Social media and digital marketing can be the most rewarding endeavor for any business, but it can be overwhelming. Today, it is paramount for any brand or business to use social media as a tool. We have learned that by focusing and tracking to critical elements of our purpose, we stay on target and on message.

Please, use this questionnaire like a north star and let it guide the strategy.

Our goal is to align our business goals with the social media strategy. Like a car with a pulling steering wheel, if the social media strategy is not aligned, we will veer off course and ultimately waste time and money.

As we do with all of our clients, we begin with the WHY! So why do we start with WHY? It gives more purpose and meaning to the events of our day.

Why are we in business? Why do we show up at work every day? Why are we reading this blog post?

C2C’s goal is to help business remember or find the “WHY” and incorporate that into their brand and messaging. We know that consumers emotionally connect with brands that understand their why and deliver on the brand promise. We love teaching this to our clients.

So here we go:

Here are our six keys to building an effective social media strategy:

1. What are our goals?

This question is important to answer and will provide us guidelines for our social media posts. (FYI, more sales is not a useful goal – the customer doesn’t care about that).

Use SMART goals:

• Specific – Make our targets clear and accurate so there is no confusion on what the result should be.
• Measurable – Make our goals measurable, so we know if our efforts are working.
• Actionable – We’ll want to set up steps to reach our goal.
• Realistic – Set goals that make sense for our brand. Do we have 100 Instagram followers? Shoot for 200 in 30 days.
• Time-bound – It’s essential to set timelines. Fill out an excel spreadsheet for all applicable platforms: Facebook, Twitter, etc. and set goals for those pages.

2. Who is our target audience?

The second key component to creating a social media strategy in knowing who appreciates our service or product,

Learn the demographics, and psychographics, including which competitors they follow, what publications and websites they’re into, etc. Seriously, follow our competitors and pay attention to what their followers interact.

The more we know about our audience is, the easier it will be to create content that bridges the gap between our brand/business and adding value to their lives.

3. What is the current state of our social media marketing?

Auditing where our current social media marketing strategy and presence stands is another crucial step in creating our social media strategy. Do we have Facebook, are we on Twitter? Have we updated our LinkedIn lately? Take a temperature check on all platforms and be honest with ourselves.

Pay attention to our engagement, what networks we’d like to be on (or drop), the quality of our content (images and videos), are we consistent?

Our audience should dictate which platforms we use. If we have little interest in Snapchat, but our target audience is active there, that’s where we need to go.

4. What kind of content will we need to produce?

Content, Content, Content. We are experts in our field, right? Then we should share what we know. Give, give, give, give and when we consider putting up the “ask” (“buy my stuff”) then give more. People can see right through a sales pitch and could care less that we need to drive revenue. Consumers will give back if we give first.

Content should be as genuine as possible and give people a reason to follow us. Like this blog, I am providing my time and expertise, for free. We hope that people reading this will grow from the knowledge, do better business, and find success.

5. Do we have the necessary resources and budget?

It is not as expensive if there is time to dedicate. What is our time is worth and do we have resources or the budget needed to create the content necessary?

No! We can’t hire an intern to do this for us at $15.00 per hour; it won’t work (see #4). We must curate content or work with someone that can.

Which leads to the next question…

6. What tools will we need?

Here’s where we can revisit our resources and budget since there are a lot of free or low-cost tools that can help us create the content we need.

A lot of the social media networks have built-in tools (Like Facebook Live and Instagram Stories) that make content creation easier. Many of us are scared to create authentic content and we shouldn’t.

 

Just start and learn along the way. If you need coaching or help call us or find a social media coach.

Find out more here: https://2completion.com
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2018 – Protect Your Brand, Project Your Brand