Social media is now regarded as a powerful channel to market and promote your business. If you use it effectively, you can build a solid personal connection with your customers. But many marketers are doing social media marketing without a defined plan, which often leads to waste of time and money. In order to harness the power of social media, you must develop a clear strategy that will define your goals, identify your customers, and determine the activities of your competitors.

Below are the top pointers you need to consider in developing a social media strategy that works.

Establish Scalable Goals

Like any plan to guide your business, it is crucial to first understand your goals. Be clear on where you want to go. What is the purpose of your social media marketing? Do you want to improve brad awareness? Do you want to increase your profit? Do you want to build customer loyalty and increase customer retention? You don’t need to target all of these goals, by you must choose one to two objectives to focus your social media marketing activities.

The classic rule of establishing SMART goals is applicable to social media marketing. Your goals must be specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time bounded. For example, if you are an online store who wants to increase sales, you may choose to attract added 1000 online leads per month. Meanwhile, if you are targeting brand awareness, you may want to increase the frequency that your brand is mentioned on social media by 30%. These objectives must be directly connected to your goals, and they must be doable.

Know Your Audience

An effective social media strategy is all about connecting to the right people with the right messages. Hence, it is crucial to know your audience. For instance, it’s nonsensical to target everyone in age group 18 to 35 years old if your products are designed for young professionals who are highly interested in gadgets.

It is ideal to create your customer personas. Develop a detailed profile of your ideal customer. Give them a name, age, income, their interests, and their motivations. If you have different target customers, develop a persona for each.

Assess the Social Media Efforts of Your Competitors

Evaluating the social media efforts of your competitors will give you a great opportunity to learn more about your customers as well as the strategies that can work. Choose your top three competitors and determine which social media platforms they have presence, and take a closer look on their content. What type of messages they are sharing? What type of cultural references they use? Are they talking mainly about their products, or are they trying to highlight something else?

Build Your Messages

Once you know more about your customers and competitors, the next step is to build your messages. This is not detailed content, but a general core messages that you think will be interesting with your customers based on the personas you have developed. Select two to three core messages, and then break them down further to make the messages more defined.

Select the Social Media Platforms to Use

It is important to select the right social media platforms for the products and services that you want to sell. For instance, Facebook is ideal for businesses who have a wider target market (B2C model), while LinkedIn is a recommended channel for the B2B model. If you are into a fashion business, Pinterest is an ideal platform.

Developing your social media marketing strategy can be a challenge. In order to save time, money, and effort, you can entrust the job to a reliable social media marketing agency.