Even before you get your first customers, it’s important to think about how you’re going to market your business effectively. This guide will walk you through the steps of creating an effective social media marketing strategy that will bring you success in any industry, from brick-and-mortar shops to ecommerce stores, service providers and beyond. Read on to learn more!

1. Know Where to Find Your Target Market

Part of understanding effective marketing strategy is knowing where to find your target market. Are you looking for an audience with a certain age range? A particular gender? Someone who makes a specific income level? Knowing who you’re trying to reach is critical for narrowing down your marketing strategy and making sure that your message hits home with potential clients.

2. Develop a Message for Your Target Market

When defining your target market, it’s critical to create a message tailored to them. Doing this helps increase your chances of creating a product they want or need, which will lead to them buying from you. The key is to figure out how and why they would buy what you’re selling. What are their biggest problems? What keeps them up at night? What motivates them in life? Use these answers as levers for developing your marketing strategy.

3. Set Up Your Social Media Business Accounts

It’s important to ensure you have all your social media business accounts set up correctly. Each platform is a little bit different, so follow the procedures and fill out as much information as possible. Remember the idea of this is to make it as easy as possible for your customers to find you. It also teaches each platform who to show your content to.

4. Identify Content Your Target Market Likes

Social media is about more than just being on your favourite networks—it’s about providing value, having a conversation and getting involved. There are a variety of ways to find engaging and useful content, and each platform is different. One of the best ways is to go to the platform your customers are on, go to the search bar and type in your keywords or niche. Find what’s trending, what has engagement and what’s going viral. Make notes or save this content and see if you can use it as inspiration.

5. Create Images for Your Social Media

Using social media has become a common way for business owners and entrepreneurs to reach out to their target audience. For your online presence (and corresponding brand) to be successful, it’s vital that you learn how to create images for your social media platforms. With images, you can increase engagement, connect with potential customers, and grow your followers and fan base. Using a graphic design program like Canva is perfect for this.

6. Post on Social Media

Many people use social media platforms on a daily basis – making it a powerful tool for reaching potential customers. How does one go about posting on social media? You create the image/video, upload it to whatever platform your using, create written content with a hook, something interesting and a call to action at the end and use appropriate hashtags if needed.

7. Automate Your Social Media

Social media can be a great way for any business to market itself and its services, but as with any task it takes time and effort. Automating your social media marketing will give you more time to focus on building up your brand. To automate your social media, I suggest using the platforms’ internal scheduling tools.

8. Evaluate Results, Adjust and Improve

You can’t measure results if you don’t know what you’re measuring. Define your marketing goals so you can evaluate your progress and adjust accordingly. Don’t be afraid of making changes; in fact recognise that most businesses need more than one plan before they find success.