Many businesses find creating a competitive social media strategy overwhelming, especially without a marketing expert to counsel them. The primary goal has to be to define the objectives a startup wants to achieve and start with small steps, which in turn should be part of a larger social media marketing vision. This means that every social media interaction should be guided by a plan and driven towards pre-determined goals, with well-defined ORM.
Why do so many brands have failed social media strategies, though most have social media profiles? It’s because they tend to overlook the need of auctioning a strategy that is imperative for brand awareness, customer acquisition, and lead generation. Without one, a presence is obsolete.
Below are a few steps any startup can follow to get a plan moving and action a social media strategy:
- Build a profile: Create a well-curated social media profile, on one platform and master it. Update it constantly and tweak it to get the best interaction before you move on to more platforms. Create the same handle name to maintain consistency. Brands like Nike and AirBnb can be used as examples for good social media profiles.
- Identify your target audience and market demographics: Sectioning and identifying your target audience is vital as it will help understand the kind of posts that need to be made. Tools such as Google Analytics, Baremetrics and Segment can help you decipher your target audience better.
- Create a content strategy: What would the vision and language of the brand be? How often would you post? What form of content would you post? What kind of communication would you post on what day of the week? These are some points that can help firm up the content strategy.
- Engage with your audience/followers: A positive approach and conversation are more likely to result in converting a customer. Leave comments on profiles, this will pique audience interest and lead them to your pages.
- Go Live: Use live videos to ask questions, interact, and showcase company culture, events or product launches. It drives real-time engagement and practices calling out names and positive comments and tracking campaign performances. This includes both live and published content. Performance data acts as perfect study material to analyse the TG reaction to content being published.
- Stay active, stay consistent: A continuous conversation with your audience will keep them enthralled and intrigued. An intrigued follower, with the right information and hook, can be persuaded to shift from a latent to an active customer. Somedays consistency might be challenging, for times like these use tools to automate and streamline publishing.
There is no thumb rule as to what strategy can work for a startup, across industries. Social media strategies need to be curated depending on the brand’s vision and positioning, target audience demographics, time of the year and budget. Every strategy goes through tweaks and edits until it can be its most productive self. Once it does work, make the most of it since they don’t necessarily have a long shelf life.
A notable strategy by Swiggy, back in 2019 was the ‘Voice of Hunger’ Campaign, where Swiggy asked Instagram users to record their voices through voice notes while creating waveforms which resembled the shapes of a kebab skewer, a nacho, a pancake, and more. Many influencers, popular musicians and rappers participated, the result of which was beyond successful.
This campaign was awarded 3 Bronze Lions at Cannes Lions and drove a 2,100% surge in traffic while increasing Swiggy’s followers by 40%. The brand dipped into recent tech, at the time and published user-generated content, convincing the audience to do it for bragging rights, apart from the lucrative incentive of a year’s worth of food vouchers.
Another interesting campaign that secured Spotify as a household name & into Internet slag was the ‘There’s a playlist for the’ campaign. This campaign was designed to touch every emotion, every mood and every relatable life event, with a playlist. Their media company created 3 billion loyalists, for every moor across multiple demographics using location-based listening analysis to reach over 72,000 social media shares and working its way into internet lingo.
While strategies can be unique, tools like customer segmentation, social listening, geo-targeting and adapting to trends in technology can take your campaign a long way.
Reinvent, revise and reimagine your campaigns before they are redundant and result in your page doing dormant. Fostering effective social media strategies means you’ll need to master the basics of social media research and communication methods. We also have enough data to support that relying on organic social media marketing alone might be a risky affair for your organisation. Performance marketing gives your brand the nudge it needs to reach your audience, especially if you are a new player in the industry.
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