One of the many “marketing monsters” we often hear about from our small businesses is strategy. When you run a small business, you wear more than one hat: you’re often boss, janitor, and everything else that needs to be done, so creating a detailed social media strategy gets pushed off to the side. We know small businesses don’t have the time or budgets to design elaborate social media strategies, so we’ve streamlined the process to give you a simple, straightforward template to creating a social media strategy for your brand.
Why does having a strategy matter?
A social media strategy is like a map – it gets you where you want to go with as few wrong turns as possible. Building your brand’s strategy can be a lot simpler than you think! A strategy identifies your goals and summarizes how you’re going to achieve them, helping your social media become more effective in reaching your business’s goals. Your goals and strategy streamline the rest of your social media planning. It becomes easier to identify and plan the kind of content you want running on your page when you know what you want it to achieve.
How do you create a social media strategy?
The Why: Set the Goals
First, look at your brand, what do you want to achieve? What are your business’s biggest goals, and how can social media help achieve them? A few examples of goals that are often part of social media strategies are brand awareness, product sales, and customer engagement. There are tons of goal setting methods out there, if you have one you love, use it! If not, we’re big fans of SMART Goals for their simple, thorough approach. SMART Goals ensure that you have a clear, well-defined, measurable goal that’s connected to your business’s larger plans.
Learn more about how to use SMART Goals here. And see our template below.
The How: The Plan
Now that you’ve set your goal (or goals), identify how you’re going to reach them. If you used the SMART Goal method, you’ve already worked this out and are a step ahead of the game. If your brand wants to increase their engagement with customers, how are you going to open doors for them to communicate with you? How are you going to demonstrate your listening? A possible solution would be to focus on creating posts that ask customers questions and for their feedback on products and services. If this is your goal, you’d want to focus on creating content that opens doors for communication and engagement, while limiting content and platforms that aren’t known for engagement and response.
Once you have outlined your goals and have a strategy in place, you’re ready to start developing content. Don’t fear, that’s easier than you think too! Next week, we’ll make sure content creation isn’t a marketing monster for your business.
If all of this still seems like too much, give us a call, we’d be happy to walk your business through creating a social media strategy that tells your story and grows your business. (936) 637-7593
