Social media is a great tool for reaching out to and connecting with potential customers. What more, even a startup company can jump in. But jumping in without a plan is not a good idea. You need to have the right social media marketing strategy to succeed in the effort. Here is how you should develop your own.
Why Your Startup Company Needs A Social Media Marketing Strategy
While it might seem obvious, knowing the importance of having a social media marketing strategy before creating yours is still a good idea. This gives you a better appreciation of the results and helps you decide how you are going to do your social media engagements.
Developing A Strong Organic Presence
People are more likely to engage a brand on social media if they feel that it is organic and not overly trying to promote itself. With a well-thought-out strategy, your startup company can build that organic presence more successfully. In particular, you will be able to post more consistently to keep your audience engaged.
Create Better Content
One challenge that many brands new to social marketing face is deciding what to post on their pages. By having a detailed strategy, you get over that challenge and better plan your content repertoire. Not only will you be able to develop the right content to meet your needs, but you can also be more creative in engaging followers.
Saves You Time
By laying out everything together before you even start your social media campaigns, you lessen the time trying to figure out what to do next. Instead, you can focus more on developing your social media presence. This also gives you more opportunities to connect with and engage your audience.
Better Chance To Reach Marketing Goals
Ultimately, you are on social media to market your brand. With the right strategy, you get to better define the goals you want to reach. This also helps you better see how your work here ties back to the overall business goals you have.
What Makes A Good Social Media Marketing Strategy For Your Startup Company
Social media marketing strategies come in different forms, depending on the needs of your brand. But they all have several key elements that will ensure their success. By leveraging these elements, you can develop a strategy that better establishes your startup company’s presence on the different platforms.
Social Media Audits
The first important thing you need before building your social media marketing strategy is to have a clear idea of your current social media presence. To do that, conduct a social media audit.
Start your audit by gathering information about your past performances. Organize all of these in a spreadsheet. You can also set aside a separate sheet to keep track of your competitors for comparison later.
Once you have all the information, review how you have set up your social media profiles. Take note of the way your pages present this information. Tweak this as needed to better convey your brand’s image through them.
Beyond the basic information, you would also want to take a closer look at how you use the different social channels. Review your top-performing posts and determine what made them work. Compare this with competitors’ posts to have a good idea of what works and what you can improve later.
A Set Of Clear Goals
Goal setting is an integral part of marketing as a whole. Thus, you should be able to define your exact goals on social media in the context of your larger marketing goals. For instance, if your larger goal is to increase sales, decide on what goals your social media marketing efforts should aim for to reach those.
The Right Platforms For Your Startup Company
While there are multiple social media platforms, trying to get into all of them in one go can be an inefficient move. Remember that, while a social media platform might be popular, it is not always going to be the best fit for your business. Instead, focus on the ones that will best suit your targets.
The first criteria to consider here is where your target audiences are found. Note that they might be using several channels but they are not present in each equally. You would want to go for channels that they most commonly engage. This will help you better target your social media content.
Consistent Social Media Content
Consistency is crucial for your startup company’s social media presence. Your audience would want to hear often from you for them to be more engaged. To achieve that, you need to build both a content bank and a content calendar.
Your schedule should support not just your social media goals but also your offline marketing strategies. The 80/20 rule is a useful guide for building your content schedule. This means that 80% of your posts should focus on adding value to your audience. Meanwhile, the 20% is for pushing your links or other calls to action.
The other thing that you need to have for consistent posting is a content bank., As the name says, this is the collection of content to be posted on your pages. To have a more organized start in building your content bank, itemize the different brand aspects you want to show the audience. This will help you decide what kind of content to create.
Once you have your content bank, create a system to determine which pieces should be for posting at a given time. Keep track of the ones that have already been used as well. Don’t forget to bank the messaging that you will be using for campaigns. Remember that you can build the bank small or large depending on the period you want to cover and your availability.
Make Your Startup Company Popular On Social Media
Once you have completed your startup company’s social media strategy, don’t think of it as a one-time process. Be ready to adapt it continuously to your audience’s changing preferences. That will help you more effectively capture their interest and engage them with every post.