Are you seeking towards expanding the horizon of your targeted audience? Or Thinking of posting relevant social media contents regularly?
Well planned social media contents will keep your focus and increase your chance to reach the more targeted audience and thus help achieve business goals.
This article will guide you through the steps to plan and create a good social media marketing content for your business.
1. Understanding Your Targeted Customers
Whether you are a start-up or a well established business, defining your targeted customer is the first step for success. Most of you would think that it is very easy to define your targeted customer based on age, location, gender, etc. However, defining targeted customers based on the above factor is not enough.
Success Factor
You will have to go beyond just basic information. In this era of cut throat competition where customers have lot of options to choose from, “experience” is the key differentiator. Every customer just doesn’t want to buy, they want an experience they can fall in love with and this has been the success factors of many companies like Uber, Amazon, etc.
Best approach to understand the nature of audience
The best way to make your customer feel the same is by putting yourself in their shoes. This is the best approach to understanding your customer. In this way you can understand their point of view and work accordingly.
Best approaches to build trust
The customer acquisition approach is different for different customer based on the customer. When a customer approaches you, he is filled with numerous questions and the best way to build customer trust is by answering to their doubts and providing valuable content which can be in any form for example images, blog post, webinars etc. By dedicating your time to understand your customer, you can connect with them in a better way.
2. Deciding The Need For Use Of Social Media and Identifying KPIs
Goal setting is very important in every work. The same applies here too. Goals are very important in measuring the success of any effort. The three potential goals that you can set to measure your online engagement efforts are:
- Building a Community
Build a community on a social media platform for your customers. The number of members may vary in the group depending on your customer base.
The various factors on which you can measure the growth of the community is a number of group members, number of members viewing your post or videos and questions being asked in the group.
Unfortunately Facebook doesn’t provide much support in this context, but you can use third party tools like Grytics.
- Increasing Your Brand Awareness
This is the biggest reason why people use social media. According to a survey, an average person spends two hours a day on various social media platforms thus it becomes a key factor for any business.
If you take Twitter for example, you can use #Twitter Analytics to measure your brand awareness. You can know the number of followers, mentions and shares of your tweets or brand, top mentions, new followers and profile visits. women with 62% males and 38% females.
- Boosting Customer Engagement
Customer engagement is the second most important factor in measuring social media success. Thus increasing customer engagement would help you build trust, perception and recommendations online. Engagement is an important factor when it comes to #Facebook and #Instagram as their logic prioritizes posts with higher engagement to posts with less engagement thus showing them first in news feed.
3. Choosing the Right Platform for Engaging Customers
Putting your ad on every social network is not the right approach. Before concluding on the platform to start with, you must put in some effort to find out the correct social network that attracts your targeted audience. Network demography and return across platforms are the two key areas to work on.
Facebook is the giant in a social network. A study revealed that 79% of the total online users are connected on Facebook. From gender point of view, 83% women are using Facebook as compared to 75% men. 100 million hours of videos are being watched on a daily basis on Facebook. This number has been on a high ever since the inception of Facebook Live feature.
24% of online men and 25% of online women comprise the 319 million active monthly users on Twitter. Twitter app handles the 8% of the total Twitter’s traffic. Twitter has an average of 6000 tweets per second. 22.5% of Twitter users belong to the age group of 25 to 34.
With over 600 million active monthly users, Instagram is getting very popular among the adults. Instagram is expected to have over 100+ million users in U.S alone. Gross revenue from advertising on Instagram is $2.8 billion.
38% of online women prefer Instagram as compared to 26% online men. Over 50% percent users log in to their account on daily basis whereas 35% use in several times in a day. The Instagram Stories feature has over 200 million active daily users.
#Pinterest comprises of almost one third of the total online population which has 45% online women users and 17% online men.
#LinkedIn is the pioneer in the field of B2B social network with over 106 million monthly users. LinkedIn has its network spanned in 200 countries and 24 languages are available on its platform. 31% online men and 27% online women are associated with LinkedIn. Two new members are getting associated with LinkedIn per second and 040% of these users log in their account daily.
YouTube
#YouTube is placed second on the list of search engine and is behind it’s owning company Google. With over 167 million unique users every month, it sees four hundred hours of video being uploaded every minute. It covers more than fifty percent of online users in USA alone who have accounts on YouTube. 80% of the people in the age group of 18 to 49 watch videos on YouTube. The ratio of male is high as compared the women with 62% males and 38% females.
Snapchat
With 301 million active users, #Snapchat is more teen oriented with a high portion of the members being in the age group of 13-17. Snapchat services are accessed more than once by a healthy group of users on a daily basis and ranked above Twitter and #Tumblr when it comes to user engagement.
4. Researching Topics for Content
Once you have finalized your platform, the next step in launching yourself is deciding the content. The content should be so developed that it is relevant, to the point and not centered around your business only. Creating something unrealistic is also not the right approach to move ahead. The content must be such that it engages your audience.
Start bi-way communication with customers
Now that you have figured out your target audience and know about them, the next logical step would be to connect with them in a bi-way communication. You can come up with polls or multiple choice questions and get feedback. A reward or a pleasant surprise at the end of the feedback would make your users come back again. Google Forms can be a great help when it comes to creating a questionnaire and tracking feedbacks.
Get ideas from your family and friends
Another way of promoting your business and getting new ideas is by talking with friends and family. It doesn’t matter if they are invested in your business or not, a simple chat can bring out ideas for your content. You can also look up to your competitors. Things that work for your competitors might also profit you. They can be inspirational for your content.
and the type of content and when that content to be published.
5. Planning Your Content Schedule
After completion of the research, you are ready to start your blog. The topic must be engaging and to the point with respect to your business. The next step is choosing the heading for the blog. Keywords are very important for your blog as it attracts customers to you. Good keywords will help you present yourself as a good brand.
Create a quality blog
The blog should feature a good presentation and that requires breaking it down in logical parts that should include an introduction, a body, a conclusion and call to action. A call to action might be a simple link asking the customer to join a webinar or participate in a survey or review.
How to create content for targeted audiences
The below image is an example and helps you to plan your content. It should help you to create content for your target audience based on the platform and the type of content and when that content to be published.
6. Building Trust Through Regular Updates
Simply publishing content would not bring you out as the leader or a trusted brand. The basic rule for the success for any communication is that it should be a two way process. The more frequent you are on a social media and connect with your targeted customers, the better the chances are of them turning into your customers. I
t builds a trust in them and makes them come to you. On an average, it takes eight connections to turn a potential customer into a client. Keeping this in mind, you should always improvise and come up with ideas to shorten this.
7. Track Your Progress and Be Flexible to Changes
Measuring the success of your social media plan is the final step. This will help you determine whether your efforts are bearing any fruits or not for your business. You can calculate the success by looking into three main areas; conversion, reach and engagement.
Measure your progress
Conversion will help you to conclude whether your social media efforts are helping you in your sales or not. It would be a good thing if it helps you in this regard, if not then you will have to come up with an alternate plan. A social media dashboard can be a very helpful in this regard. This will provide you with social data that would help you to measure your progress.
Expand your reach
Reach defines the number of people who were affected by your content. The larger your reach the more successful you are in terms of matching the frequency with your customers. A number of followers on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, total views and subscribers to your YouTube channel helps you to assess your popularity on social media space.
Take help of engagement metrics
Engagement metrics helps you analyze as to how many people are interacting with through social media. This could be in form of likes, comments and shares on Facebook, retweets and mentions on Twitter, etc.
Final word
Final word includes the data of statista that reveals that the number of users on social media platform has crossed 1.96 billion and in future till 2018 it is hoping to reach 2.5 billion. And the main question arises in context of your plan and strategy is how to keep yourself ahead of your rivals in this competition. And if you didn’t figure out any strategy yet then you would probably trail behind your competitors and they will kick off from the whole business agenda.
Don’t be lame, go ahead with a perfect strategy and increase engagement as well as trust within your users and see the result.followers and profile visits.