10 Step Social Media Marketing Strategy Checklist for Small Business in 2015

Social media marketing has always been promoted as a “cheap and easy” way to market products and services. However, for the success of social media marketing, you should be able to develop a comprehensive social media strategy. We all know that social media has been termed as a growing marketing tool with access to millions of customers through a button only. Nearly 90% of the Internet users use at least one social media tool for every business to develop a social media strategy. Below is a small 10 steps checklist to help you develop a great social media strategy for your business:

• Know your Target Market:

Everyone is on social media- but everyone is not your potential customers. Knowing the exact target market is very important, as you will be investing a lot of time and efforts behind your campaign. So it’s very important to know that you are at the right place among the right people. You can get exact idea about your target audience by asking yourself questions like:

• Who are your customers? – Sex, Age Group, Geo Location, etc.
• What are their problems? How can you (or your product) solve them?
• Which platforms do they use? Why?
• What motivates and inspires them?
• Why should they connect with you? 

• Create Content that your Audience will love:

Okay, so now you have your target audience, you need to get them love your brand. You not only need to get into their heads, you need to touch their hearts.

• Learn what’s important to your audience.
• Share valuable information that directly addresses their questions and concerns.
• Understand what information they want to see more.
• Show how you can best serve them.

• Maximize your Reach:

Repurposing great content across multiple channels is the secret sauce to maximizing reach. Don’t assume things, majority of your target audience may be on a particular platform but it doesn’t mean they are not there on other platforms. Share your great content on various popular platforms like Facebook, Google+, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn this will help you

• Improve Brand Awareness
• Enrich your brand through multi-channel campaigns.
• More visibility to your content.

• Keep your Branding Consistent:

While creating accounts on various social media platforms keep in mind that you keep your logo, color schemes, fonts and graphics consistent. This will help you:

• Keep your brand easily identifiable across various channels.
• Generate a sense of belonging to your audience. 

• Maintain a Content Calendar:

Don’t just dump data and information to your audience. Work-out on a proper deployment plan and keep them information step-by-step. Give them time to understand the information provided by you.

Take a strategic approach by maintaining a content calendar where you can manage topics, goals and platforms to support and align with your overall marketing strategy.

• Plan your topics
• Break them between certain time duration- it can be an event or particular days of the week etc.
• Choose the platforms you will be posting them. 

• Make your audience feel special:

Everyone loves to feel special, so does your audience. Whether its internet or real life, little things go a long way. But, how can you make them feel special?

• Take time to respond to queries and questions.
• Give them feedbacks for their suggestions.
• Interact with them- show genuine interest in you audience.
• Wish them- send your wishes if you come across birthdays or some achievements of your audience. 

• Share and get shared:

As the old proverb goes “Give Respect to Get Respect!” showing interest is not enough, you need to show that you care about others more than your content. You can follow a 80-20 rule, your shared content should be 80% informative and 20% promotional.

Find others who share similar content as yours and share it! Just make sure it’s relevant to your audience. 

• Analyze:

This is the holy grail of your content strategy. Based on this you can plan your further strategy. Most of the social media platforms now a days provide their own analytics for your posts.

Otherwise you can use Google Analytics, it provides a large amount of data statistics and analytics which should guide you on planning your further content strategy. Leveraging this information can provide you answers to questions like:

• Which content is making the biggest impact on you audience?
• How & Why some content works and some don’t?
• What is the best time to post based on your audience?
• What type of content they love?
• What are their current dilemmas related to your product/services? 

• Stay with the trend:

Keep an eagle eye on the latest happenings in your industry. Update your audience regarding the same on a timely manner, as it’s a sure shot way to maximize your content’s organic reach.

• Keep evolving:

Keep changing your strategy for better based on the analytics insights and experience with your audience. Don’t be afraid to change your strategy whenever necessary.

Hope our checklist will help you plan and implement a successful social media strategy in 2015. Don’t hesitate; let us know if you have any queries. We will be glad to help!