Social Media: Where Conversations Happen & Connections Are Made
According to HubSpot, there are over 2.38 billion monthly active users on Facebook, and 1 billion active monthly users on Instagram. Pinterest, Snapchat, Twitter, and LinkedIn have equally impressive numbers. And these numbers are growing. More and more individuals are taking to social media to interact with friends, share news and information, and get recommendations.
Your business needs to meet these billions of people where they already are: on social media.
That’s not to say that through social media, you’re going to reach a billion people. That shouldn’t ever be your intention...even if you believe your product or service would serve every single person around the world. Instead, your social media use should be targeted.
And the beauty of these social media platforms when it comes to marketing is the ability to reach your niche. You can use your resources wisely to reach your target demographic without breaking your budget.
But how do you begin developing social media marketing content and campaigns? Let us help.
It Starts With a Plan
If you’ve been reading our blog or perusing our website for any length of time, you know that in most every case, we’re going to tell you that you need a plan. Social media marketing is no different.
Before you begin throwing time and resources into social media marketing, identify your goals and your overall social media strategy. To do so, you have to know who you’re trying to reach--your target demographic--and how you hope to reach them.
If you start by detailing everything you know about your ideal customer, you’ll soon have a clear picture of who you are trying to reach. In other words, you’ll have created a thorough buyer persona. We’ve written an entire article about the benefits of having clearly defined buyer personas. Summarizing the main points, we know that identifying your buyer personas:
- Helps you learn how to talk to your prospective clients and customers. If you know who they are, you know where they are spending their time online (you’d hate to be throwing resources at Facebook when your target market is actually spending most of its time on Twitter, wouldn’t you?), and how they like to communicate.
- Focuses your marketing efforts, making them more successful. If you know what your people and want and how they want to receive information, you can cater your marketing efforts accordingly. You won’t waste time on projects that drain your resources with little to no return on your investment.
- Avoids confusion within your organization. Creating a clear buyer persona and ensuring that every member of your organization understands it and is working with it in mind allows you to avoid confusion within your business. If everyone is on the same page, then your external communication efforts align with your marketing strategy as a whole which aligns with your product development etc. etc. etc.
Once you clearly identify who you’re targeting and develop detailed buyer personas, you’re ready to set goals and create a plan for reaching this audience.
The bottom line for goal setting is this: SMART goals are always more likely to be met. SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. Every goal, whether for the entire organization, a single department, or even a single team within that department, should always follow this rubric for social media marketing best practices, social media campaign ideas and more.