It is now more evident than ever that having an effective social media strategy in place is vital for growing your business’ online presence.
According to a report by Social Media Examiner, 97% of small businesses use social media to attract new customers, however 85% of business owners aren’t sure which social media tools to use.
This increased exposure helps brands generate traffic, leads, and sales. The most popular social media platforms are Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok and Pinterest and knowing the right tools and strategies to use can make the difference between targeting the right audience or simply wasting money on your ads.
What is a Social Media Strategy and Why is it Important?
A social media strategy helps tie together your whole digital marketing strategy and helps to grow your online presence. One of the key factors in ensuring your strategy will be successful is determining your business goals, objectives and target audience.
Social media marketing can also be seen as a free marketing tool that can not only boost your online presence but can also help you connect with your target audience and generate the leads and sales you are looking for.
Essentially, a social media marketing plan contains an overview of your digital marketing goals, and how you plan to reach them. This includes a content calendar of the type of engaging content you wish to post, alongside any push for social media advertising.
Social Media Marketing: Reaching Your Audience
Customers are also more likely to trust and engage with your brand if you are consistent with your online presence. A Social Media Examiner report states that 63% of shoppers who search for businesses online are more likely to become consumers of brands with an established social media presence.
The reason for this is that social media is one way to continuously reinforce your relationship with your audience and bring across your brand messaging and personality. Alongside this, focusing on your social media presence can allow customers to view your brand as more recognizable, in comparison to your competitors and can help establish an industry-expert voice.
Furthermore, being active on social media can make your brand feel more human. Since the digital transformation the world has experienced in the last few years, corporations have been focusing on trying to engage their audience through social media marketing and are moving away from the idea of being unreachable.
By connecting with your audience, you can learn about your customers’ actual interests while gaining valuable insights about their behavior in real time, which will allow you to cater to their needs in your strategy. Analyzing insights and feedback through comments, direct messages, or simply analyzing the engagement rates on your social media posts to see which posts are generating the most traffic and shares, are great ways of accessing these learnings.
Trust and consistency can help convert your leads to sales, and increase conversions overall. For example, for every piece of content you put out, whether this is a post on your feed, a story, email, or blog post on your site linking back to your social media pages, this could be an opportunity to convert your customers.
Optimizing your Strategy
A study by Optinmonster states that 90% of all marketers say social media marketing has increased their business’ exposure and that social media has a 100% higher lead-to-close rate than outbound marketing. Over 66% of marketers spending at least 6 hours on social media per week, confirming that they have gotten more leads, as opposed to those who have not focused their efforts on social media.
Focusing on your social media strategy is another way to increase traffic to your website. By linking back to your site through your posts, highlights or even links in bios, you essentially add another pathway back to your website which helps increase inbound traffic.
You can also optimize your strategy by not only creating the most engaging content but by using influencers and targeted posts. Because of the power of social media and the influence that bloggers tend to have, this can help build your audience’s trust while also targeting more of a wider audience.
Final Thoughts
Once you establish your key business goals, digital marketing objectives, and your target audience as well as tone of voice, you can begin developing your social media strategy and content. This will help you achieve your overall goals and objectives while increasing your inbound traffic and generating more leads and sales.
About the Author: Larry Kotch is the co-founder of The Brains, an award-winning digital marketing agency in London. Ranked #3 in B2B Marketing’s Global 30 under 30, Larry leads a dedicated, remote team of talented digital marketing professionals.
The post How to Optimize Your Social Media Strategy for Ultimate Business Growth appeared first on Social Media Explorer.
