Social Media Marketing Strategy: 5 Things to Consider Before Starting

Social Media Marketing has become one of the leading ways to connect with customers and effectively drive conversions. Of course, it’s only effective if a strong strategy is put in place.

For many small brands and new businesses, entering the world of social media marketing is overwhelming. Before you put together a strategy, take a step back and evaluate these five crucial considerations.

Who’s Your Target Audience?

Perhaps the most crucial considerations are identifying and clarifying your target audience. Many brands make the mistake of casting a wide net and attempting to attract everyone. There are two overarching problems with this approach.

First, creating generalized content may not appeal to the audience member who’s most likely to buy— in other words, it won’t resonate and spark an emotional connection.

Second, while you may end up with thousands of followers, you’ll have minimal authentic engagement, which is what sells.

Instead of a broad approach, niche down and clarify the characteristics of who your product or service is truly helping. This exercise will help you create compelling content for the group that’s most likely to exchange money for your offering. Furthermore, it will ensure you’re receiving high-quality, accurate feedback about your customer behaviors.

How Will You Measure Success?

One could argue that the ultimate success in a business is making a sale. To create a social media plan, you’ll need to refine that definition a bit.

Consider what metrics matter the most as you launch your social media strategy. These metrics and goals will evolve over time, but you need a starting point to validate the efforts you’re making. Consider metrics like:

• Reach
• Engagement
• Followers
• Click-through rates
• Conversions
• ROI

Understanding your goals will help you start to shape a structured content blend, outlining some pure engagement and reach-building posts and those with direct sales content.

What Tools Will You Use?

Planning, creating, posting, and analyzing social media is a full-time job. Fortunately, several tools can help streamline, simplify, and automate the process to make the load a little lighter. Before diving into a social media strategy, identify which tools you need to succeed.

While every business’s tech stack looks different, the two foundational tools you require are an editing app and a scheduling app. Editing apps help you create high-quality images and videos to appeal to your audience. You may want a basic photo editing app to create a brand aesthetic or something more nuanced, like using a makeup and hair editor in photos (learn more here) for professional quality beauty images.

Before creating a concrete strategy, you must first identify your technical needs.

What’s Your Brand’s Voice?

A brand is about more than logos and fonts; it’s about how you communicate with your target audience. Your communication style could be light and conversational, informative and professional, or quirky and fun. What matters is that the tone you use is consistent and connects with your target audience.

Consider your brand voice and how it will translate in social media posts. Use descriptive words when identifying the voice (i.e., light, conversational, fun) and note negative words or tones that shouldn’t be used (i.e., inflammatory, cheap, controversial).

What Resources Do You Have?

Finally, identify what resources you have available before crafting your social media strategy. It’s all well and good to commit to scheduling and posting twice per day on all platforms, but that doesn’t make it realistic. Identify who’s on your team and what bandwidth they have. Consider the financial commitment of subscribing to tools or creating professional-quality TikTok videos.

Fortunately, we live in an age where even the small fish in a big pond have an opportunity to compete. Tech is commonplace, and tools are accessible— but it’s still essential to navigate this step.

When you’ve clarified the details surrounding your social media strategy, you can start to put it together. Remember that nobody is set in stone, and you can, and should, pivot if things aren’t working.