Answer the right questions before you start your Social Media Strategy and you will achieve the best results for your brand. Businesses are key players on the social media networks today. Social Media is a direct and real-time way of relationship of consumers with brands. Social media users really connect in a personal level with their favourite brands.

Social media platforms are in fact a new storefront for products or services, a way of reaching new clients and it can also be another sales funnel that actually increase sales and revenue. For all those reasons, most businesses, entrepreneurs and brands do not want to miss the huge opportunity of having a presence on Social Media.

But in many cases, if you do not have the right approach to your marketing strategy and if you don’t answer the right questions, you may end up wasting your efforts and time and not reaching any clear positive results.

So if you want to avoid failure and wasting your efforts, answer the following questions before starting your strategy:

1. What is my final goal?

The first thing you need to think about is what is the final goal of your business. What do you want to achieve as a business owner, entrepreneur or a blogger? And how can you achieve that final goal? In most cases, the answers boil down to one: increasing your revenue. To achieve that goal of increasing your revenue, you simply need to increase your conversions, sell more or get more clients.

This sounds pretty obvious but oftentimes we lose perspective and focus on doing things that are not leading us to our final goal. So it is important to make sure that you are clear on the final goal of every (lucrative) business.

“Time = life; therefore, waste your time and waste your life, or master your time and master your life.” – Alan Lakein

2. Who is my target audience?

The second question you need to ask yourself is who is your target audience. You most likely already have this clear through your experience, but it is a great idea to create a “customer avatar” or “customer persona” to be able to identify that particular potential customer.

A “customer persona” or “avatar” in Marketing is a representation of the traits, features and behavior of a business’ target customer. Having a customer persona can help you to identify and address your target audience, and you can create more than just one avatar, if you have more than one type of customers.

One of the things that the avatar is going to help you with is in terms of taking a decision of what type of message your brand is going to send. The message is important indeed, but how you express that message is vital to reach your customer. You need to speak their language!

Once you know who your “persona” is, you need to find out where can you find your “persona”. There are probably lots of places where you can find out your target audience but in most cases, today you can find your avatar on social media. Once you are clear about what you want to achieve and who is that particular customer that can give you that goal, it’s now time to look at the social media channels and ask the next questions:

3. Where is my target audience?

Where on Social Media can I find my target audience? To properly answer this question, think about your persona or personas, and find out what their favourite social media platforms are. Also, ask yourself within the main social platforms where in particular can they be found.

For example if your target audience is young people, they will most likely be on Snapchat. If they are millennials mums, they will mostly be on Instagram. If your business is about selling services to professionals, you will probably find them on LinkedIn. If your persona is a forty-something guy, you probably will find him on Facebook.

Go deeper once you figure that out. That forty-something year old guy on Facebook probably is also a member of Facebook groups related to sports, or tv shows. The millennial mum is probably interested in fashion accounts on Instagram. The professional on LinkedIn probably follows some experts or “gurus” in a certain professional field.

In other words, here is where you have to take your time to research and find out where your potential customers can be found. Once you know this, you can select the right social channels where your business should be present. When you know where your potential customers are, you will know where to concentrate your social efforts to avoid dispersion and waist of time.

“To be happy, we must not be too concerned with others.” – Albert Camus

4. How can I connect with my target audience?

In this final question the most accurate answer is: with your message. Your message is WHAT you have to say and most importantly in terms of connection with your target audience, HOW you say it.

“How you say it” equals to your content: your content goes from a range of elements that goes from your images to your texts, and everything in between. The secret of having an engaging message that connects with your target audience, is that it must be aligned with your potential customers’ language, colours, icons, style, images, captions, expressions, etc. All that “look and feel” your brand is projecting, must connect with your target audience, so that your message can penetrate that barrier and they can receive it.

And finally, one of the core values of your message is “What you say”. This means you have to describe or talk about your business, your brand, your services or your products, but the key in social media to make your message powerful is to be CONVERSATIONAL.

Making your message conversational simply means don’t try to sell! Focus on offering solutions to your clients and engage in conversations on the platforms or communities where your target audience is!

Conclusion

Make sense of your social media presence. Answer these questions and let them lead you to the right choices on your social media strategy. This way you will be able to build a targeted community where your business will get lots of opportunities to grow,

Tell me, what do you currently do to make a successful approach to your social media strategy? Please leave your thoughts in the comment section below!

Image courtesy of Twenty20.com