With social media usage spiking across different regions, including North America, brands are shifting their focus and resources towards optimizing their social media channels.

To retain and grow their share of voice during these unprecedented times, some companies and marketers feel that they need to be everywhere on social media to be effective. They read about the shiniest new platform, or the most popular sites, and decide they need to be there too.

But this thinking is often misguided. You don’t need to be everywhere, or constantly adding new platforms to your social media marketing. You should be where your buyers are — and that’s why everything starts with them.

Understand Your Buyer

The best social media starts with a deep understanding of:

• Who buys your products and services?
• Which buyers do you want to target in order of priority?
• Where these buyers engage in social media and how?
• What is of real interest to your buyers (outside of your product or service) and how to deliver non-monetary value through your presences?

Understand Your Budget

Once you have an understanding of your ideal buyer, the next step is looking at your social media budget. This can direct your strategy and efforts, depending on how much you are able to put towards it.

1. Graphics and Video Content

Presences that are image-and-video based will require a lot of creative. If you don’t have in-house resources for this, it can cost more than the entire maintenance of your digital marketing presences.

2. Content Post Frequency

Too much content can swell your budget but not necessarily lead to better results. Ask yourself how you can maximize your content to its highest potential without spending more than you have to.

3. Content Creation

In some cases, content creation is left to junior team members because it’s thought to be easier, less important, or because they seem more social-media savvy. But this is often a mistake. Content should be strategically optimized and tagged based on research, especially during a global crisis such as the ongoing COVID pandemic.

This comes with years of digital marketing experience.

Most resources write content just for the sake of having it or delivering communication. We frequently see unoptimized content that doesn’t possess the attributes needed to reach markets. This is not to mention spelling and grammar issues – would you put out a print piece with typos?

4. Other Impacts on Budget and Ways to Save

• Focusing on end-to-consumer sales: this is often the most expensive method to reach prospects with the most engagement required.
• Referral relationship marketing to get to the end-consumer: this is less expensive but requires sales resources for follow-up.
• Product marketing: this is often more expensive because it requires more creative.
• Services marketing: this is often less expensive because you can produce more text-based content.

Understand Your Strategy

Know the who, what, when, where, why, and how before you start:

• Who is the target buyer(s)?
• Why are you marketing to them?
• Where will you market, which presences will be the target, and in what types of communities?
• What is interesting or of value about what you will share?
• When – at what frequency will you share?
• How will you convert customers?

From here, where there is a limited budget you can start by:

1. Targeting your prime buyer personas.
2. Focusing on first building out presences where your prime buyer personas already are.
3. Distributing your content in their communities within those presences.
4. Tagging influencers on those platforms.
5. Maximizing success – then moving on to build out your next presence.

This type of strategy can work with any budget – and it also proves why “good” social media doesn’t mean being everywhere. It means getting clear on your buyer personas and finding the platforms where they are spending their time.

You don’t have to build this type of strategy alone. The Purpose Company offers buyer persona consulting and digital marketing services that will find the best social media platforms for your brand.

Contact us today to get started. Call 647-880-9709 or visit www.thepurposecompany.ca.