Is your social media strategy just kind of … ok? Like, is it perfectly adequate? Just kinda chugging along and existing? You oughta do something about that. Namely, inject it with some adrenaline ‘cause your social media strategy should be much more than adequate. Now, before you go and grab a bunch of Tide Pods and call everyone into your office for a group Tide Pod challenge, try these things first …

Write Down Your Social Media Marketing Strategy

Just like with studying, writing down marketing plans makes a big difference. According to CoSchedule, marketing professionals who take the time to document their marketing strategy are over five times more likely to achieve success.  In addition to that, 88% of people who set concrete marketing goals achieve them. You can split your strategy into high-level and low-level portions.

High-Level

This section should include overarching goals for your strategy. It should:

• Describe how social media fits within your overall digital marketing plan.
• Include guiding principles for brand voice.
• State what values you want your brand to express.

Low-Level

The low-level strategy is more about the nuts and bolts about how things are going to be done. It should:

• State how often you want to post per week or per month.
• Outline what platforms you plan to post to.
• Plan a budget for the next quarter.
• Determine the sources of the content you want to share.

Putting it in writing helps you stay organized and consistent and makes it easier to share your strategy with others like employees or contractors. You can simply show them. The biggest benefit is that it prevents your social media strategy from being aimless, which is the worst thing for a social media strategy.

Coordinate Social Posts with Specific Campaigns

A lot of social media posting is of the “just because” variety, as in: you post just because you feel like you should be posting something. Of course, you should be posting just because it’s something that businesses basically have to do nowadays, but in 2018, try tying some of your posts to special events, promotions or specific sales campaigns. For these special events, create customized graphics and post ideas that are different from your usual posts. Think visually so you can capture attention and use some strong call-to-action posts to try and collect early sign ups to your event. These specialized, limited time social media campaigns help you evolve quickly with your platforms by getting you to set concrete goals at the beginning of the campaign and monitoring how close you came to those goals at the end. This allows you to make more informed decisions for the next special event campaign. Think of each specialized campaign as a little learning experience and a chance to experiment.

Develop Content Marketing Assets and Landing Pages Just for Social

A lot of business social media is just shooting links at people, but you are doing it wrong if you are just being a link cannon. Make 2018 the year you stop scheduling a bunch of links to be fired at your followers. Instead, make it the year that you start creating content pieces of real value for your audience. Not just blog posts, but content pieces that get actual traction like infographics, which get around 41.5% engagement, on average. Only video gets better ROI than infographics. Along with these content pieces, have multiple landing pages so you can send specific audience segments to different landing pages rather than sending them all to a generic “Contact Us” page. One lead capture landing page might be focused on 18-year-old college students while another one is geared toward 30-something professionals and another one toward new parents. Each of these segments could have their own call to action that would cater specifically to them, increasing your chances for getting them as a lead. Developing specific content marketing assets and tying them to targeted landing pages helps connect your social media posts to revenue generating customer actions.  

Invest in Professional Video

Oh, look! This post has something about video. Who woulda seen that coming?

[First we start with some statistics.]

Businesses that use video marketing:

• Generate 66% more qualified customer leads than businesses that don’t use it.
• Earn 54% more brand awareness than businesses that don’t use it.
• Experience significant benefits and positive ROI, according to 77% of small business owners who use it.

[Then we layer on some logic.]

If you haven’t done it yet, dip your toes into video by turning a photo slideshow into a short video or make a few live videos that showcase your expertise in an area. (Answering customer FAQs is a great way to do that.)

[Now we slyly tell you how what we do fits into this.]

If you really want to upgrade your social media presence in 2018, though, you need to invest in some professionally done video assets that you can share on social media because not only will these get attention, their professionality will reflect the quality of your services. Only a high quality business would bother investing the money in a high quality video, right? They provide you something to link to within other campaigns and you can embed them on your site, in your blog or in an email. They make a much better sales pitch than a bunch of text and you can reuse them for multiple purposes. For an especially attention grabbing video, we suggest a high-quality animated video.

[See how smooth that was?]

Promote Posts to Targeted Audience Segments via Paid Social Advertising

With Facebook recently announcing that business posts are going to have less organic reach on the platform, paid advertising is going to be important in 2018 on Facebook and other platforms. Target accordingly. Put all this stuff together (but especially the animated video part) and you’ll have yourself a completely revamped social media strategy for 2018 that will rocket your brand to the top of people’s minds when thinking about your industry. Click here to use our price estimation calculator to see approximately how much a professionally done animated business video will cost.