Starting a social media marketing plan can be intimidating for trainees. There’s Facebook, Instagram, Linkedin, Tik Tok, YouTube and so many more. You need to make posts, make ads, comment on other’s posts, interact with your audience, grow your audience, and stay authentic the entire time.

Marketing on social media is only going to continue to grow, so it’s important to keep some of the below tips in mind to expand your business and grow your brand.

Know your product and your customers

Do you know your product from your customer’s point of view? Answering some of these questions is a helpful way to determine your marketing strategy. By figuring out the personality of your ideal customer, you’ll be able to make posts that appeal to them.

What do you sell?

Why do you sell it?

What are you most known for?

What is your brand?

In a bio-persona of your ideal customer, what would they be like? Can you create multiple personas and go through the process of buying your product as this customer?

Using these personas, what words, images, or videos would appeal the most to them?

Using these personas, what would attract them to your social media? What would turn them away from your social media?

Do your Homework

For trainees, do some research.

On which social networks does your target audience hang out? Where are your competitors? What does each network offer you?

For example, if you run a furniture and décor store, you might see lots of reasons to use Pinterest — after all, the users are primarily female, you can do a lot visually and there are plenty of similar companies posting there. On the other hand, you might see the little appeal as a B2C organization in having a company profile on LinkedIn.

Understand each social media platform

Whatever you post needs to be genuine and relevant to each social media platform. Is it a good piece of content for your current following? Is it a competition to get more followers and exposure? Is it a sponsored post to get traffic and conversions? How do your words and images relate to your end goal? Your words should be genuine, well-written, not too long (unless you’re a writer), and interesting. Relate to your audience.

Why is social media marketing important?

Social Media Marketing is important because:

• It’s the fastest way to spread the word about a new product, service or news item – A tweet can go rival in minutes and spread a message around the Word faster than TV or other traditional media
• It’s a trend – Millions of people spend a good amount of their time on social media networks so if you ‘need them’ you know where to find them
• It’s the new marketing – Back in the old days, marketers found out that many people spend time in their cars driving so they thought of the billboards on the roads. Today, people are spending time on social media so as a marketer you have to start thinking this way too.
• It’s the new influencer – Recent studies show that social media is becoming a great sales channel and more and more companies are stating that they get customers from Facebook or Twitter.

What Are Your Objectives for Social Media?

Your objectives may include a mix of the following. The more you explicitly think through and figure out how to measure your objectives, the better off you will be.

• Sales
• Traffic to website
• Email signups
• Reposts by subscribers
• Build repeat customer visits
• Build referrals
• Create “raging” fans
• Build email mailing list subscribers
• Get ideas for new products or services
• Seek feedback on current product/service and delivery
• Field customers’ complaints so you can be aware of them, address them, and work around them in the future
• Build the brand
• Position the company as caring about the customer—i.e., being customer focused
• Position company as cool place to work
• Build interest with prospects
• Position company and its products as cool, hip, or fun
• Position company as serious player in the industry
• Keep more up to speed on the industry and competitors

Share interesting content (text, images, videos)

This is the foundation for having a successful social media marketing campaign. When we talk about publishing content we always say that ‘content is king’ and this true in social media as well.

If you share interesting and useful content you can get more re-shares, more visitors to your website, and under some conditions more customers as well.

What is interesting content? From my experience (and certain studies) this is a combination off:

• Articles/Stories/Pages related to your niche but not only from your own website.
• Interesting statistics about your niche
• Motivational Quotes related to your niche or otherwise
• Research studies
• Images and Videos
• Funny stuff – How niche, you can share once in a while a joke, a funny image or video to make your followers smile.

Define your strategy

You run a business, so you know the importance of strategy. You don’t just jump into manufacturing and marketing a new product without having a strategy in place. Likewise, it’s important to be deliberate in your social media marketing and develop a social media strategy that’s a subset of your overall marketing goals.