Social media platforms are ideal for connecting with your audience, increasing brand awareness, and driving sales. However, it would help if you had a social media strategy to achieve your goals for your business. A plan helps you know your audience and helps you create relevant content that aligns with your business goals.
According to statistics, there are more than 5 billion social media users, which is an estimated 62% of the world’s population.
- The average time spent is 2 hours and 20 seconds daily on social media.
- On average, people use 6.7 platforms every month.
Here is a step-by-step social media strategy to boost your brand awareness.
What is Social Media Strategy?
A social media strategy is a comprehensive plan that includes goals, tactics, and metrics to achieve the best performance. The best approach can help you increase brand awareness and engagement and drive sales.
Types of Social Media Strategy
Social media platforms are versatile in 2024, so there are numerous strategies you can use to achieve your business goals.
Viral Strategies
You can create viral strategies by knowing the trends to explore your reach and engagement to increase brand awareness.
Nurturing Strategies
It helps you create deeper customer connections by sharing engaging content like behind-the-scenes.
Trust-building Strategies
You can create these strategies by sharing your reviews and user-generated content that increases credibility.
Influencer Marketing Strategies
You can partner with relevant people in your industry to increase the credibility of your product and brand.
Launch Campaigns
You can create a launch campaign by creating your latest product line to boost your brand.
Steps to Build Social Media Strategy to Drive Brand Awareness
Now that you know the basics of a social media strategy, let’s dive into the steps to build a social media strategy. Here is a step-by-step guide to making a successful strategy.
Set Goals for Your Business
The first step is to understand and set your social media goals. Think about your business requirements and the results you want to achieve. You may have long-term and short-term goals for your business. After setting your goals, define key performance indicators (KPIs) for the most important social media metrics. Each channel has different metrics, so you need to know about all channels to be successful on social media.
- Facebook: Reach, Engagement, and Impressions
- Instagram: Interactions, Profile Visits, and Stories Discovery
In addition, you can go beyond it to know about the growth rate, amplification rate, and virality rate.
Know Your Target Audience
Knowing and researching your target audience is important to creating a successful social media marketing strategy. You can build content with your target audience by following these steps.
Research your Target Audience
You must look for demographics, psychographics, and other patterns to narrow your target audience. With this strategy, you can develop a tone for your brand. You can learn about your target audience by following these methods.
- Run a Survey: You can collect quantitative data about your target audience, including their location, job rate, age, core interests, challenges, and goals.
- Conduct Interviews: You can speak to customers to collect qualitative data to know about their goals, pain points, challenges, and values.
- Research the Competition: Identify your competitors, their characteristics, the content that they follow and engage in, and other related information.
- Study Analytics: You can get information about analytics from the built-in insights of the social media platform.
Create Customer Persona
After researching your target audience, you can make customer personas. A persona includes information like demographic information, location, and age. In addition, it has psychographic data, including buying concerns, interests, and motivation to buy. This information can help you create a picture of your audience and customize content accordingly. For instance:
- Interests: What are their hobbies, interests, and passions?
- Location: Where does your ideal customer live? Like their country, state, and region.
- Gender: What is their gender? Its importance depends on your brand.
- Age: What is the age range you want to target?
- Buying Concerns: Will they choose to buy your products? Are they concerned about the quality?
- Pain points: What are their pain points, challenges, and goals?
- Income Level: What is their income level? Should they spend more money buying premium products or not?
Choose Your Social Platforms
The most important step is to choose the best channel for your business. Many businesses need to be more active on all channels. For instance, Facebook is the biggest social platform to engage with prospects and customers. This platform is suitable for many content types. Its Live feature allows you to connect with your customers through video.
Conduct Competitive Analysis
Competitive analysis helps you know about your competitors’ activity on social media. Also, you can know where your brand sits in the market.
Step-by-Step Guide to Conduct Competitor's Analysis
Identify the Top 5 Competitors
Your competitors are the brands selling the same product or service as you. They have the same audience and space in the market.
Use Social Media Listening
You can use this feature to know about your competitors’ activity on social media.
Research Social Media Platforms
Know about the social media platforms they use and how they use them. For instance, they share reels and stories on Instagram.
Identify Their Top Posts
Know their top posts and what content the posts have. It will inspire your content.
Conduct a Social Media Audit
Once you audit your existing social media content, you can identify what works best for your brand. It will give you a detailed insight into the type of content formats your audience loves. In addition, you will know about the best time to post when your audience is live.
Plan Your Content
The next step is to plan your content strategy. There are different types of content with unique purposes.
- Most people prefer short-form video content to long-form content.
- Brand building takes time and requires financial investment, resulting in long-term sales growth.
- Create creative content to increase profitability.
- Make sure to post fewer messages so that they can be memorable.
- Make your brand assets strong, including slogans, color schemes, logos, characters, and fonts that can help you build an emotional connection.
- Emotions are helpful in brand building, so associate emotions with brands for long-lasting impact.
Set up Your Social Media Profiles
Setting up your profiles is another important step. Create a profile that gives a cohesive look and includes all relevant information about your brand.
- You can follow these steps to create your profiles.
- Fill all profile fields with the required information.
- Use keywords to help users find you.
- Focus on branding and use high-quality pictures.
Develop Content Strategy
Create a plan for the content type you want to create and share that content on social media platforms. However, the content may differ based on the audience’s requirements. Make sure to create content based on your customer personas.
Manage and Engage Your Community
Social media platforms allow you to build connections that help build communities. You can create engagement and drive brand awareness through communities. However, it takes time to make a community and engage with them. Most importantly, you need to be responsive to engage on social media.
Use the Right Social Media Tools
It takes work to create content for multiple social media channels. So, you can use social media tools to create ease for you. These tools help you schedule content in advance, create graphics, analyze comments, and tell you about engagement metrics.
You can use the following tools to create the best social media strategy.
- Scheduling Tools
- Hootsuite
You can design, schedule, and publish content on multiple social media channels with Hootsuite. It helps you distribute your content to multiple channels at a time. In addition, you can know about the best time to post your content.
Summary
The above-detailed guide for creating a social media strategy to drive brand awareness helps develop your social media strategy. Creating a social media strategy will help you identify goals, and you will be able to measure the progress of your business.
