Social media is ubiquitous, and it’s an effective marketing tool for any business. Even established businesses with loyal markets use social media to maximize marketing efforts. Creating a solid social media strategy is an integral part of any marketing plan, whether it’s for an international conglomerate or an e-comm shop run from your living room.
To make the most out of social media, it’s important to create a strategy and plan that is tailored to your market, falls within your budget, and is able to be scaled according to the rate of growth of your business.
Here are some tips to consider when creating a social media strategy as an entrepreneur.
Table of Contents
Define your Goals
What do you aim to do? What would you like to see happen? How many people do you want to steadily build up on your social media profile?
Defining specific goals not only helps clarify your thoughts, it also helps prioritize what you want to get done and will give you a framework to work with when it comes to choosing which methods you will use to achieve them. Think of it as the first building block of your social media strategy. As you progress, set specific times to evaluate your goals and adjust them according to how your business and marketing efforts are performing.
Know Your Audience
Knowing and understanding your target audience will inform your goals and social media strategy.
Who is your audience? Write down an average user profile. Are they older, younger? Men or women? Are they children? What types of goals, dreams, or challenges do they face? How is what you’re offering them going to help them?
Create Quality, Actionable Content
Content is king on social media.Though it may be tempting to flood your channels with mediocre content in order to more quickly establish a presence, fight this urge. Today’s media consumers are savvy to hard sells, and are offended by weak content. Invest in creating solid content over quantity and it will pay off.
Social media is highly visual, and because of this, at StickerYou we invest in creating a lot of visual content around stickers, labels and decals, including photos, videos and infographics. If you lack design knowledge or photography skills, consider investing in a designer or photographer to help you curate an aesthetic and provide you with product and lifestyle images that you can then schedule and share throughout the quarter, or the year. There are a number of companies that offer art design services for a reasonable price, and having a professional help you can add immeasurable value to your content.
Make your content actionable by inviting the audience to do something, whether it’s click on a link, offer an email address, or be added to an email list or share the image through the user’s own social networks. Again, depending on the medium you’re using, there are options for making the content engaging and actionable.
Engage with the Audience
Any company that just throws out random posts, shares some pictures and thoughts, or even just puts the products up in their ads is not engaging with the audience.
Engagement is crucial in a social media strategy. Social media is a two-way street, as opposed to traditional advertising which went just one way, from the advertiser to the consumer. Today’s consumers want to know that a brand is connected to them, and committed to understanding and engaging with them. They want to see that the people running the business are real individuals behind the posts, memes, and ads that they see. They want to get to know the team running the business and relate to them. Creating trusting relationships is going to go much, much further than just gathering a handful of likes.
Make sure to respond to comments online, share or like relevant content from your followers’ feeds and comment when appropriate. Don’t be afraid to slide into someone’s DMs to address a concern about your product or offer a proactive way to correct the situation. Pepper your social media feeds with more casual images of your team or behind-the-scenes shots that show the blood, sweat and tears that go into making such an incredible product as yours.
Social media today is an incredibly important tool for any company, but especially startups. It’s a great way to organically and affordably grow a customer base, and a strong strategy will only maximize these effects.
Author: StickerYou Founder & President, Andrew Witkin
As the founder of a global e-commerce leader in custom-printed, die-cut products, Andrew Witkin is widely recognized as a leading authority on e-commerce, customization, startups, marketing and the tech economy. Witkin has also served as VP North American Licensing for Nelvana/Corus Entertainment and Director of Marketing for MegaBrands/Mattel.
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