Social media marketing can be a highly effective way to attract prospects and retain customers for your local business.
With this in mind, implementing a social media strategy that achieves meaningful results requires streamlining your efforts and posting content consistently.
Yet, this can prove difficult, especially when you're new to these platforms.
Nonetheless, in this post, you'll learn the essential steps to create a social media strategy that helps ensure your target audience can discover and engage with your local business.
Let's begin!
Define Your Goals
You must define your goals when launching an effective social media strategy.
What do you want to achieve from your accounts on social media channels?
Do you want to attract more visitors to your website?
Are you looking to build brand awareness?
In reality, you likely have several goals you want to accomplish.
Hence, write them down and ensure they are specific, measurable, and achievable.
Choose the Best Platforms for Your Local Business
You can opt to create accounts on numerous social media platforms.
Nonetheless, you should initially focus on just one or two.
Then, you will better understand what content works and what doesn't after seeing how your audience reacts.
Equally important, you want to save time and effort by marketing on platforms that make sense for your business.
Identify Your Audience
An effective social media strategy requires researching your target market.
Hence, you should construct personas of your ideal customers before producing content.
Analyze Your Competition
Studying your competition will show you what works well on social media and what mistakes to avoid.
Considering this, set aside time to review your competitors' posts, pages, and ad creatives.
Ultimately, looking for ways to outperform your competitors' social media strategy will benefit your business.
Choose Which Type of Posts to Create
You should carefully consider what types of social media posts to share.
Does a post series or a giveaway make sense?
To emphasize, plan your posts, production, and frequency with your marketing goals in mind.
Again, studying your competitors can offer inspiration.
Nevertheless, copying or stealing their ideas can land you in trouble.
So, be sure that your content is original.
Create Social Media Posts in Advance
As stated earlier, success on social media requires that you post consistently.
Ideally, you'll want to post daily.
Be that as it may, finding the time to create quality content and posts can prove challenging.
Thus, creating and scheduling posts in bulk and then employing software to publish them automatically can simplify the process and save time and effort.
Keep Track of Metrics
A proper social media strategy enables you to track essential metrics like post engagement and website traffic from your social media platform accounts.
Above all, proper tracking shows you what's working and what you need to change.
Notably, the more metrics you analyze, the easier it is to identify the posts that yield positive results and increase your bottom line.
In Conclusion
As shown above, creating a social media strategy for your local business doesn't have to be complicated.
Accordingly, formulating a clear, concise, and well-researched strategy can mark the difference between success and failure.
However, it is essential to remember that seeing results from social media takes time and patience.
But results will eventually come.
So, invest the time now, and you'll be one step closer to achieving the growth you desire for your local business.
Hope this helps,
Erik
We implement creative, results-based digital and hybrid marketing strategies for local business clients.
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