In this post, you will learn the seven steps your business must take to create an effective social media marketing strategy.

Step 1: Audit Your Current Social Presence

Before you strategize about where you are headed, take a quick look at where you are. A few areas to consider when auditing your business’s social media presence are:

• Which networks are you currently active on
• Are your networks optimized (photo and cover images, bio, URL, etc.)
• Which networks are currently bringing you the most value
• How do your profiles compare to your competitors’ profiles

Step 2: Document Who Your Ideal Customer Is

You will want to get as specific as possible with this part. For example, if you identified your target market as parents it would be ok. However, if you identify your ideal customer as a parent that lives in the United States, is between 30 and 50 years of age, earns over $70,000, primarily uses Facebook and has an interest in outdoor activities you will have much more success.

Even the best marketers will fail if they are marketing to the wrong audience. Answer the following questions to help you come up with a highly focused buyer persona:

• Age
• Location
• Job Title
• Income
• Pain Points (that your business can solve)
• Most Used Social Network

Step 3: Create A Social Media Mission Statement

Your social media mission statement will drive your future actions, so make sure you put some thought into it. This statement will make it clear exactly what you plan to use your social media presence for and should reflect your brand identity. Keep in mind your ideal customer when trying to create this statement.

An example mission statement might be “to use social media to educate current and potential customers about digital marketing, with a focus on social media marketing.” Once you have this statement documented, it will make it simple for you to decide what to share and create.

If it doesn’t align with your mission statement, forget about it. Businesses that post randomly without a guiding mission will fail. People follow experts, not generalists.

Step 4: Identify Key Success Metrics

How will you determine if your social media marketing efforts are successful? I am not just talking about gaining more followers, I am talking about making money. Afterall, it is hard to rationalize spending time and money on something that isn’t improving the bottom line.

A few metrics to consider measuring are:

• Conversion Rate
• Time Spent on Website
• Reach
• Brand Mentions
• Sentiment
• Total Shares

Step 5: Create and Curate Engaging Content

Sadly, many businesses jump straight to this step. Hopefully, this post has made it clear that there are several vital steps that you must take before you start creating and curating engaging content to share on your social media channels.

Let’s now discuss the fun part, posting to social media. You know who your ideal customer is and you used that information to create your social media mission statement. Armed with this information it should be easy for you to begin creating and curating content. So, what exactly is considered content? Here are a few examples of content you could create:

• Images
• Videos
• Blog Posts
• Company News
• Infographics
• eBooks
• Interviews

The list of content ideas goes on and on, but make sure you focus only on forms of content that align with your mission statement, as well as your skill set. Content is what fuels social media, so it is crucial that you consider creating high quality, engaging content as a top priority.

Step 6: Invest In a Social Media Management Tool

Most marketers have a secret, they leverage tools to boost their productivity. Ok, maybe it isn’t a secret, but without tools, marketers would face constant burnout (many do even with tools). When it comes to social media, having a social media management tool allows you to scale your efforts with ease.

One of the main benefits of a social media management tool is the ability to schedule posts ahead of time. Remember that content calendar you created? Make sure your scheduled posts in your social media management tool align with your content calendar.

Step 7: Track, Analyze, Optimize

This may be the most important step when it comes to succeeding on social media. Even the best social media marketers rely on trial and error. It might seem basic, but tracking your results, analyzing the data and then making tweaks to optimize them is crucial.

Each previous step should be re-evaluated after you have had time to analyze the results of your marketing efforts. Let the data drive you. If it is telling you Facebook or Twitter is your most effective channel, consider doubling down.

A great social media strategy is never set in stone. It is a constant work in progress that changes when necessary. So get out there, create a strategy and start optimizing it as you continue to grow and learn more about your business and your audience.

Are you looking for ways to strengthen the impact of the content you create?

It isn’t always easy to generate the buzz you’re looking for.

Knowing what to publish, when and where can greatly increase the visibility and reach of your content.

In this, you will find 26 topics, an A-Z guide, with key points that will help you create a social media content strategy that resonates with your audience.

#1: Align Content Development With Social Media Metrics and Goals

Understand the goals of your company’s social media content delivery to help you develop a more attainable strategy.

Jayson DeMers suggests, “First you need to know what to measure. The end goals dictate the measurement metric.”

He offers metrics for four social media goals:

• If you’re looking to generate traffic, your metric should be: unique visitors from social websites where you’ve run your social media campaigns.
• If you’re looking to create a following, your metric should be: subscribers, followers on your social channels (Facebook, Twitter, etc.).
• If you’re looking to generate interaction, your metric should be: quantity and type of commentary (Facebook comments, Twitter replies/mentions).
• If you’re looking to generate revenue (which is the ultimate purpose), your metric should be: the precise dollar value of every lead a social post generates.

Keep this information in mind when crafting your social media content.

#2: Beef Up Your Content Strategy With a Big-Brand Mindset

Small businesses can learn valuable lessons from the big-brand approach to social media.

Rick Mulready suggests three things big brands do very well that small businesses can emulate:

• Find where their customers talk and “go deep.”
• Create content that people want to talk about.
• Use social media to listen to customers.

Starbucks, with over 34 million fans on Facebook, is a good example.

On Thursday, June 6, they posted a Facebook offer “Enjoy a Grande Iced Coffee, Iced Tea, or Starbucks Refreshers Beverage for $1 on June 7.” The update was shared by 13,931 people and received 1,553 comments. The offer was not tweeted to their 3,852,454 Twitter followers.

By promoting the offer on Facebook, where they have a significantly larger following, Starbucks leveraged the promotion on a platform where they were sure to get higher visibility, giving followers an incentive to follow the brand.

Use a big-brand approach to engage your social media followers.

#3: Concentrate on Increasing Daily Updates

Ensuring that your posts and updates have a good chance to be seen by your target audience is an integral part of a content strategy.

Leo Widrich offers 3 key tactics:

• Frequency: Post around 5-10 times a day on Twitter and 1-4 times a day on Facebook for optimal outcome.
• Timing: Almost all research studies highlight the main work hours from 8 am to 8 pm as good times to tweet and post to Facebook.
• Multiple sites: Post to multiple social sites, in addition to your own blog or website.

  Create a frequent and reliable presence on social networks.

Pay attention to frequency, timing and multiple sites, and you’ll increase the odds of achieving higher levels of social engagement.

#4: Delve Into Data From Social Media Channels

Data from social channels (e.g., Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ and blogs) can be overwhelming unless you have clear goals to guide what you’re looking for and what you’ll do with the information once you find it.

Douglas Karr points out, “The sheer volume of social media data makes it incredibly difficult to analyze.”

He offers five practical ways you can use social data to benefit your business:

• Gauge the real-time market mood.
• Identify relevant issues and content.
• Determine user interests.
• Provide internal operational metrics.
• Execute competitive research.

Explore social data with an actionable plan in mind.

#5: Engage in Real Interactions

Lana Bandoim writes, “Social media engagement is often defined as the real interactions that happen on these networks.” She points out that social media engagement relies on daily interactions among users to survive. While autoposting tools are one way to communicate, more businesses are beginning to understand that engaging with their audiences in real conversations will bring them better results and add more value to their social streams.

Be available to your audience in real time, when you can have more meaningful back-and-forth conversations.

#6: Follow Facebook’s Changes

Got the hang of your Facebook Page? Enjoy it while you can, because based on Facebook’s history, the only thing that’s certain is that Facebook will change.

A Google search for the words “Facebook changes” brings up a great number of results with a range of topics such as changes to timeline, cover photo policy, implications for merchants, mobile layout and much more.

Rachel Sprung suggests 5 ways marketers can keep updated on Facebook changes:

• Follow Facebook’s business changes for regular updates.
• Follow the Facebook tag on TechCrunch.
• Set a Google Alert for Facebook updates.
• Follow new posts on AllFacebook.
• Follow social media and tech experts.

No one wants to have their Page change features on them without having ample time to prepare. Keep up to date with Facebook developments to make sure you don’t miss out on the changes coming down the pike.

#7: Get Acquainted With the New Google Analytics Social Reports

Google‘s new standalone reports, Data Hub Activity and Trackbacks, give marketers more in-depth insights into social networks and how users respond to a business’s content.

As Google describes:

The Data Hub Activity report shows you how people are talking about and engaging with your site content on social networks. You can see the most recent URLs people shared, how and where they shared (via a “reshare” on Google+, for example), and what they said.

The Trackbacks report shows the sites that are linking to your content, and in which context. This can help you replicate successful content and build relationships with those users who frequently link to your site.

Check out the new Google Analytics reports and apply what you’ve learned to your content development strategy.

#8: Help Users Find Your Content With Hashtags

Why should businesses care about hashtags? Steve Cooper sums it up with five reasons:

• Promotions—hashtags make it easy to track a promotion’s activity across many social platforms.
• Unification—you can track a hashtag across all the major networks or filter them individually using new tools such as Tagboard.
• Conversations—giving a customer your website URL doesn’t make it easy to begin a conversation, but hashtags do.
• Targeting—unlike going after a general web surfer on the open web, people who use hashtags are likely to engage in social conversations and therefore are more likely to share a positive experience they’ve had with your brand once you’ve broken through.
• Innovation—because they’re so flexible, simple and ubiquitous, more businesses are able to find creative ways to add power behind the hashtag.

  A hashtag search on Tagboard will help you follow all the conversations.

  Tagboard filters hashtags on major networks.

Use hashtags to include your content in active public conversations.

#9: Introduce Content With Infographics

Infographics are defined as graphic visual representations of information, data or knowledge intended to present complex information quickly and clearly.

Dragan Mestrovic illuminates the benefits of infographics in four persuasive points:

• Infographics are shared on the web, Twitter and Facebook more often than other content online.
• Infographics are easy to understand, consume and share.
• On Twitter, LinkedIn and StumbleUpon, infographics get more shares than other content.
• Marketers love infographics because they offer an easy and powerful viral marketing tool to spread the word about your company’s products and services.

  Infographic of infographics

Infographics are a great way to synthesize information simply and visually as seen in the above image from Vsual.ly. When done well, an infographic is a perfect poster-child for quick and effective dissemination of information via social media.

#10: Justify Frequent Updates and Posts

Why is it that some businesses are posting fast and furiously and others are crawling far behind? Chances are that the businesses posting more frequently had to justify to management the importance of maintaining an active presence.

As we discussed in #5, autoposting does not offer a suitable alternative to real-live human beings who can respond to comments and post breaking news updates.

A tool such as How often do you tweet could shed some insight:

Monitor your social media engagement compared with your competitors’. Share the results with management to help justify a request to dedicate more time and resources to the company’s social media efforts.

#11: Keep Klout in Perspective

Klout utilizes Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Foursquare, Wikipedia and Instagram data to create a Klout user profile that is assigned a “Klout score,” a numerical value between 1 and 100.

Many critics suggest Klout scores aren’t representative of the influence a person has and discount the scores, as well as the thinking behind Klout.

Mark Schaefer offers an alternate view: “The ability to create and move content is the absolute key to online influence. So think about this—to the extent that you could actually measure that, wouldn’t you also be creating an indicator of relative influence?”

When it comes to Klout scores, don’t throw the baby out with the bath water. Instead, ask what you can learn from your competitor’s higher score and how you can do what they’re doing with their content.

#12: Look to the Future of Social Media

The question of social media’s ability to capture leads has been at the forefront of marketers’ minds from the beginning. Twitter is the latest network to offer an approach that will let marketers be more proactive with lead generation cards.

Twitter describes lead generation cards this way: “[The cards] make it easy for users to express interest in what your brand offers. Users can easily and securely share an email address with your business without leaving Twitter or having to fill out a cumbersome form.

“When someone expands your Tweet, they see a description of the offer and a call to action. Their name, @username, and email address are already pre-filled within the card. The user simply clicks a button to send this information directly (and securely) to you.”

At the time of this writing, Twitter stated, “Currently lead generation cards will only be available to our managed clients; we have plans to launch this card globally and to small- and medium-sized businesses soon.”

Stay updated on the availability of Twitter’s lead generation cards so you’ll be ready to use them.

#13: Make Your Blog Mobile-Friendly

I don’t know about you, but I seem to be visiting more and more websites on my mobile phone these days. If I land on a page that isn’t mobile-friendly and it’s slow and difficult to navigate, I’m out of there.

Jon Young provides 8 tips to make your website mobile-friendly:

• Only give visitors content they need.
• Carefully plan your layout.
• Landing pages should be simple.
• Design for multiple browsers and device compatibility.
• Always include social media icons.
• Automate the experience and use mobile redirects.
• Provide a link to your full site.
• Usability should be top priority.

  By using Mobile Meter, we can see what Social Media Examiner looks like on mobile devices.

Don’t give readers any reason to leave your site. Be mobile-ready and -friendly.

#14: Network in All the Right Places

What social networks do your customers favor? Are they on Twitter and Facebook, but haven’t embraced Google+ yet?

Ryan Little writes, “One recent study on social media usage revealed that the average user has two social media accounts. While some users find pleasure in multiple networks, there are people who have found a single community they love and stick with it, even when the temptations of a new social network arise. And there are others who have used various networks and narrowed their usage down until only one platform remained.”

The situation gets a little more complex for businesses. It’s important to keep in mind that your customers may favor one network today and in six months discover that another meets their needs better.

Follow your customers and prospects so you can network in all the right places.

#15: Outsource Content Development as Needed

Can your business keep up to date with all the tasks associated with maintaining social presences (e.g., reading and sharing good content, responding to users’ comments, asking questions to help engage your audience)?

Tim Devaney and Tom Stein write, “Studies show it takes a midsize company about 32 hours a month to capably handle a single social media platform.”

According to Eve Mayer, “The companies that have the most effective social media communications are those that have a combination of internal and external people doing social media.” She advises businesses to take several steps toward a successful social campaign:

• Decide what you want to achieve.
• Don’t spread yourself too thin.
• Keep some social media in-house.
• Send some social media to a consultant, someone who understands social media and can apply that knowledge across many different platforms.

How many hours a month does it realistically take for your business to maintain social presences? Don’t let the shortage of internal resources hamper your online capabilities. Outsource social media to cover your bases.

#16: Present Your Human Side With Photos

Photos and other types of visual content are highly shareable on social networks. Pam Moore suggests that when you post photos of your team, it helps to show your business as a human brand and build relationships with your community.

Social media has made it possible for you to share information about your business in a multitude of ways. Photos can show your serious, productive, silly, creative, successful and charitable sides—but above all, be sure to expose your human side.

#17: Question Readers for More Engagement

Questions are a good example of engaging content and have become a frequent go-to tactic, especially on platforms such as Facebook. Belinda Whittaker suggests three types of good questions to ask:

• Pure fan engagement questions to help tap into the interests and lifestyles of your fans.
• Market and competitive analysis questions to generate conversations and engage with possible leads who are interested in buying that product.
• Product/service feedback questions that can serve as a fast focus group to find what people like most and what areas you can expand into.

Are you asking your readers questions? When they answer, do you reply?

#18: Replicate Your Brand Identity From Platform to Platform

Let’s say you joined Facebook in 2008 and Google+ in 2012. A difference of four years can seem like eternity in the world of social media. Regardless of the year, you’ll want to make sure you have a consistent brand identity today.

Desmond Wong examined how Google, Target, Etsy, Coca-Cola, Disney, Amazon, New Yorker magazine and SEOmoz approach brand consistency across multiple social media platforms. Factors included how they use design and graphics in unison across platforms, and whether they use consistent colors, fonts, icon styles and logos.

If you’re in doubt about whether you demonstrate a consistent brand experience, take a look at all of your pages side by side and see if there are any changes you need to make.

#19: Strengthen In-Person Events With Social Media Promotion

At times you may wonder about the relationship between in-person events and social media, and how they’re able to coexist.

Jay Baer describes 7 ways to use social media to promote in-person events:

• Engage—encourage potential attendees to interact with you early on by crowdsourcing feedback.
• Intrigue—create an event page on event listing sites (e.g., Facebook events, Eventbrite).
• Invigorate potential attendees with videos, blog posts, press releases, Twitter list of attendees, etc.
• Integrate—pick a hashtag for the event to get people talking.
• Inform—ask attendees to vote on session suggestions via text messages, consider QR codes on badges.
• Propagate—stream live video of your event.
• Aggregate—spread the conference presentations as widely as possible; use email links on your website and publish on SlideShare.
• In-person events, combined with online social networking, provide terrific opportunities for businesses to reap the benefits of both worlds.

#20: Talk With Team Members to Keep Up Momentum and Morale

None of us should work in a vacuum. We need to know what’s working and what isn’t. But sometimes the people seeing the analytics aren’t necessarily the ones who are managing the company’s online presences.

Chris Heiler suggests that one critical way to keep your social media team engaged is to provide them with updates on goals. As he says, “You need to keep them updated by sharing your successes with them. Has your website traffic increased significantly since putting together your social media team? Is your blog generating more qualified leads?”

To garner support, show team members the results of their efforts.

#21: Use a Conversational Tone to Engage Readers

Social media has changed the way businesses communicate publicly. In fact, we’re often advised to avoid stiff and stodgy business writing and encouraged to adopt a more conversational tone. And yet sometimes we’re at a loss to know what that means for our business.

Courtney Seiter suggests you explore your culture, community and conversation as you develop your social media voice. As she says, “Take us inside your brand’s experience… listen to the way your community voices their feelings, speak their language, on their terms… and then communicate with personality and authenticity. No strong-arming or hard selling, just talking in a way that’s comfortable, conversational and relatable.”

Use a conversational tone to make your content feel more authentic and engaging to readers.

#22: Visit a Number of Search Engines to Find the Perfect Image

With all the attention images receive on social media, it stands to reason that businesses will be on the lookout for interesting visuals.

Joshua Lockhart provides a list of six visual search engines to help you find the image you want. He suggests TinEye, CC Search, Compfight, FlickrStorm, WeSEE and Google Image Search.

Take a few minutes and check out the visual search engines. When you find one great image you hadn’t previously come across, it will make a difference.

#23: Widen Your Writing Style With Online Tools

When you’re busy writing online content, it may feel like you don’t have the time to stop and look into new writing tools. But when you do, you’re apt to find a treasure trove of useful tips.

That’s how I felt when I came across Sherice Jacob‘s unique list of apps, websites and software programs for online writers: WordCounter, Cliche Finder, Creativity Portal, Unstuck, ZenWriter, Byword, Readability, and SychroEdit.

Writing tools can help recharge your battery while fulfilling specific needs.

#24: Expand Your Article With Relevant Tips

Online readers often gravitate to tips-related articles. A search on the keyword “tips” produced 30,400,000 global monthly searches. Suggested keyword terms included every imaginable type of “tips;” for example, photography, makeup, Sudoku, travel, weight loss. Regardless of the industry, people are often looking for tips.

#25: Yield to Your Customer’s Journey

Social channels differ in the roles they play in the customer’s journey towards making a purchase.

Lee Odden writes, “Understanding the customer experience from awareness to consideration to purchase folds well into the core principle of Optimize—to empathize with your customer and understand how they discover, consume and act on information. By doing so, you can create a practical digital marketing plan and social media marketing strategy that optimizes for attraction, engagement and conversion.”

#26: Zero In on Your Customer’s Interests and Needs

What do your customers care about? What information will help them in their day-to-day work or make their lives easier and more successful?

If you’re going to go to great lengths to craft and publish content, keep your customer’s interests and needs front of mind.

Your Turn

There’s a lot going on in the world of social media marketing today. We’ve covered some solid ways and social media content strategy to help ground your efforts and explored some of the innovative changes that can affect your presence.

With 2016 under way, one thing is clear: social media is now a vital marketing channel for businesses of all sizes. The common question a few years ago, “why should our business use social media?”, is now being replaced with, “how can our business grow with social media marketing?”.

As a social media marketer, this makes me very excited. What doesn’t make me excited is how many businesses are still trying to market on social media without a documented strategy. In this post you will learn the seven steps your business must take to create an effective social media marketing strategy.

Step 1: Audit Your Current Social Presence

“Know thyself. Know the customer. Innovate.” – Beth Comstock

Before you strategize about where you are headed, take a quick look at where you are. A few areas to consider when auditing your business’s social media presence are:

• Which networks are you currently active on
• Are your networks optimized (photo and cover images, bio, URL, etc.)
• Which networks are currently bringing you the most value
• How do your profiles compare to your competitors’ profiles

Step 2: Document Who Your Ideal Customer Is

“The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself.” – Peter Drucker

You will want to get as specific as possible with this part. For example, if you identified your target market as parents it would be ok. However, if you identify your ideal customer as a parent that lives in the United States, is between 30 and 50 years of age, earns over $70,000, primarily uses Facebook and has an interest in outdoors activities you will have much more success.

Even the best marketers will fail if they are marketing to the wrong audience. Answer the following questions to help you come up with a highly focused buyer persona:

• Age
• Location
• Job Title
• Income
• Pain Points (that your business can solve)
• Most Used Social Network

Step 3: Create A Social Media Mission Statement

“What makes you weird, makes you unique and therefore makes you stand out.” – Dan Schawbel

Your social media mission statement will drive your future actions, so make sure you put some thought into it. This statement will make it clear exactly what you plan to use your social media presence for and should reflect your brand identity. Keep in mind your ideal customer when trying to create this statement.

An example mission statement might be “to use social media to educate current and potential customers about digital marketing, with a focus on social media marketing.” Once you have this statement documented, it will make it simple for you to decide what to share and create.

If it doesn’t align with your mission statement, forget about it. Businesses that post randomly without a guiding mission will fail. People follow experts, not generalists.

Step 4: Identify Key Success Metrics

“If you cannot measure it you cannot improve it.” – Lord Kelvin

How will you determine if your social media marketing efforts are successful? I am not just talking about gaining more followers, I am talking about making money. Afterall, it is hard to rationalize spending time and money on something that isn’t improving the bottom line.

A few metrics to consider measuring are:

• Conversion Rate
• Time Spent on Website
• Reach
• Brand Mentions
• Sentiment
• Total Shares

Step 5: Create and Curate Engaging Content

“Content is where I expect much of the real money will be made on the Internet.” – Bill Gates

Sadly, many businesses jump straight to this step. Hopefully this post has made it clear that there are several vital steps that you must take before you start creating and curating engaging content to share on your social media channels.

Let’s now discuss the fun part, posting to social media. You know who your ideal customer is and you used that information to create your social media mission statement. Armed with this information it should be easy for you to begin creating and curating content. So, what exactly is considered content? Here are a few examples of content you could create:

• Images
• Videos
• Blog Posts
• Company News
• Infographics
• eBooks
• Interviews

The list of content ideas goes on and on, but make sure you focus only on forms of content that align with your mission statement, as well as your skill set. Content is what fuels social media, so it is crucial that you consider creating high quality, engaging content as a top priority.

I strongly recommend that you create a content calendar that outlines how often you will post to each network, which topics you will share and when you will share them.

Step 6: Invest In a Social Media Management Tool

“We live in times in which ordinary people can do amazing things using the right tools”

Most marketers have a secret, they leverage tools to boost their productivity. Ok, maybe it isn’t a secret, but without tools marketers would face constant burnout (many do even with tools). When it comes to social media, having a social media management tool allows you to scale your efforts with ease.

One of the main benefits of a social media management tool is the ability to schedule posts ahead of time. Remember that content calendar you created? Make sure your scheduled posts in your social media management tool align with your content calendar.

Step 7: Track, Analyze, Optimize

This may be the most important step when it comes to succeeding on social media. Even the best social media marketers rely on trial and error. It might seem basic, but tracking your results, analyzing the data and then making tweaks to optimize them is crucial.

Each previous step should be re-evaluated after you have had time to analyze the results of your marketing efforts. Let the data drive you. If it is telling you Facebook or Twitter is your most effective channel, consider doubling down.

A great social media strategy is never set in stone. It is a constant work in progress that changes when necessary. So get out there, create a strategy and start optimizing it as you continue to grow and learn more about your business and your audience.

Social media is one of the most powerful tools in your marketing arsenal. If you use it correctly, you can create a strong personal connection with your prospective customers. However, marketers often make the mistake of diving into social media without a clear plan. At best, this is a waste of time – and at worst, it can lead to a PR disaster. To benefit from social media, you need to build a clear strategy that takes into account what you’re trying to achieve, who your customers are and what your competition is doing.

Here are a few social media strategy tips to help get you started:

Understand your goals

As with any journey, the first step in creating a social-media marketing strategy is to understand where you want to go. What is the purpose of your social media marketing efforts? Do you want to create or raise awareness of your brand? Are you looking to increase sales, or website traffic, or both? Is your goal to build customer loyalty and increase retention? These goals aren’t mutually exclusive, but you should focus on one or two: If you spread yourself too thin, you’re not going to accomplish anything.

Create measurable objectives

It’s time to set clear objectives based on your goals. Focus on the S.M.A.R.T. social media strategy for goal setting to ensure your objectives are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time based.

For example, if you’re a B2B marketer looking to increase sales, you might decide that you want to generate an additional 100 online leads a month. On the other hand, if your goal is brand awareness, then you might want to increase the number of times your brand is mentioned on social media by 50 percent. In all cases, these objectives should be directly tied to your business goals, and they should be achievable. Otherwise, they’re just wishful thinking. Also, make sure your objectives are time limited. For instance, you need to achieve that 50 percent growth in brand awareness within six months, not at some undefined time in the future.

Related: Adopting a Winning Social Strategy

Once you set your objectives, make sure you can measure them. Find the right tools to track and analyze each one, so that you can quantify your progress. Not only will this let you know when you have arrived, it will also help you to spot problems early and adjust your course if you need to.

Characterize your customers

Now you know where you’re going, but you still don’t know how to get there. A successful social-media strategy is all about targeting the right people with the right messages. To do this, you need to understand your audience. For instance, there’s no point in targeting everyone in the 18 to 35 age group if you really want to get to upwardly mobile young professionals who are technology enthusiasts.

The best way to do this is to create buyer personas. Sit down and create a detailed profile of your ideal customer. Start by giving them a name. How old are they? What is their income? Do they have children? What do they like or dislike? What motivates them? And so on. If you have more than one ideal customer, create a persona for each.

Look at the competition

When it comes to social media, your competition can tell you a lot about what works and what doesn’t. After all, they’re targeting the same customers  you are. If you ignore your competition, you’re giving up a fantastic opportunity to learn from their successes and mistakes.

To research your competitors, start by picking three or four of the top ones. Find out which social networks they’re active on, and study their content. Is it funny or serious? What kind of cultural references do they use? Do they talk about their product primarily, or do they focus on other things?

For example, if you sell snowboards, do your competitors talk about how their snowboards perform, or do they post amazing snowboarding videos that just happen to include their products? Then, see how well each competitor is doing (e.g. how much engagement  — comments, shares, likes) — they get on their Facebook updates.) This will let you determine which strategies work and which ones don’t.

Develop your messages

Now you have a handle on your ideal customers and your competition, it’s time to start building your messages. This isn’t detailed content; rather it’s the top level set of key messages that you think will resonate with your customers based on the personas you have created. Choose two or three messages, then break each one down another level creating a simple messaging hierarchy.

There’s nothing wrong with adopting some of your competitors’ successful messaging ideas but also try to create original messages that set you apart — this will help you to create a unique brand voice. Don’t be afraid to get creative as your social media presence should be exciting, not boring.

Choose your channels

Not all social-media platforms are the same. You need to choose the right ones for the products or services you’re selling.

For example, LinkedIn is a good platform to target for business-to-business sales while Pinterest may be better if you’re in the fashion business. Some of these channels will become obvious when you look at your competitors but see if any relevant channels were overlooked.

You should also identify influencers who can reach your target audience. Good bloggers command high levels of trust in their readers and are indispensable in creating buzz around your brand. Take the time to target the most appropriate bloggers – sites such as mine, Tomoson, can help you to do this.

Build a content plan

Finally, you need to develop a strong content plan that will deliver engaging material. The content needs to align with your overall messaging and be appropriate for the channels you’re using. This is more than just product information – think about how you can deliver real value to your audience. Don’t just stick to one type of media – a mix of videos, guides, infographics and other styles will engage your potential customers more effectively. Also, don’t think of content as something you post once. You need to have an ongoing presence on social media so use these social media strategy, and that includes delivering fresh content on a regular basis.

Do you need help getting started with your social media marketing strategy?

Do you know what to include?

Goals and objectives guide your social media strategy to help you successfully connect with your customers.

In this article I’ll share what you need to include in your social media marketing strategy so it works from day one.

#1: Identify Business Goals

Every piece of your social media marketing strategy serves the goals you set. You simply can’t move forward without knowing what you’re working toward.

Look closely at your company’s overall needs and decide how you want to use social media to contribute to reaching them.

You’ll undoubtedly come up with several personalized goals, but there are a few that all companies should include in their strategy—increasing brand awareness, retaining customers and reducing marketing costs are relevant to everyone.

I suggest you choose two primary goals and two secondary goals to focus on. Having too many goals distracts you and you’ll end up achieving none.

#2: Set Marketing Objectives

Goals aren’t terribly useful if you don’t have specific parameters that define when each is achieved. For example, if one of your primary goals is generating leads and sales, how many leads and sales do you have to generate before you consider that goal a success?

Marketing objectives define how you get from Point A (an unfulfilled goal) to Point B (a successfully fulfilled goal). You can determine your objectives with the S-M-A-R-T approach: Make your objectives specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound.

Using our previous example, if your goal is to generate leads and sales, a specific marketing objective may be to increase leads by 50%. In order to measure your progress, choose which analytics and tracking tools you need to have in place.

Setting yourself up for failure is never a good idea. If you set an objective of increasing sales by 1,000%, it’s doubtful you’ll meet it. Choose objectives you can achieve, given the resources you have.

You’ve taken the time to refine your goals so they’re relevant to your company, so extend that same consideration to your objectives. If you want to get support from your C-level executives, ensure your objectives are relevant to the company’s overall vision.

Attaching a timeframe to your efforts is imperative. When do you intend to achieve your goal(s)? Next month? By the end of this year?

Your objective of increasing leads by 50% may be specific, measurable, achievable and relevant, but if you don’t set a deadline for achieving the goal, your efforts, resources and attention may be pulled in other directions.

#3: Identify Ideal Customers

If a business is suffering from low engagement on their social profiles, it’s usually because they don’t have an accurate ideal customer profile.

Buyer personas help you define and target the right people, in the right places, at the right times with the right messages.

When you know your target audience’s age, occupation, income, interests, pains, problems, obstacles, habits, likes, dislikes, motivations and objections, then it’s easier and cheaper to target them on social or any other media.

The more specific you are, the more conversions you’re going to get out of every channel you use to promote your business.

#4: Research Competition

When it comes to social media marketing, researching your competition not only keeps you apprised of their activity, it gives you an idea of what’s working so you can integrate those successful tactics into your own efforts.

Start by compiling a list of at least 3-5 main competitors. Search which social networks they’re using and analyze their content strategy. Look at their number of fans or followers, posting frequency and time of day.

Also pay attention to the type of content they’re posting and its context (humorous, promotional, etc.) and how they’re responding to their fans.

The most important activity to look at is engagement. Even though page admins are the only ones who can calculate engagement rate on a particular update, you can get a good idea of what they’re seeing.

For example, let’s say you’re looking at a competitor’s last 20-30 Facebook updates. Take the total number of engagement activities for those posts and divide it by the page’s total number of fans. (Engagement activity includes likes, comments, shares, etc.)

You can use that formula on all of your competitors’ social profiles (e.g., on Twitter you can calculate retweets and favorites).

Keep in mind that the calculation is meant to give you a general picture of how the competition is doing so you can compare how you stack up against each other.

#5: Choose Channels and Tactics

Many businesses create accounts on every popular social network without researching which platform will bring the most return. You can avoid wasting your time in the wrong place by using the information from your buyer personas to determine which platform is best for you.

If your prospects or customers tell you they spend 40% of their online time on Facebook and 20% on Twitter, you know which primary and secondary social networks you should focus on.

When your customers are using a specific network, that’s where you need to be—not everywhere else.

Your tactics for each social channel rely on your goals and objectives, as well as the best practices of each platform.

For example, if your goal is increasing leads and your primary social network is Facebook, some effective tactics are investing in Facebook advertising or promotion campaigns to draw more attention to your lead magnets.

#6: Create a Content Strategy

Content and social media have a symbiotic relationship: Without great content social media is meaningless and without social media nobody will know about your content. Use them together to reach and convert your prospects.

There are three main components to any successful social media content strategy: type of content, time of posting and frequency of posting.

The type of content you should post on each social network relies on form and context. Form is how you present that information—text only, images, links, video, etc.

Context fits with your company voice and platform trends. Should your content be funny, serious, highly detailed and educational or something else?

There are many studies that give you a specific time when you should post on social media. However, I suggest using those studies as guidelines rather than hard rules. Remember, your audience is unique, so you need to test and figure out the best time for yourself.

Posting frequency is as important as the content you share. You don’t want to annoy your fans or followers, do you?

Finding the perfect frequency is crucial because it could mean more engagement for your content or more unlikes and unfollows. Use Facebook Insights to see when your fans are online and engaging with your content.

#7: Allocate Budget and Resources

To budget for social media marketing, look at the tactics you’ve chosen to achieve your business goals and objectives.

Make a comprehensive list of the tools you need (e.g., social media monitoring, email marketing and CRM), services you’ll outsource (e.g., graphic design or video production) and any advertising you’ll purchase. Next to each, include the annual projected cost so you can have a high-level view of what you’re investing in and how it affects your marketing budget.

Many businesses establish their budget first, and then select which tactics fit that budget. I take the opposite approach. I establish a strategy first, and then determine the budget that fits that strategy.

If your smm strategy execution fees exceed your budget estimate, prioritize your tactics according to their ROI timeframe. The tactics with the fastest ROI (e.g., advertising and social referral) take priority because they generate instant profit you can later invest into long-term tactics (fan acquisition, quality content creation or long-term engagement).

#8: Assign Roles

Knowing who’s responsible for what increases productivity and avoids confusion and overlapping efforts. Things may be a bit messy in the beginning, but with time team members will know their roles and what daily tasks they’re responsible for.

When everyone knows his or her role, it’s time to start planning the execution process. You can either plan daily or weekly. I don’t advise putting a monthly plan together because lots of things will come up and you may end up wasting time adapting to the new changes.

You can use social media marketing strategy tools like Basecamp or ActiveCollab to manage your team and assign tasks to each member. These tools save you tons of time and help you stay organized.