Social media is an indispensable marketing platform for business in today’s day and age; not just businesses, but also for individuals, to build their personal brand. People know you through the content you publish online.
Having a sound content strategy is definitely the key to achieving your goals; however, it is equally important to have the right approach towards social platforms to avoid any illusionary expectations, and also get the desired results. When it comes to desired results, we all have some same things in common which include raising awareness, building relations and driving sales.
Now, there could be some roadblocks that might scare your intentions and hold you back from optimizing social media for your personal brand or business. Decisions like how to post, what to post, which platform to go with, graphics or not, how long should I wait to see the results and how to reach out to your audience can consume your days and bog you down. It happens, and it is very natural.
You might have even spent sleepless nights just thinking about your content strategy and not actually implementing it, because again, roadblocks. I get them. After all, it is about the way people are going to perceive you and decide if they want to connect with you and/or do the business, so those decisions are considerable. However, all one needs is the right approach towards social media marketing – since it is not rocket science – and learn as they go.
So let us look at the three-step approach to take while getting started with social media:
Know who’s at the other side. The famous marketing phrase: if you are marketing to everyone, you are marketing to no one, holds absolutely true here. Acknowledging who is going to read your posts, i.e. your target audience, while creating content is imperative. That’s the first step in the copywriting or marketing process. Although your posts on social media are meant to reach a large number of headcounts, it will connect with each one of them if you really know your audience well.
Look at it this way: you are walking into a meeting room and have to deliver a presentation about your next move in content strategy. But, you do not know who you are addressing, do you really think it is going to be effective? If you approach the right way and communicate your message in the right manner, you will get the right (desirable) response.
The same goes for social media. You can go global or stick to a particular demographic but if you do not know what your ideal clients look like, you are losing on chances to connect with them. There are limitless ads and content pieces that your audience comes across, most of which are choking them with self-promotion. Therefore, your primary goal should be to provide value to your audience – without any strings attached – and allow them to know you well.
Try not to create any barriers but bring down the existing ones, making it easier for your audience to reach out to you, interact with you and build a connection with you. Because when you are starting off, you do not need to hit the sales right away, once people trust you they are going to make a purchase anyway. So you need to work on building relationships and raising awareness first. That way, they will come back for more information, consume more of your content, share it with their friends. Your aim should be to provide value by educating your audience, rest assured.
Zero in on a platform. There are diverse people, content pieces and different vibes on different social platforms, which one ideal for your business? For instance, LinkedIn is a star platform for B2B companies, since there are a majority of decision-makers and the audience is mature, which makes it an ideal platform.
You need to identify the right platform to approach when starting out. You can start with all the platforms at one go, for sure, but that is not recommended. The reason being: each platform performs differently – the algorithms vary, and the audiences have different patterns of consuming content. If we say LinkedIn, you would notice that scrollers are looking for valuable content. They claim to become smarter by being on LinkedIn – it gives them immense opportunity to connect with their audience and win back business leads.
This type of platform is best to educate and inspire your audience. Not only that, this platform has witnessed an immense surge in the past year only. When you have a platform in mind, you also know what type of audience is there, on what time you should be publishing the content and how to deal with the (constantly changing) algorithms. Not just that, community building and brand building just become simpler from otherwise being overwhelming.
Create, experiment, create again. Lastly, it all boils down to trying your hands at various pieces of content and zeroing in on a couple of them. There is no recipe book for marketing, or writing content, for that matter. Marketing is best known as dynamic. Platforms are constantly changing and so are the taste of your target audience. No one likes to be shown the same type of content over and over again. Therefore, experiment with different types of content pieces and know which one works best for you.
This should not be very difficult once you have clearly underlined your audience, the message that you want to convey and the frequency at which you have to do it. Do not get disheartened if your content is not liked by millions – do not have cloudy expectations; social media is a tool to connect with your audience. The idea is not to get countless followers that barely add any value to your network, the intention should be to find your tribe – people who will absolutely adore your content will be hungry to consume more and the ones you can eventually sell to, to keep your business running!
With this approach, you are ready to roll!
