If you’re a small business owner, your social media shouldn’t simply be a place to post pretty pictures, but rather, a tool to establish your credibility, share your promotions, and build a community.
So in this blog post, we will cover each step you need to take to develop a social media strategy that will take your profile from an unintentional gallery of photos, to a structured resource of information, news, and entertainment.
Why You Need a Social Media Strategy
Unlike your personal social media accounts, If you want to see engagement and growth on your business’ account, you need to establish and utilize a social media strategy that both attracts followers and keeps them! This is because your business’s followers follow you for a completely different set of reasons than those who follow you on your personal account.
For example, on your personal account, your followers are most likely friends, family, and acquaintances, looking forward to seeing your daily life and the occasional milestone. Meanwhile, if you run a restaurant, your followers are most likely strangers who are looking forward to seeing updates on new menu items, special promotions, upcoming events, or even contests.
So, unless you strategically tailor the content you post to meet the needs of your specific followers, or in other words, create a social media strategy, it will be incredibly challenging for you to engage with your audience and utilize social media in a meaningful way to grow your business.
Creating Your Social Media Strategy
To create an effective social media strategy, you need to define a few major points that will guide all of the content you plan, create, and publish on social media:
- Your content pillars
- Your selling points
- Your target personas
Your content pillars are essentially the primary topics that your posts on social media will be about. Continuing with the previous example, if you run a restaurant, your content pillars would probably look like:
- Your menu
- Promotions & special discounts
- Events
- Staff & company culture
By defining the content you post into a set of primary categories, you can more easily plan and create posts that are focused on the specific offerings of your restaurant. Afterwards, you can begin to define all of the selling points associated with your content pillars. The more selling points the better!
If you run a restaurant, you should create a list for each item on your menu accompanied by its features. It could look something like this:
- Grilled Salmon w/ Mashed Potatoes & Seasonal Greens
- Recipe developed by award-winning chef
- Ethically sourced salmon
- Locally sourced produce
And, you aren’t done here! These are just features of the dish. You should also brainstorm the advantages and benefits that your customers can experience or enjoy from ordering this item.
So, while locally sourced produce is a feature of this dish, the benefit is that your customers can also enjoy supporting local farmers by ordering it. By breaking down your content pillars into features, advantages, and benefits, you can create a huge inventory of points that you can use to create content.
Now, you should have an extensive bank of information that is specific to your restaurant and your menu, the last thing that you need to define are your target personas. While your target audience refers to the general demographics of your ideal customer, your target personas are more like specific people that would fall into this audience.
For example, within your evening dinner audience you can have your typical affluent young customers, but one group can consist of regulars looking to experience the same meal every Friday night, while the other group can consist of mixologists who come for your new alcoholic creations. While these people all fall within the same general demographics, they can clearly be split into 2 separate target personas based on their behaviour and interests.
Defining your target audience into a short list of target personas is crucial to develop your social media strategy, as it will allow you to understand your customers on an individual level. With this understanding, you can then create tailored content to connect with the unique interests, wants, and needs of your individual customers.
By breaking up your overall target audience into a set of target personas, you can create content that not only captures what you offer as a business, but also connects and resonates with your customers on a deeper level.
If you establish all of these key points, you can easily create a huge bank of ideas to produce effective and relatable content.
Implementing Your Social Media Strategy
Now that we’ve defined the major points that will allow you to rapidly produce content, the last thing we will cover is how you can effectively implement it!
How you implement your content is just as important as the content itself, as posting without purpose will lead you to creating an unfocused social media profile. Ideally, you want to craft each post with a specific goal in mind like highlighting your ingredients, or showcasing your company culture. By posting with specific intentions, you can better connect with your audience and make your social media presence more impactful.
In addition, intention will also allow you to keep your content more varied, which in turn will make your posts more engaging. While constantly highlighting your products may seem like the best way to grow your business, repeatedly posting content with only one purpose can annoy your followers and negatively impact your business’ reputation. Instead, you should assign a different purpose for each of your social media posts to constantly keep your content fresh.
The last element you need to consider to implement your social media strategy is timing. This means taking into account internal aspects of your business such as upcoming promotions and general seasonality, as well as external aspects, such as local events or even pop culture news. By timing your posts to take advantage of opportunities from within and outside of your business, you can maximize the effectiveness of your posts.
Unfortunately, even with great content, posting without a plan will only get you so far… It’s essentially the same as throwing stuff against the wall and seeing what sticks!
To maximize the benefit of using social media to grow your business, you need to keep your followers engaged by posting with a specific intention, creating variation, and strategically timing your posts to align with your seasonal goals or current events.
In conclusion, here’s a summary of the steps you need to take to create and implement a social media strategy that will take your profile from a photo gallery without purpose, to a tool that will establish your credibility, share your promotions, build a community, and ultimately grow your business.
- Determine your content pillars, selling points, and target personas
- Determine seasonal opportunities as well as news and events to take advantage of
- Define your goals for each post
- Time and schedule your posts to maximize engagement
By utilizing these steps to create a social media strategy, you can begin to use social media to better resonate with your audience, which will in turn contribute to the success of your small business.
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