In this era of digitalization, it is hard to believe there ever existed a time when social media didn’t serve as the cynosure of our professional and personal life. Social media is the best platform to boost your business and learn the market trends. It is accurately quoted by CEO and editor-in-chief of Foodable, Paul Barron – “I use social media as an idea generator, trend mapper and strategic compass for all our online business ventures.”

While the majority of conventional brick and mortar businesses have entered the field of digital marketing to create their online presence, it still can’t be said if they are making an optimum use of the social media platforms.

It is not an unprecedented fact how B2B and B2C businesses have gained the potential customers with the correct social media marketing tactics. There are many social media management tools (some of them even free) available to use it to your benefit. But then how do you use it to target the right audience and attract just the right customers? This blog will not only answer all your queries but also help you gain the confidence in framing a smart social media marketing strategy.

1. Choose your Social Media Network

First things first. The strategies you form and social media channel you choose ultimately depend on the type of business you want to promote. So, is it business to business or business to clients?

The next thing you need to fix your attention on is to choose a suitable social media platform for your business. According to ebizmba, the 5 most popular networking sites of 2017 are Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn.

Facebook : With the active user base of more than 1.59 billion, you can easily reach your target audience. This is rated as the most popular social media platform. According to Facebook, more than 50 million small businesses use Facebook pages to reach their target audience.

Youtube : Youtube official blog reports 1.5 billion monthly active users. This is the potent platform for the businesses. It has launched various video tools and allows live streaming as well.

Twitter : It has over 328 million active users and is the best platform to share real-time news, images, and contents. The images you use for your content play an important part in boosting your brand image.

Instagram : This platform is ideal for the one whose business include visuals majorly. This includes businesses who are involved in food or fashion industry, are artists, authors, filmmakers, etc. who can attract their customers with the mere images or videos.

LinkedIn : It is an ideal network for professionals and B2B networking. The platform has over 106 million monthly active users helping you reach worldwide with your strong content.

You can try mastering one social media platform at a time and then move on to another. Because every time you post your social media campaign across different channels, you need to modify it even though your purpose remains the same. If not, you might get into some serious trouble.

2. Streamline Your Target Customers

To develop an effective strategy for social media marketing, you need to be sure of your audience. Your success in social media marketing entirely depends upon targeting potential customers.

To streamline your target customers, you have to understand the customers first. And for this, it is important to build the buyer persona. Ask yourself 5 W’s, namely who,what, when, where, and why. The questions can be:

Who : Who are your present customers?, Who do you want to sell your services and products to?

What : What is the background of your customer?

When : When do the customers buy your products or services?

Where : Where do your customers live?

Why : Why do they buy your services (or your competitors service)?

These questions will help you understand your buyer persona and ultimately help you focus on your potential customers.

3. Stay Clear on Your Goal

There are basically two goals that make the businesses choose social media marketing – creating Brand Awareness or Conversions. To pursue any of this, it requires patience and hard work.

Determine your goal and don’t forget it merely because you are not getting sufficient likes or followers. They fall secondary to everything, and many businesses have failed with such social media tactics.

Content plays an important role in social media marketing and has a direct influence on your business. Although, initially you won’t get much traffic on your page, so you can pay for diverting the traffic. And gradually switch to creating organic traffic when your business has flourished its social media presence.

4. Convert your Business into Brand with Effective Content

The ultimate goal of any business using social media marketing is to convert it to a brand, enhancing its goodwill in the market. This is a time-consuming task and demands a consistent hardship.

The easiest way to pursue this goal, is by creating engaging and informative content on your channel, consistently. Provide your audience the story ideas and leads that have nothing to do with your business but are useful to them. You can also follow the one-in-seven rule. This means posting one content related to your products/services and the other seven being informative. This will help you build a relationship with them. As quoted precisely by Gary Vaynerchuk, an American serial entrepreneur and four-time New York Times bestselling author – “Saying hello doesn’t have an ROI. It’s about building relationship.”

This will help you gain their confidence and become their trusted source. The word-of-mouth, as you know, plays an important role in social media marketing. Even a single share of your post will help you gain many potential followers.

You can also engage your followers personally by answering their queries in the comments, replying to them in messages, asking conversation-starter questions or by holding a question and answer session.

5. Content Scheduling

Once you are done with all the aforementioned things, the last but not the least task is content scheduling. It is important to plan the specific interval or time frame between two contents being posted on your social media channel.

Why is it so important? To begin with, if you upload the content way too frequently, it will lose all the charm even if it is fascinating. Because let’s face it, no one has significant time to spare and too many notifications from your end will only confirm your entry in their bad books. Alternatively, if you are too irregular, you will be forgotten. Because there are many other competitors fighting for your client’s attention.

To avoid such problems, prepare a monthly plan of social media postings. You can also take help of free social media scheduling tools that are available online. They will help you in making this complex task simple.

Social media marketing might seem a complex structure, but once you are on it, it will all become much clearer and simpler. Be sure to focus on right audience and create an informative content, and you can rest assured about your success.