Your social media platforms can be a powerful tool for enhancing your brand image and connecting with your target audience. Through social media, you’re able to have conversations, create a buzz, and promote your products or services directly to your target audience. However, with each new year, your strategy to promote on social media can change.

With the new year coming up, most of us are thinking about the goals we’d like to achieve with our businesses. Whether it’s attracting new leads, creating repeat clients, or just improving your online image, creating a strong social media strategy can help you get there.

However, as social media is becoming a staple in just about every company’s marketing strategy, you need to go above and beyond to meet your target audience’s expectations. To see high-quality results from your social media strategy in 2018, you need to stand out.

It isn’t difficult to enhance your social media strategy to prepare for 2018. To help you get a step above your competition, here are three easy ways you can improve your social strategy to start seeing better results.

1. Know Your Audience

The success of your social media marketing comes down to how well you can connect with your target audience. If you’re not producing content that they want to engage with, they’ll skip right over your social media posts – causing you to waste your time, energy, and budget.

If you want to get more attention, you need to take a moment to really understand who your audience is. Get to know their fears, problems, concerns, as well as what they enjoy or find entertaining. Understand what they’re looking for when the log on to a social media platform and what content they’ll be most likely to engage with.

The better you know your audience, the easier it will be to tailor your content for their unique needs. When you start posting directly for the individuals you’d like to connect with, you can see your engagement rates skyrocket. Listen to what your target audience is looking for, engaging with, and try to create content that fits their unique needs and preferences.

2. Include Video Content

When creating your social media strategy, you want to consider what kinds of content will make your target audience stop scrolling through their newsfeeds and timelines. While high-quality images used to do the trick, you need to get a bit more creative about what you’re posting in 2018.

Regardless of who your target audience is, there is a strong chance they identify highly with visual content. To help pull in their attention, you can create videos that you can share on social media. Not only are videos a great way to get your audience to stop and pay attention, it is also a fun way to share content and information.

However, when you create your social media videos, remember that your customers are busy people. Play around with different video lengths, or create teasers for longer videos you have hosted on your website. Find the right video length to encourage your social media friends and followers to watch the content all the way through.

3. Define a Content Creation and Promotion Budget

When you’re developing any marketing strategy, you need to consider what returns on your investments you’re seeing. In order to determine if your social media strategy is successful, you need to be able to identify if you’re bringing in more money than you’re spending. To do this, you need to create a budget.

A budget for content creation allows you to develop high-quality materials that you’ll be excited to share across your social media platforms. Through budgeting, you can outsource projects to experts who are able to improve your content quality and help you see higher returns. However, when budgeting you also need to think about how you’ll promote your new content.

Include different advertising strategies and techniques within your social media marketing budget. While social media does allow for some free marketing, boosting your posts and promoting your content through ads can help you reach new leads and improve your conversions. Additionally, social media allows you to highly target your audience – ensuring you’re only paying to reach the best quality leads for your business.

Putting It All Together

Developing the right social media strategy for your target audience can take some time, as well as a bit of trial and error. However, when you do the right research, create engaging content, and develop a budget that allows you to create and promote your posts to the right audience, you can connect with more high-quality leads.

Make 2018 your year for social media with these three strategy-enhancing tips!

Not ready to execute a social media strategy on your own?  Our team can help assist you in finding your target audience and meeting your goals.  Learn More about our Social Media Marketing Services.