as many questions as you can. The more questions you can answer clearly, the clearer your target audience becomes.

Identifying your personas allow you to personalize or target your marketing for different segments of your audience and tailor your messaging according to what you know about those different personas. Buyer personas can also allow you to produce highly targeted content that leads to a higher influx of new and repeat customers who are pre-qualified by data.

Your target audience be a basis to determine the social platforms you would use for marketing that would help you achieve your goals. For instance:

• Facebook and YouTube are both prime places for ads due in part to their high-earning user bases.
• The top social networks among Millennials and Gen Z are Instagram and YouTube, signalling the strength of bold, eye-popping content that oozes with personality.
• Women vastly outnumber men on Pinterest, which is noted to boast the highest average order value for social shoppers.
• LinkedIn’s user base is well-educated, making it a hub for in-depth, industry-specific content that might be more niche than what you see on Facebook or Twitter.

However, don’t spread yourself too thin. Instead, focus on networks where your core audience is already active so you can gain traction fast.

 4. Decide what you want to measure

 Establish the metrics you want to measure in line with your goals. The most measured metrics are:

• Reach. Post reach is the number of unique users who saw your post. How much of your content actually reaches users’ feeds?
• Clicks. This is the number of clicks on your content or account. Tracking clicks per campaign is essential to understand what drives curiosity or encourages people to buy.
• Engagement. The total number of social interactions divided by the number of impressions. This sheds light on how well your audience perceives you and their willingness to interact.
• Hashtag performance. What were your most-used hashtags? How much reach did you get from the hashtags used? Which hashtags were most associated with your brand? Having these answers can help shape the focus of your content going forward.
• Organic and paid likes. These are interactions attributed to paid or organic content. Given how much harder organic engagement is to gain, many brands turn to ads. Knowing these differences can help you budget both your ad spend and the time you invest in different formats.
• Sentiment. This is the measurement of how users react to your content, brand, or hashtag. How many likes, shares or saves did your content attract? Did customers find your recent campaign offensive? What type of sentiment do people associate with your campaign hashtag? It’s always better to dig deeper and find out how people talk or feel about your brand. 

5. Create engaging content

If you’ve carefully and properly completed the above steps of determining your goals, target audience and platforms to use, determining the type of content to post should be quite easy.

Structure your content strategy around specific themes that resonate with your brand identity and be consistent with that.

Content ideas for your social media marketing may include:

• Stories and time-sensitive posts. These are very good for behind-the-scenes and covering events in a fun way.
• Short form videos – Videos continue to dominate the social space due to their high engagement. So, incorporate that into your content strategy.
• Posts that show off your human side. Showing your vulnerability to your audience drives empathy and greater engagement with your posts.
• Posts that educate, entertain and inspire.

It is also a good idea to see what your competitors are posting so you can conduct a content audit analysis to see where you lie vis-à-vis your competitors.

6. Post in a timely manner

Consistency is key when using social media to market your products/services. Schedule your posts to when you have the greatest number of your audience online. Engage with your audience, don’t just post and go. Check their posts, comment and like what they’ve posted. Remember it is a social platform so endeavour to be social by connecting and engaging with your followers and target audience. Be available to respond to your customers’ questions and mentions at the soonest so your brand can be seen as one that engages with its audience, breeding brand trust. Never leave your customers hanging.

7. Analyse your results

It is very important to analyse your data. Look at your top-performing content; adjust the content that didn’t do well. Keep tweaking and testing your strategy to fit in with what’s working. Use your data to assess whether you’re achieving your KPIs. Always keep improving on your strategy.

The above steps, if followed, will help you draw up your social media strategy that is effective and measurable.

Download a free social media strategy template that you can complete in simple steps.

Managing your social media and posting regularly can be time-consuming and unachievable for many small business owners. That is why we have designed ready-to-use social media templates for different niches. Click here to see if your industry template is there and if not, please email us at [email protected] and we’ll add your industry asap.

Oak Marketing & Brand Management provides the expertise of a full marketing team for your business without the need to hire more staff. Learn more about our services at www.oakmarketingqa.com

Tolu Olajide

Founder, Oak Marketing & Brand Management