How to Develop a Winning Social Media Advertising Strategy

Social media is one of the most powerful tools to get visibility and reach out and find new audiences for your business, bar none, but working in it without a proper strategy is like throwing random ingredients together into a pot, hoping to create a meal on Gordon Ramsey’s level, but that is not how it works.

There are so many moving parts involved in social media marketing that if you start working without an idea, you are shooting yourself in the foot before you can even get started. So, here is a little guide to give you a working structure on how to develop a winning advertising strategy.

Goals and Reaching Out

Every plan, whether that is social media or something else, begins with setting clear objectives and goals that help you define what exactly you want to achieve and dictate how you invest your energy and time, funneling them into the proper channels so to speak.

This goes without saying, of course, but your objectives should be smart: measurable, specific, relevant, and attainable. Once you have your goals, you can break them down into smaller, bite-sized objectives that are easier to alter, scale, and keep track of as you work on attaining the larger goals in the plan.

Start by reaching out to professionals, like this creative advertising agency in Sydney, and informing them of what you are looking for and what your objectives are. Some examples of these objectives include increasing your brand awareness by x% in one year for example, or growing your followers and audience on social media to x amount of followers in one year, to name but a few. 

Target Audience

If you want to create an almost foolproof plan, you need to know and understand who you are communicating with, what your audience looks like, down to their pain points and most pressing needs, and the effectiveness of this communication is based on how well you know and understand said audience.

If you do not know who you are dealing with, your content is more than likely to just miss the mark, so research your target audience, using social media tools to give you some much-needed insight. This is one of those things where you should not go with your gut, or make assumptions you cannot back up, where data, actual proof, is available.

When you define your audience based on psychographic, demographic, and geographic information, you get the insight you need to help determine what kind of content will perform the best. 

Social Media Channels

You need to select your social media channels wisely. Just because a platform exists certainly does not mean you should be on it, and there are many, many platforms. The platform or platforms you end up choosing should be informed by the research you did on your audience, which means you go where your audience is.

It is also important that you narrow down where you want to spend most of your time, attention, and energy based on your brand and target audience, as you do not want to spread yourself too thin over too many platforms, none of which garner real interest or a following.

You have to look at it this way; creating a social media presence takes a lot of resources, time, and work, which increases exponentially with each new platform, so giant corporations can afford to do so.

But when you are a small or medium enterprise, it naturally gets significantly more difficult, with a limited budget at your disposal. Quality, not quantity, is the name of the game here, so take account of the resources you have and go from there.

Engaging Content

Creating engaging, interesting content that resonates with your audience and also attracts new people is vital, entire brands have built an audience just by tweeting memes and casually engaging with their followers. Some of the most prominent examples of this include KFC or Opera GX, so depending on your brand and audience, decide what will work best, but whatever you do choose, make sure it’s high quality, with the effort put in.

Try to be original, follow trends without falling captive to them, use humor to your advantage, and very importantly, stay consistent. Do not start spamming your audience with multiple posts a day for a few weeks straight and then just disappear. Instead, post maybe once or twice a day, but stay consistent in doing so; that is a vital factor of social media. 

Some brands and businesses have been catapulted into success and recognition based almost entirely on their social media alone. It takes effort, focus, and willingness to understand and communicate, but if wielded correctly, social media might be the big break you were waiting for.