For any job, hobby, or just life in general, goal setting is important. Goal setting helps you, your business, or your skills stay in a continuous motion of growing and improving. When it comes to a businesses social media appearance, goal setting is crucial.

Why?

Goal setting holds you accountable! In social media, this not only keeps you accountable for consistently creating quality content, but also keeps you accountable to your followers, consumers, and potential customers. Goal setting lends to a bigger goal of build brand trust and loyalty with customers.

Outlining your goals and setting an action plan makes it easier to follow through. This can also help with balancing a marketing budget and knowing where to focus your time and energy.

One key tip in goal setting. SMART.

Make your goals, specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time sensitive.

Best of luck,

The Strategist

Instagram is a great place to develop your brand visually. It is important to understand what kind of creative content your followers, consumers, and target audience are drawn to as this increases customer engagement with your brand.

Think of Instagram like the visual representation of your business or brands voice. Pretty important right? Here a few Instagram specific tips to help you out:

1. Giveaways. Do them right and this will jumpstart your engagement and overall brand awareness.
2. Captions. Keep the short and sweet, but don’t forget the hashtags. Oh, and bonus points for asking a question in the caption. This will intrigue your audience. Use less than 10 carefully chosen words to hit the sweet spot.
3. Data. The data never lies. Looking back on previous post analytics can be super helpful in determining what your consumers like to see and what you can do better! Always improve.
4. Timing is everything. Once you know your target audience, you know when their most active on Instagram. Instagram analytics also shares this information with you. Use it and stick to it.
5. Quality over quantity. Be consistent but intentional.

Best of Luck,

The Strategist

Hi there,

Here is a little tip for you and your business today, choose the RIGHT social network. However, thats not as easy and straight forward as it may seem. In order to keep up with best social media practices for your business it is important to first know what social platforms are most appeal and used by your intended audience.

There is a three part system to determining which platform to use:

1. Know your audience. Identify who they are and do some research. Recent studies have found that the most used social network for 30-49 year olds is Facebook, while 18- 24 year olds use Instagram the most.
2. Know your goals. Sales goals, creative goals, there are so many. Are you using social media to build relationships with your customers or offer customer support? Or are you using social media to create a visually appeal representation of your business?
3. Find your audience. Once you know who they are and you know what your goals are its time to make it happen. Know when your audience is most active on social media and grow from there.

-The Strategist

The success of a businesses social media is dependent on the engagement of consumers. There are many different factors that determine the level of engagement social media accounts can deliver to a business. There are also many different forms of social media engagement. Lets discuss a few.

First, it is important to understand what causes and encourages consumers to engage with a businesses social media accounts. Compelling stories and a sense of humor are two things to consider here. Implying a call to action in post and staying consistent can increase engagement as well. Another is asking questions.

Asking your consumers questions on social media not only makes your business appear more personal and relatable to the consumer but lets your consumer know that you value their input. When the consumer feels valued, brand loyalty increases.

Questions can come in many forms on social media. You can ask questions through polls that give your business real feedback. Or you can ask questions and encourage engagement by making a contest or giveaway out of it. There are so many ways to increase consumer engagement with your social media, but asking questions is a fool proof way to benefit both your business and the consumer.

Best of luck!

-The Strategist

Hey there!

Welcome to a little strategy session with The Strategist.

What does strategy mean in term of your business? It is important to master best practices for your social media but that first means mastering a strategy that works for YOUR brand.

While this may seem overwhelming at first, strategy can be built around 3 simple topics:

1. Who is your target audience
2. What appeals to them
3. What times are those individuals most active on social networks

Knowing who your target audience is will help determine what social networks they use most often. Knowing what appeals to your target audience will help define your brands voice, how you approach and engage with your target audience and what kind of content to create to appeal to them. Knowing what times your audience are most active on social networks will help determine what times to post your carefully curated content to have the most reach and impact.

All of the smaller details fall within those three questions. Details like voice, posting frequency, customer engagement, theme of content, user generated content, analysis, goal setting, and so much more. Start with the big three and build from there.

Best of luck

-The Strategist

Lets first start this off by saying there are so many rules to so many things that this list may seem annoying and over kill. We agree. There truly are not many rules to social media. Instead, its all about creating an environement that your brands voice can be understood and your consumers can feel seen and heard. There are few things that break the “rules” of social media, as most social netorks are platforms for creativity and communication which have liimiting boundries.

However, when it comes to consumer engagement and social media best practices there are a few “do’s and don’ts” that can be viewed more as guidelines rather than restricting rules.

The Do’s

• Actively engage with your consumers.
• Post frequently and consistently
• Respond to customer concerns and questions timely, professionally, and authentically
• Use hashtags to reach potential consumers and grow business
• Utilize social networks analytical and business insights to track growth
• Always include a call to action
• LEARN EVERYTHING YOU CAN ABOUT YOUT CONSUMERS

Then Don’ts

• Do not spam your consumers
• Do not post things that are not relative just for the sake of posting
• Do not silence consumers concerns on social media
• Do not abuse hashtags

Before breaking down individual best practice topics, lets first highlight some of the basic. At the Strategist we believe no best practice tip is too small not to share.

1. Know you audience
2. Set measurable goals
3. Focus on building customer relationships
4. Define your brands voice
5. Quality post over quantity
6. User generated content is your friend
7. Cross-channel marketing
8. Handle negative comments quickly and with grace
9. Have a content strategy for each social network
10. Use hashtags
11. Know what tips work best for each network

There is so much more to socila media marketing, but understanding and implementing a few of these best practices are the foundation to success. Stay tuned for a break down of each of these topics and how to implement them into your busiesses marketing strategy.

-The Strategist

In the fiercely competitive world of marketing, direct and digital is taking the lead. This means social media is your businesses new best friend, if it isn’t already. However, this doesn’t mean willy nilly is the approach to take with social media marketing.

There are best practices for social media that can quickly set your business apart from others, if properly executed. This blog will discuss new topics weekly on how to enhance and improve your business and social media strategy through best practice tips and tricks. Follow along and learn something new! We are ready to help you succeed.

-The Strategist