A social media marketing strategy is a must-have for all startups, regardless of their industry. It doesn’t matter if you are in B2B or the B2C space. A sizable portion of the world’s population today uses social media. It influences the customer’s buying decisions.
If you are still not convinced, then let me tell you that social media marketing is more cost-effective than traditional modes of marketing. There is no reason why you should not utilize this strategy. Most of your competitors are already using it to get ahead of you.
The main social media channels for startups are:
- Youtube
Let’s cut to the chase and discuss seven easy steps that you can implement right now.
1. Select the right channel for yourself
If you are in the B2C space, it does not make sense to create a profile on Linkedin as it is mostly for professionals. So, how do you decide which social media you should use?
First, identify the industry in which you are in. For example, if you are in the B2B industry, then you should create profiles on Linkedin and Twitter. Then, identify your target audience—their age, demographics, which social media they use. For example, most people on Instagram are below the age of 35.
Creating a buyer persona and defining your typical customer or audience will be of great help. For example, a regular customer may look like:
- Age: 18 years
- Gender: Female
- Interests: Fashion and music
- Preferred social media: Instagram and Facebook
2. Define your goals
Thinking about your goals is one of the most necessary steps. Not defining goals is a recipe for disaster as all your marketing efforts are likely to fail. “Making sales” is not a goal.
Ensure that the goals you outline are S-M-A-R-T. It stands for specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-based. Hence, a S-M-A-R-T goal will be “make 200 customers buy the online course in the next six months”.
Realize that getting X number of followers and Y number of likes is not a good goal for a startup. Also, it does not need to be restricted to something as straightforward as making a sale. Your goal could be anything based on your needs.
3. Create a social media profile
You may already be having an existing personal profile on social media and presence. While all that is good, you will have to create a separate business account. All social media apps have a business account with added features such as the Analytics section.
Once you decide, your preferred channel finds out its requirements as different platforms have different requirements. For example, when creating an Instagram profile, consider the following things:
Twitter:
- Profile picture (400 x 400 pixels)
- Bio (160 characters or less)
- Header image (1500 x 500 pixels)
- A pinned tweet
4. Conduct target audience research
Before you start creating content, you need to know who you are creating content for and who is your target audience. For that conduct target audience segmentation and create buyer personas. A buyer persona is a fictional representation of your ideal or typical customer based on data.
Analyze the customer’s background information such as their hobbies, interests, age, likes, dislikes, education, occupation, and so on. This way, you’ll be able to create targeted content and deliver it to the right person and boost sales.
5. Conduct competitor analysis
You need to look at your competitor’s profiles and see what they are doing. If you don’t know who your competitors are, then do a broad search on google. Write in the Google search bar ‘startup+niche’.
Once you have identified your competitors, take a look at their profiles and ask questions like:
- How many followers do they have?
- What is the level of engagement on their posts?
- What do you like about their profiles?
- What you don’t like?
A better way to do competitor analysis is to use tools like AHrefs, SEMRush, and Keyhole. Once you have your list of competitors using these tools, you can do a social media audit. These tools will check their profiles against certain metrics, which will be very useful.
6. Create content
If you want to set yourself apart from everyone else, you will need an effective content marketing strategy. Create shareable and engaging content that is also data-driven. It will require time, effort, and proper strategy.
Understand your reader’s requirements, what do they want to see, keep up with the trends, analyze data, then create a strategy accordingly. There are different types of content to use, such as blog posts, e-books, videos, emails, infographics, and podcasts.
You can even publish case studies to show your target audience how you have helped solve your customer’s pain points in the past or helped them achieve results. Publish whitepapers and industry reports to establish your authority in your selected niche.
InVideo is a free tool that lets you create video content for free. It even has 3500+ templates, and their Instagram Templates are easy-to-use. Use this tool to take your content to the next level.
7. Measure the results
Many newly launched startups make this mistake. They put a lot of time and effort into creating content and distributing it across social media channels but don’t analyze their performance. Measuring results tells whether or not you are achieving your social media goals.
Decide metrics that you will measure such followers, reach, engagement, etc. You can even invest in tools that will analyze your performance. Now, study the collected data to understand the type of content, which yields results for you and the type of content that does not.
Autore: spidwitblog
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