One of the changes that came up as a result of the pandemic is the drastic social media growth and presence, putting the business world to a challenge of keeping up with the trends for survival. Having millions of individuals scrolling on screens and watching media content makes it very important to develop a social media strategy. I prefer dividing the process into four steps:
Research Your Target Audience.
Doing potential research about your target audience helps you to know the right words for your business pitch, engagement, understand who you to sell to, and engage on social media. This gives you specific information of who your audience is, who are your customers, what niche tends to buy from you, and who you are trying to reach out to.
Competitor/Market research
Researching and analyzing what your competitors are doing gives you a strategy to outcompete them that is basically repurposing your strengths for marketing your brand and products. Some people may not agree with this approach but it’s a great way to know if there are no publications on a specific product to use as an opportunity and if there is a gap in the market that you could use to your own benefit.
Setting Goals.
This all starts with knowing the goals of your company to help you tailor that into social media-specific goals. These then guide you in knowing which tracking tools like google analytics to use in providing you with the metrics that can be measurable.
You as well always need to consider the SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable/Assignable, Realistic, and Time-Related) acronym while creating your goals. The first use of this term in management context was in November 1981 by Dr. George Doran, you can check out his point of view on a YouTube video. To break it down:
Specific:
Specificity in setting goals matters a lot as it encourages motivation in achieving goals. A few questions to ponder about while creating clear goals are:
- What are we trying to accomplish as a company?
- What resources do we have?
- Who is in charge of this goal? And
- Why this goal?
Measurable:
This helps you to track your progress in achieving your goals that are to say the increase in the buying rate, customers clicks, and so on.
Achievable:
It is important to consider realistic and achievable but not too easy goals to avoid demotivation. The questions to ponder about in this section are:
- Do we have the capacity to achieve this goal?
- Do we have the right resources to achieve this goal?
- What constraints do we have at hand?
Assignable:
Dr. George Doran addresses this as assignable unlike achievable in the above YouTube video. This means assigning a specific goal to one person rather than two or more makes it easy to achieve a goal rather than having people debate on who is responsible.
Relevance:
It’s vital that your goals align with your company’s mission, vision and values to avoid contradictions that may affect your general strategy as a company.
Time Related:
Knowing the time period needed to achieve your goals helps in setting a strong strategy and knowing the right resources to use.
Develop the infrastructure.
This involves setting up a scheduling tool and standard operating procedure if you don’t have any. This helps in saving time for everything by knowing which content is needed and when it is posted online. The SOPs do a good job at helping out new employees to know what you do as a company, when you do it, how the content calendars get approved, what to do in case of any customer service issue, and the vital contacts in case of technicalities.
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