Last Updated 3 months by Emily Standley-Allard
As a small business it gets exhaustive keeping up with and building extensive, detailed social media marketing strategies that take a huge amount of time. Here’s how you can build a successful social media strategy in 2023 for your own business with higher ROI in four simple steps!
Does this sound familiar?
When you or your agency brings on a new client, do you plan a meeting, sit down, and present a massive social strategy presentation, with 75 power point slides displaying every insight and minute detail?
Do you really think your clients really read all of it?
Top executives just want to get to the bottom line and view the content. See if it works for them and their brand.
That’s why there’s really no need to be spending 60 or more hours building a successful social media strategy plan that no one really pays attention to!
Growing a successful social media strategy should be fun, engaging, attractive, and most of all simple.
How you communicate your social strategy to a business should also be seamless and simple.
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- What do you want to accomplish on social media?
- Who are the people you’re trying to reach?
- How will you measure success?
- And what resources do you have to reach your goals?
Let’s take a look at each.
Think goals are obvious? Think again.
There are many types of goals, large and small and they need to be prioritized.
Goals on social media need to be tailored to your audience, fit your brand, match your voice or else you’ll miss your mark completely.
As a social manager you’ll want to show these goals and the path that led you to the success of meeting them.
The “SMART” acronym is a popular and perfect way to start.
SMART stands for:
- Specific: Are you targeting brand awareness? Conversions? Followers?
- Measurable: If you can’t measure it, it’s not specific enough.
- Achievable: You’re not getting to a million followers overnight. Be realistic.
- Relevant: Your social goals must tie into to your business goals.
- Time-sensitive: Know when you’re checking in on your goals. Monthly? Quarterly? Annually?
Frameworks can have a bad rep but are a necessary fundamental approach that helps build your social media foundation.
Keep them top of mind!
For a detailed post on how to create an epic social media marketing strategy for your business read below!
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Who are the people you’re trying to reach?
Knowing your target audience is a MUST for marketing in any venue.
It needs to be known inside and out from when your audience logs in, to what type of bagels they enjoy, leisure activities, sites they frequent most and more.
Building a buyer persona is massively important.
Throwing ideas out there and hoping to attract the right person is like throwing a generic profile on a dating site with a blurry toothpaste-stained photo, and no bio. It’s a no go.
You can’t go for mass appeal when your brand is trying to target in on an exclusive niche market.
When working on a successful social media strategy for a business focus your content on current owners.
Reach out to them, find out what they like and don’t like about your products or services. What could be improved?
Existing owners are much more likely to help build your engagement than someone just dropping in on your page by happenstance.
Find out what their major interests are and grow upon that.
As far as posting don’t forget the rule of 80/20. Post 80% posts of interesting, fun stuff, storytelling and 20% of more brand driven material.
Successful Social Media Strategies
If you’re a social media freelancer and working for multiple companies in various niches, it’s a bit trickier as you must build your knowledge and research skills on many levels.
Fortunately, Google, ChatGPT and AI software like WriteSonic is super helpful with that.
Focus on the top content creation skills you already have.
If you’re mainly a writer use your copywriting skills to engage with quirky or unique copy.
Are you a rockstar with design? Grab them with eye catching graphic design or video content.
If you enjoy being in front of the camera you can create short skits for TikTok. This doesn’t require a lot of expensive equipment, but it does require some ingenuity and panache.
Again, always be thinking about the audience you want to attract for the particular brand.
Creator Economy Survey – Making Sense out of Social Partnerships
Professional tip! If you’re spending more time creating than you’re receiving engagement, likes, shares and follows something’s amiss.
Rethink your successful social media strategy, your platform and reassess.
When working with a larger team use the talents of the team based on what they are good at individually.
Don’t assign Peter the graphic designer to write Ogilvy copy to attract the masses. He’ll be miserable and it won’t get you the results you need.
Fortunately, there’s a great deal of high-quality social media software out there to help you out. This not only helps with scheduling, headline writing tips, posting, keeping track of, measuring, and managing all your content to multiple platforms, but also with curation of posts, ideas and more.
How will you measure your success?
There are endless ways to measure success on social media to track how your posts are resonating with your audience.
Depending on what your company wants to accomplish; likes, follows, conversions, sharing, this can be tracked within each social network itself or through an excellent social media software like Sprout Social, Crowdfire which is highly affordable, or another.
Keep the SMART goals in mind.
Most companies are of course interested ultimately in conversions.
To get there though you need to start at the top of the funnel which is, you guessed it – interest and engagement.
Sprout Social has a fantastic list of analytics and measurement options to see how well your content is working and has an amazing list of great metrics to monitor your posts to choose from.
I highly recommend you try them. Sprout Social is free for 30 days.
What resources do you have to reach your goals?
Launching a successful social media campaign doesn’t have to be expensive.
There’s high quality software that fits various budgets big and small that do a host of incredible things that will save tons of time, energy and effort. You can schedule social posts up to a year in advance if need be.
Depending on the number of clients you have you could outsource the work to various freelancers online or in house.
What gets expensive is advertising on the social platforms. Obviously, that depends upon the client’s budget.
In terms of advertising on social, my website discusses the cost of Facebook/Meta ads.
Platforms like Meta, Instagram, TikTok and others all have a host of educational resources and help you build trending ad campaigns within your budget that are highly helpful to marketers, businesses, and individuals.
After all, that’s how they make their money!
I recommend educating yourself (if you’re a solo social manager) or hiring someone who is familiar with managing social media advertising as the metrics and monitoring of that is more complex than running a simple social media campaign.
Grab Sprout Social’s Social Media Calendar
Keep in mind – successful social media strategies are not one size fits all. What works for a dental company will not work for an ecommerce business.
They all must be custom designed for each and every brand, business and company.
They also can’t or rather should not be duplicated for each platform as each social network is different and caters to a unique demographic.
Try not to be impatient. If you don’t see results in a month that’s to be expected.
It takes time, consistency, patience, and trust for people to reach out online.
Authenticity is a word that’s thrown out there often nowadays, but it is imperative.
Conclusion
The more transparent, knowledgeable, educational, fun, and interactive your social media strategy is the more people will want to interact with you, remember you, and eventually be curious enough to visit your website or perhaps even make a purchase directly from your social platform.
For more awesome tips on how to grow your business and presence online reach out to me or visit me on social!
