If you want to engage in social media, you need to have a  social media strategy . If you want to use social media to market your company, you need to have a marketing strategy in order to most effectively use social media for marketing. Whether you have a formal strategy written down or not, here are some tips to help make your social media content more strategic.

1. Know your target audience

The first step towards creating a successful social media marketing strategy is knowing who your target audience is, or determining who your product is meant for. How do you go about deciding who your product will appeal to?

• What your industry deals with. 
  Before diving into the type of people you should be targeting, you need to have a clear understanding of why your product or service exists, and who it exists for. What problems does it solve? The answer to this question will help you move on to points #2 and #3: deciding your audience demographic and audience type.
• Audience Demographics (age, gender, location etc)
  Your product will sit well with certain segments of the population, and may not be very relevant to other segments. For example, if you’re an e-commerce store that sells make-up, you’d want to focus your efforts on reaching out to women, say between the ages of 16 and 50, and use platforms that fit this demographic, like Facebook or Instagram. 
• Type of audience
  Once you know what your industry deals with, this step should be relatively easy. You need to figure out what type of audience will benefit the most from your product. Bloggers, Working professionals, Individual consumers? Or, if you’re looking at a larger scale then SMB’s, Businesses, and Brands?

After you’ve narrowed that down, the next step is to decide what social channels you should focus on.

2. Decide which social media networks work best for your social media marketing strategy

There will be  4.4 billion social media users  in the coming years,

and that number will only grow. Sites like Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest are all highly relevant platforms when it comes to spreading brand awareness or engaging with your customers. The question remains, though: what platforms should you be promoting on?

It may seem like being active on all of them is a good idea, since this will broaden your reach and help spread the word, but that is not necessarily the best strategy. Being present on every social platform will make it harder to manage all of them effectively and you’ll find yourself in a “Jack of all trades, master of none” situation.

One of the most strategic tips is to select a few social channels for your marketing strategy that will work well for you based on your Target Audience, and focus your efforts on promoting your product there, Trademark user group event production.

3. Launch and optimize your profiles

Setting up your site is a great step, but launching your sites and platforms alone will not be enough to start out strong with your strategy. To fully realize the potential of your marketing strategies and to effectively drive traffic to your site, you must employ optimization practices for your social strategies. 

Whether you are focusing primarily on Pinterest marketing, or placing most of your emphasis on Facebook strategies, it is vital to make sure your profiles are targeted in their approach. Your services and sales must be designed to continually improve traffic using optimization strategies, like optimizing visual content, utilizing blog posts, and even using videos to reach out to your audience. 

The term “optimization” can make people feel overwhelmed, but the process of optimizing your social networks is not as difficult as it might sound and is likely well within your ability. To optimize your profiles once you’ve launched them, spend some time evaluating the people you want to reach, and how you can best reach out to those people. 

Social media posts can be targeted and optimized using relevant hashtags, making sure images rank well using alt text, and including common keywords in your posts. Whether you use videos on YouTube as a source of marketing, or posts on Facebook are your bread and butter, profile optimization is essential.

4. Create valuable content for your social media management strategy

Now that you’ve decided who you should be targeting and where you should be promoting your product, you can start working on creating content for your social media marketing strategy. This is one of the most powerful social media tips, because content truly is the currency of social media marketing across all platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and more.

The type of content you create depends on the social accounts you’re posting to. Posts perform differently on different social profiles, so it makes sense to tailor content specific to each social profile. For example, posting quotes on Instagram is a good way to garner engagement, but doing the same on Facebook may not guarantee similar reach. Posting links on Facebook is quick and easy, but linking on Instagram requires several extra steps for both the poster and the consumer–though both successfully use stories to connect.

There are a number of tools that you can use to create quality content types easily. My friends at Viraltag use  Canva  for creating engaging and attractive posts. They’ve integrated them into our dashboard, as well, so it’s easy to create tailored posts for each social profile.