For social media marketing to be effective, time must be taken to understand each individual business, it’s approach, it’s goals and limits.
Every client is bespoke and therefore the strategy and subsequent content must be tailored specifically to the needs of the client’s business.
Here at The Social Desk, no client is taken for granted and each client is regarded in the highest regard. We pride ourselves on taking the time to listen; understanding the clients’ brand and in turn understanding our role as a digital marketing agency. We work closely with several our clients, including Thornton Legal, to manage their social media accounts. Each client account is approached individually to tailor to each specific clients individual requirements for their brand.
Developing the right social media strategy
For social media marketing to be effective, it is essential to plan a social media marketing strategy. Key areas to consider when formulating a strategy:
- Who is your target audience?
Aside from the obvious customer segmentation metrics, such as gender, age, interests etc, it is important to establish your target audience so that you can measure your social media ROI against specific metrics.
When considering who your target audience is, it is important to remember your current clients and their importance within your social media marketing strategy, as well as prospective clients you wish to target.
You should aim to be informative to current clients, keeping them updated on what your business is doing and encouraging them to engage with the business and become ambassadors for your brand, sharing and engaging with content. Your current clients are often an essential element in making your social media marketing a success!
For prospective clients, content needs to be a little more nurturing. Here you want to raise awareness of your brand, informing prospective clients of your services but also allowing them to see the benefits of how your services will work for them and making it easy for them to get in touch for more information.
- What platforms are most appropriate to your target audience?
Your target audience may not be on every social media platform. It is essential to research which platforms they are on, which platforms they are most active on and which platforms will generate the most engagement for your brand.
You want to generate engagement with your target audience therefore researching which types of posts generate the most engagement, on which days and at what times; are an essential element when planning your strategy. These vary across all platforms; therefore, it is essential to tailor your content strategy accordingly across each different platform.
- What content are you going to share?
Content will become the driving force of your social media activity and therefore should be at the core of your social media marketing strategy. Knowing what content you plan to deliver and what actions you want your target audience to take, is critical to the success of each social media marketing activity.
Social media content can be output in varying ways across many platforms. Some of the most popular outputs are as general posts across platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn, as stories on Facebook or Instagram and as specifically targeted Facebook Ads. It is essential for any content you output to be consistent with your brand colours, fonts and messaging to ensure uniformity across the materials you’re outputting for your brand.
- When are you going to share your content?
One of the common pitfalls in social media marketing activity is posting at the wrong times! Many people put out fantastic content but don’t factor the times that they are posting it into their social media marketing strategy. In order to maximise the results you get from your social media efforts, you must do proper research into the best times to post content. There tends to be a pattern around what specific times of the day people are online and therefore you need to research the patterns of your specific audience to find out exactly when you should be posting content. This, of course, varies across platforms and across audiences therefore it is important to understand your specific audiences’ online behaviour.
- What results do you expect from your social media marketing activity?
You need to consider why you are using social media. Without a why, there is little point to being on social media! Many businesses want to ensure they have a brand presence and are active on social media as it allows them to target specific audiences relevant to their business. Social media can be instrumental in generating new leads for your business, driving traffic to your website and promoting your products or services. Social media allows people to engage with your brand, encourages people to build a community with your brand and allows people to contact you more freely, helping with your overall customer service.
By benchmarking yourself against competitors’ social media activity, you have the opportunity to assess whether what you are doing is working and achieving the results you would expect – it is always advisable to keep an eye on what your competition are up to!
It is important that you are consistently monitoring the content you are outputting. This allows you to see what is/ isn’t working, whether you are using the correct hashtags, whether you need to tailor times that you post and whether you are getting the results you expect. By consistently monitoring your activity, you can tweak your social media strategy and outputs accordingly.
Why outsource your social media management?
Many businesses, like Thornton Legal, choose to outsource their social media marketing management to specialist companies such as The Social Desk. This allows you, as a business, to focus your efforts on what you specialise in the most – running your own business! Here at The Social Desk, we pride ourselves on getting to know our clients and like to think we become an extension of their business by learning everything about our clients’ business and personalities and managing their social media efforts accordingly!
Here’s what Thornton Legal had to say about working with The Social Desk:
“We have been using Suze and the team at the Social Desk since October 2019, and we have been really pleased with the quality of content, the communication and the results. We’re a recruitment business and we rely heavily on social media for brand awareness across Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn. Suze has taken the time to understand Thornton Legal meaning the quality of posts, Tweets and photos are top notch and the engagement high and at the right volume. Outsourcing our social media to The Social Desk has saved us a lot of time and allowed us to focus more on our jobs which, ultimately, means improving profits. Highly recommended!”