It is important for every business that wants to be on the lead to actively follow trends in marketing and apply them in a way that suits their market share and target audience.

In this time and age, social media marketing is a trend that has not only come to stay but is evolving really fast. Instead of going to search engines, a growing number of internet users prefer to make queries on social networks such as Facebook. Thus, it is expedient that every brand has an active online presence. But the truth is, there’s more to social media marketing than setting up accounts and putting up posts or tweets. For a business to thrive on social media, you need a good plan; without which your social media marketing efforts can be a waste of time – or worse still, a recipe for disaster.

Planning isn’t an easy task. In fact, it can be the most difficult (and yet most important) aspect of your social media efforts. But productive brainstorming on the points below would ease up the process and help you create great marketing strategies.

1)    Know your goals

Due to the versatile and variant nature of social media networks, it is important to first and foremost, establish your goals and objectives so as not to get carried away. Your goals are crucial in determining which platforms you will sign up to and target, how frequently you will post on them, what you will post on them, what resources you will need, how many staffs would you need to allocate to the activities, and of cause, the metrics and KPIs you will use to access your performance. Knowing your objectives also allows you to quickly re-evaluate and make changes when your social media marketing campaigns are not meeting your expectations.

In setting your goals, you must ensure that it aligns with your broader marketing strategy.  This way, you can ensure the efforts you put on social media works in line to achieve your overall business objectives. Your goals shouldn’t just be about the retweets, reposts, shares, and likes but more of the leads and conversions generated. Such as website traffic generated, newsletter signups, eBooks download, orders placed etc.

2)    Know Your Target Audience

It is essential to know your target audience and market share before you do any form of marketing online or offline. Why? because they have a direct impact on your content and strategies, which need to be tailored to fit them. You need to ensure that your value proposition is relevant to your target audience, to do this; you must know what kind of people you looking to serve; how these people think and act; what attracts them and what their needs are. Factors that can help you identify your audience, includes their interests, age, gender, income, and area of residence. These demographics are especially important when advertising on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

Read our next post, where we addressed the other three questions you need to know before setting up on social media.

Written By:

Peace Itimi