2018 Mid-Year Social Media Strategies to Grow Your Business

2018 is in full swing, it’s June, although you’d never know it with the weather the way it is. However, I digress.  If you don’t have a handle yet on how you’re going to craft the rest of your year from a strategic perspective or have a calendar in place yet, it might be time to start to get savvy about your social media plan or strategy. Indeed, just a few years ago, your social media presence and throwing a few posts up was just enough to beat competition – right? Well, not anymore.

As the techniques used to reach out to prospects are evolving at a breakneck pace, so should your social media strategy. Like having a website and a “build it and they will come” mentality, the mere existence or social media presence is no longer enough for your brand in 2018. You must invest fully into well-defined social media strategies and engage properly with prospective clients to avoid losing real customers in the long run.

What is a Social Media Strategy?

A social media strategy is a process that defines how your brand will leverage social media to achieve its set goals – and some more. Social media provides a platform for you to engage your audience, participate in activities that help you reach your goals, and measure these activities regularly to ensure they are well placed for your set goal.

What do you hope to achieve for your brand? What are the social media strategies you can leverage to grow your business in 2018? Here is the top 5 strategy checklist.

Create Strategies that solves your challenges

You must not take on every social media platform simply because you can. Set goals – attainable targets, as this will help you stick to a plan and continue to take on new challenges as you strive to scale through old hurdles. Do not set too many goals as this can over complicate the strategy and affect your objectives negatively. Most importantly, document your goals and efforts. This does not only tell you where you are, but helps to improve your chances of achieving your objectives.

With the huge potential social media promises for any brand, setting specific objective may seem difficult. Some of the specific social media goals you may consider include:

• Increasing brand awareness by providing only valuable content through your social media platform – with focus on having a strong online presence.
• Achieving higher sales quality by targeting prospects more efficiently and directly on social media.
• Creating a loyal customer base: Although this may take some time, providing meaningful content over time will help build a loyal customer base.
• Improved Return on Investment: This is the ultimate goal of any business. You can achieve this by ensuring you thoroughly audit your cost of advertisements, labor, and strategy. Social media can help you to be more specific with reaching your audience – and it is very cost-effective too.

Understand the need of your prospect

About 79% of adults today are on Facebook. This represents a large pool you can leverage – but, are you engaging with your prospective customers there? Understanding your target audience and their needs on social media will help you learn things such as the products they purchase, the service they need, and the income level of your return customers.

To achieve this, it is important to check out the demographics of your social media platforms. This is why you need to only work with platforms that correlate with your brand’s objectives. Although the demographics provide an insight into the activities of each social media channel, further analysis is needed before you can truly know customer activities on your channels.

Most brands work with some sort of social media dashboard that provides an insight into who is following you, their need, and how they interact on your channel.

‘Investigate’ your Competition

Before you start providing valuable content for your audience, it will be ideal to research your competitive landscape on social media. This will help you analyze the strategies and ideas utilized by your competitors – and learn from their failures and successes. But the first step towards achieving this is finding out who your competitors are in the first place. A simple Google search – using niche-specific keywords and phrases – will help you find your competitors and investigate them.

Provide Engaging Social Media Content

Social media signals are great – but content is king. Although social signals – the links you share on Facebook, twitter, instagram, and pinterest can help improve your brand exposure, they do little to help you rank tops on Google. Content is very important for your social media marketing strategy. However, you must provide content that blends with the identity of your brand. It is also important to strike a balance between promotional content and target content. How can you leverage your social media channels to provide relevant and engaging content?

• Videos: Approximately 37% of social media users watch online videos end to end. This figure is compelling enough to move you to invest in video content as a part of your social media strategy. Videos play a big role in influencing purchasing decision – reaching users through channels such as Facebook Live, Instagram stories, and other real time media will engage them and compel them to take action.
• Content Themes: Although providing visual content on a regular basis may be a challenge for brand owners, the results are amazing. Instagram is a premier social media channel that allows you provide visual themes to keep your audience engaged.

Measure your Performance

How well did you perform? How effective was your social media strategy? Tracking your social media efforts will help you put things into perspective. Examine your most important objectives and preferences – and weigh them against your efforts. With a well-defined social media strategy structured to create and maintain lasting relationships, there will be little room for failure.

As strive to grow your business year after year, you will continue to find updates and changes in the social media marketing trends. In order to avoid wasting time and resources on efforts that do not work, you must stay updated with the latest trends and strategies that are effective at a particular time. There are over a hundred social media channels – pick a few that will help you grow. Strive to improve every year.

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