Really ramp up your business or brand with a brilliantly thought-out social media marketing strategy that engages your audience, focusses your social media marketing efforts, drives traffic, and converts your prospective customers into paying customers.

Why Having Best Social Media Strategies is Essential for Brands and Businesses

To succeed in business or to build brand awareness, no matter what industry you’re involved in, having a winning social media strategy in place is absolutely essential and should be one of your most important business objectives and marketing objectives.

Despite this, many businesses still don’t even have visibility on social platforms and yet, according to so many industry reports and vanity metrics, it’s a brilliant place to build customer loyalty and gather data by making social efforts as well as helping to increase brand awareness.

Investing in a strong social media strategy is essential for any brand or business that wants to succeed in today’s digital world. By taking the time to create compelling content, engage with your audience, and buy followers Instagram, you can set your business up for success.

Why is that?

The Biggest Reason Why You Need to Use Social Media for Your Business

There are many reasons.  However, the most important reason of all is because almost everyone – no matter where they are located in the world – uses at least one social media platform.

So that means your customers are definitely on social channels.

people attracting to social media

Why People Use Social Media

Not only do people use social media accounts to connect with their friends, family, loved ones, work colleagues, acquaintances, and people they haven’t seen in years – but they also use social media for so much more.

People use social media platforms to “connect” with their favorite celebrities, TV personalities, politicians, pop stars, actors, actresses, and more.  They also use social media to follow their preferred brands and businesses.  It’s the quickest, easiest way to take note of new product launches, new services, and what’s going on.

So having a social media presence (whether on just one platform or across more social media networks) is an exciting and effective way to keep your business or brand high in the minds of your customers.

Using Social Media for Lead Generation

With the advent of social media, businesses have found a new tool for lead generation. you can buy likes on sites like Facebook and Twitter, businesses to reach a large number of potential customers with their messages

Social media is a lead generation tool because you can easily get your name in front of the right audience.

screen of phone showing social media apps

What Platforms Do You Want to Use?

As part of your social media efforts, you do need to decide on the social media platforms that you want to use (whether it’s Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Reddit, WhatsApp, Snapchat, YouTube, TikTok or any of the other available social media networking platforms).

Once you’ve conducted thorough research on the platforms that are right for your business niche, you need to create a powerful social media marketing strategy to bolster your social presence online.

That’s why we’re here.

As one of the biggest and best Instagram marketing agencies, we know what it takes to create meaningful social accounts and we are also very experienced in creating our own social media marketing strategies.

So, we’ve devised a guide to developing a social media marketing strategy that works and it’s right here to help you grow your business or brand.

Let 1394ta help you get to grips with creating your very own strategy, we’re about to dive in!

What Is A Social Media Strategy?

Social media has become an essential part of modern marketing, offering instant views and interaction with customers and potential customers. An effective social media strategy can help you to build brand awareness, connect with your target audience, and boost sales.

Before we start, you might well know what a social strategy is, in which case you can skip this overview but for those of you that don’t know what it is or you’d like a quick recap, read on.

people learning social media strategies.

Learn What a Social Media Strategy Is – In Summary

A social media strategy should be a part of your overall business marketing strategy.

It summarizes everything into one document (a documented social media strategy) and consists of a plan of what you’re going to post on social media, including all of your social media activity over a period of time.  That period of time would normally be 3 months, six months, nine months, or a year.

Within your social media marketing summary, you will also include what your goals are – and they will be what you want to achieve through your social media marketing activities.

Used effectively and a social media strategy should show you where you achieved social media success, where you could have done better and identify gaps in the market.

The key to creating your social media marketing strategy is to keep it brief – you can create the detail on separate documents for each social marketing activity that you want to do.

So there’s no need to go overboard – if you do so you will spend too much time on the minutiae without concentrating on the bigger picture.  That will make it harder to share with your marketing team (if you have one) and make it difficult to manage.

It really should be a one- or two-page documented strategy – an overview of planned activity over a period of time.

Next, we will concentrate on how you can plan your social media strategy for your business or brand – for more in-depth detail, keep reading.

Creating an Effective Social Media Strategy for Business

The basics are as follows:

  • Select achievable social media marketing milestones that are in keeping with your overall business strategy.
  • Identify your audience and learn as much as you can about them.
  • Identify your competition, conduct a competitor analysis, and learn as much as you can about them.
  • Conduct a thorough social media audit of all your channels and identify what you could deactivate and any platforms where you should be active.
  • Set up relevant new accounts (optimize your profile).
  • Create a social media content strategy calendar as part of your social media marketing strategy for posting content (this can always evolve over the coming months).
  • Start creating content and post content using lots of content formats.
  • Track your performance.
  • Adjust your strategy according to your social media analytics, valuable insights, and key performance indicators (KPIs).

Now we will go into detail on each of the above steps, so you get your social media marketing strategy for your business or brand spot on.

What Does Social Media Marketing Mean?

Social media marketing means using the available social media platforms in order to promote a business or brand.

When it is done well, it helps to boost brand awareness and build an audience.  It also identifies the perfect audience and allows you to sell your products or services directly to genuine prospects.

Additionally, as most social media networking channels have their own insights’ feature, you can measure how well your social media campaigns work.  You can also learn about how your customers react to your products and services – and your brand overall.

With so many features available to users of social media platforms, businesses can advertise directly to their customers, provide customer service, conduct a level of market research and importantly, measure performance.

The ultimate goal of social media marketing is to buy  IG followers cheap in order to drive sales and increase profits for the company. While there are many challenges involved in starting out in this dynamic field, it also represents a huge opportunity for savvy marketers who understand the key principles of effective social media marketing

social medias are stairs to success

So now you know what social media marketing is, the next step is to learn how to develop your social media strategy and adopt social campaigns.  Read on for this section.

Developing Your Social Media Strategy

As you already now know, your social media marketing strategy is a brief document that lists your social media goals.  Alongside each goal, it briefly details how you are going to reach your goal, what you need to do to assess your performance and who is responsible for that goal.

Now, of course, some businesses will have an entire social media team dedicated to social media marketing.  Others will have one person responsible for the area, and small businesses or start-ups may just have the business owner juggling all the different functions.  It doesn’t matter – whether you are a large corporate or a small, one-person business, social media is necessary!  You can do your entire strategy on your own, it’s just understanding how to do it effectively.

The other area that must be covered on a social media marketing document is a list of all of your social media networking platforms.

Each platform should also have a breakdown of its individual goals, how you’re going to reach those goals and who’s responsible for them.

people learning business marketing strategies from each other

Bear In Mind Your Overall Business Marketing Strategy

Your social media marketing strategy should be in keeping with your business’ overall marketing strategy, both on and offline.

An important aspect of business marketing is automatic Instagram likes. This can be a great strategy to help you get more followers and ensure that your posts are seen by more people.

As mentioned above, if you have a digital marketing team, you should assign each team member with a role and responsibility in line with your social media strategy goals.  Doing this means that every person knows what he or she should be doing.

How to Create Your Social Media Strategy

As we have already told you, begin by working out what your social media marketing goals are.

They should be SMART.  Here’s what that stands for:

  • Specific
  • Measurable
  • Attainable
  • Relevant
  • Trackable

Ideas for goals could be any of the following:

  • To grow your social media followers.
  • To gain more views on Instagram.
  • To improve your overall engagement with your fan base on Instagram.
  • To respond to your social media messages and keep the conversation going.
  • To convert your followers into paying customers.
  • To learn more about your followers.
  • To get more likes and comments.
  • To sell using the Instagram shopping feature.
  • To create a blog post every month and share it on social media.
  • To create brilliant user generated content.
  • To do one paid promotion per month.
  • To create content using different formats.
  • To use other marketing efforts to complement your social media marketing strategy.

They are just ideas to help you to determine your social media marketing goals – you can of course, use whatever goals you want!

A Note on Tracking Your Followers

grow and track followers for likes and comments

We would still expect one of your goals to be to grow your followers and track them.

It’s easy enough to track your followers and friends’ growth – which is an important metric and remember, you can always buy Instagram followers from 1394ta.

1394ta is a reputable Instagram marketing agency that helps clients to grow Instagram followers.  We use our own metrics to target Instagram users and we’ve pulled different types of users into our own databases, so we deliver genuine followers that we know have an interest in your industry (due to our extensive market research).  So if you want to get that goal ticked off quickly, use our services.

Once you’ve started to grow your Instagram followers by employing social media techniques, tracking progress is an important step to bear in mind.

There are lots of effective ways to track progress, such as engagement, click-through and conversion rates.

Raising Your Instagram Profile

Of course, for any social media platform you need to raise your profile and getting lots of views and likes helps to alter the algorithm, so more people follow you. If you’re not getting the engagement you want, then you could avoid the system and to buy Instagram likes, buy them from us instead.

Does it Work the Same Way as Facebook?

Facebook and Instagram bottles to compare

The couple of areas that Facebook and Instagram have in common are that they’re both owned by Meta, they both have a Creator Studio (useful for social media marketers to use for scheduling posts, tracking insights, and keeping all content in one place together), they also use the power of images, short form videos and photography and they have shopping features.

You can organize your Instagram and Facebook to integrate so when you post on one, it appears on the other.  Tracking progress on Facebook is similar to Instagram because they use similar metric features.  However, for Facebook users cost-per-click advertising is an effective way to track your progress.

Let’s get back to goal-setting.

Goal-Setting, Getting Started

Above, we gave you some ideas of goals to use for goal-setting for your social media marketing strategy.

  • To get started with your social media strategy, we suggest that you list three goals.
  • Alongside each goal briefly list how you’re going to achieve those goals.
  • Give yourself a time-period.
  • Assign the job to a person on your team.
  • That person should create a separate document with more detail on their specific goal (remember, the social media marketing plan is a brief, overview document).
  • Once the goal is signed off, measure it using insights.
  • Then write up a summary of how well the goal went, areas where you could improve, areas where you gained good results and decide whether you want to run a similar goal at a later date.
  • Get those three first goals completed and then add another four goals, then five and so on.

Do You Know Your Audience?

One of the major advantages of social media marketing is that your audience is definitely using it.  That means that you can identify your audience and use the networking channels to get to know them.

You can gain insights into what they want to see from you on social media.  This is relatively easy, just by conducting a competitors’ analysis and seeing what gets the engagement helps you to know what your audience want to see.

Another way to measure this is to see what reaction your audience has to your posts.  Do they prefer video?  Do they enjoy your LIVE IGTVs?  Do they like MEMEs, emojis, stickers?  You should be able to gauge their response whenever you post and take notes.

Here’s another way to measure what your audience wants to see from you on social media.  Ask them!

Instagram has great polls and quizzes that you put together yourself and post on your Instagram Stories icon.  You can also conduct market research by asking questions.  How about hosting an Instagram Live where you ask your users questions too and really engage?

There are lots of ideas above.  You also need to understand who your audience is (more about this below), who they follow, the brands that they like, the celebrities they like, the brands they engage with and why they do it?

When you know your audience, it’s easier to create the type of content that they will like and most importantly, turn them into paying customers.

To really know your customers, you need to understand their age, their location, their average income, their job, and their interests.  You could learn about your audience by creating a buying persona (sometimes referred to as audience persona).

Buying Personas (Or Audience Personas)

Creating buying personas isn’t just useful for your social media marketing strategy, it’s also important for your overall marketing strategy!  It’s easy to do this exercise and it’s fun.

First – you need to write a list of different traits of your customers, here are some of the questions you should ask yourself:

  • How old is your customer?
  • Where do they live, in a house, an apartment, at home with mom and dad?
  • What is their location?
  • Are they male or female (or other)?
  • Do they have pets?
  • Where do they work?
  • What is their job title?
  • What is their income?
  • Are they homeowners?
  • What do they do at the weekend?
  • Where do they vacation?
  • What are their interests?
  • Do they have children?

And so on!  Once you’ve done this exercise you should come up with a few buying personas, because it’s likely you have a few different types of customers.  You could name each buying persona so when you refer to them in the future, you instantly know which customer you’re talking about.

Are You Visible on the Right Social Media Platforms?

Knowing your buying persona is important for the next exercise.  Are you using the right social media networking channels for your audience?

For example, if your audience is GenZ and you’re only visible on Facebook, you’re missing out a huge chunk of your audience.  That’s because GenZ favors SnapChat and TikTok.

Here’s another – if you are highly visible on TikTok but your audience is Baby Boomers then you won’t be getting your products or services in front of the right people, you’ll certainly be missing a chunk and that’s because Baby Boomers like Pinterest, especially if your audience is female.

Millennials love Instagram – so if you’re not on Instagram then you are missing your audience.

LinkedIn, being a professional networking platform for business, is good for all age groups as it is a business social media channel.  However, if you are B2C (business to consumer) and using LinkedIn then you probably won’t be gaining huge traction as it is very much a B2B platform (business to business).

Knowing Who You’re Competing With

All through this piece we’ve mentioned competition and it’s really important to know who you’re competing with on social media channels.

Before you complete your social media marketing strategy, you need to do some background work.  Another essential exercise for any business is to conduct some competitive analysis.  Here are some of the headers you could use to find out about your competitors.

  • List the brands and businesses who you’re competing with.
  • What do they do well on social media?
  • What don’t they do well on social media?
  • What type of person follows them?
  • Who engages with them the most?
  • Who do your competitors follow?
  • What’s their content like?
  • How could you improve their social media content?
  • What social media channels are they visible on?
  • Where are there gaps in the market you could home in on?

You will soon know your competition and find untapped opportunity.  That untapped opportunity could end up being one of your social media marketing strategy goals.

Conducting Regular Social Media Audits

Social media changes – and it changes fast!  You must be able to react to those changes quickly or your own social media channels will stagnate.

Every few months we recommend conducting a thorough social media networking channels’ audit.

So, perhaps four times a year, revisit all of the social media marketing channels that you use as part of your social media strategy.  Ask yourself which ones work best for your business or brand and why?  Who’s engaging with your content?  Are you still reaching the right target audience?  Have any of your competitors moved over to different social networking platforms?

Then work out which social network platform isn’t working for you.  You may find that they all work well for you but if you have one poor performer, don’t just give up on it.  Set some measurable and achievable goals for that social media platform and monitor your progress over a period of a few weeks.

If the social media platform doesn’t improve then you can deactivate it or just pause it if you’d rather come back to it at a later date.  This frees you up to focus your attention on another platform instead and even to set up one of the newest platforms if you think it might be suitable for your target audience.

Remember, before you open an account on a new social media platform, ask yourself if your audience is on that platform and how they’re using it.  Then, ask yourself if you are sure the newer platform is right for achieving your business goals.

Once you know which social media platforms you want to move forwards with, as we’ve discussed, just break up your social media strategy into each platform and formulate them individually.

However, the content that you post cross-platform should always tally and be shared at the same time.

Ideas for the Types of Social Media Platforms for Your Business or Brand

For visual businesses (make-up, beauty, skincare, hair, clothes etc.) Instagram Stories, Snapchat and TikTok are good platforms to use and each time you get views, your video is more likely to be seen by other potential customers (to do it quickly you can buy Instagram views through our social media marketing service).

Twitter is great for sharing a headline or for customer services, as an example.  LinkedIn as we’ve mentioned is good for business.

Get Your Account Verified

A word of advice.  If you’re using Instagram and you are a business or brand, you should make sure that your account is verified because it gives your customers confidence that you’re a proper business.

A lot of scammers set up fake accounts, multiple accounts and business accounts using business names.  Search your business regularly on Instagram to make sure no one is impersonating you and report anything suspicious that you find.

Remind your followers that your Instagram account is the real deal!

When you get yourself verified, you get a little blue notification badge that appears next to your account profile.  This assures people that your business is legitimate.

Perhaps you can make getting yourself verified on Instagram one of your social media marketing goals?

Part of your Social Media Strategy is to Optimize Your Profiles

As well as verifying your business on Instagram, have you optimized all of your social media marketing platform profiles?

We suggest checking all of your profiles, especially now that you know which social media platforms you’re going to really focus on.

Use Strategic Keywords on Your Profile

Make sure that you’ve completed all of the fields in your bio and include some strategic keywords that people might use to search your business.

Let’s use an example.

Perhaps you’re a chef?  Then you should use keywords such as #chef, #cuisine, #cooking, #recipes etc.

Maybe you’re a funky clothing brand?  Use hashtags such as #streetwear, #coolclothes, #hoodies, etc.

You might be a hairdresser?  Then you could use keywords such as #hairdresser, #hairup, #weddinghair, #hairextensions, #haircolor, etc.

Create a Brand Guidelines Document

a table with some stuffs on it and a hand holding a paper writing guidelines on it.

Another thing that you must do is to keep consistent branding across all of your social media networking channels.  That way when a customer visits you on another social media platform, they instantly recognize you through your uniform branding. You should also create a brand guidelines document – which details fonts, colors, logo use etc. to help you keep your tone of voice the same across all of your channels.  We will post on this topic at a later date (check back soon!).

Use Quality Images and Video

You should also always use high-quality images and video because you want to be taken seriously.  After all, you want your business or brand to be aligned with good quality, so any sloppy images won’t do you any favors!

How to Become Inspired

Next, you need to find some inspiration.  One way to do this is to draw inspiration from other companies who do great social media marketing.

If you’re not sure where to gain inspiration from, here’s a good social media management tool link for top brands that create award-winning social media campaigns: https://shortyawards.com/.

You could also have a look at your own favorite brands on social media.  You enjoy following them so they’re doing something right!  What is it that they do that you love?  That’s a great place to draw inspiration for engaging content.

Another way to inspire yourself to create original, fun social media content is to have a brainstorming session with your team to gain ideas.  If you don’t have a team, why not use friends or family to help you and have a brainstorming session with them?

Reach Out to Your Followers

Another effective way of engaging your followers is to ask them what they want to hear about?

Also take note of what they talk about online and what posts they comment on.  There’s bound to be some synergy so think outside of the box. Often the answers are right there, you just need to do some detective work to find them!

If you need to ramp up your engagement, you can always buy Instagram views and the more you have, the more visible you become in-feed.

Create a Social Media Calendar

Part of your social media strategy is to create a content calendar that everyone works from.

It should contain everything you’re planning to post and when you want to do it – across all of your different social media networking platforms.

Use a Social Media Calendar Template

If you want to create a calendar, we’d recommend trying a social media strategy template calendar, here’s a useful link that could help you especially if you’ve never done it before:

Be Flexible

Of course, this should be an evolving document because things always crop up in-between social media posts, so you do need an element of flexibility.

Schedule Your Social Media Posts

a women try to schedule her social media posts.

A social media calendar is a really useful document because then you and your team if you have one, all know what social media is coming up and when.  Did you know that you can also schedule your posts in the Instagram Creator Studio or the Facebook Creator Studio areas?  This makes it really easy to manage your social media.

Alternatively, here’s a link to help with scheduling your posts .  Scheduling your posts is a good way of freeing up your time to get on with other important areas of your business.

Final Words on How to Develop a Social Media Strategy

Finally, if you are just starting out with social media marketing for business, everything that we have talked above gives you all of the basics you need to consider when setting up a social media strategy for your business or brand.  However, remember, your social media marketing strategy should never be set in stone.  It should be fluid, so you should revisit it every few weeks to monitor its success and adjust any areas where you know you need to improve, using social media listening so you are always in tune with your followers.

Keep Goal-Setting!

Every time you tick off a goal, set a new one. Like social media, your actual strategy should never stand.  It needs to keep on moving for you to be successful!