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Social media marketing has become one of the main tools businesses use to connect with their audiences. Prior to a global pandemic forcing businesses to go virtual, having a social media strategy already offered businesses a way to reach bigger markets easier and faster than ever before. With the development of social media marketing tools, the internet has further established its status as the main marketplace of the world.
As a virtual assistant, you can offer social media marketing services to clients everywhere. Here at Virtudesk, we equip aspiring and established social media virtual assistants with the necessary skills and training to provide world-class service to our clients. Today’s blog can help you better understand the value of social media marketing for entrepreneurs. Read on and find out how you can better respond to their needs as a virtual assistant.
What is Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing refers to the use of social media platforms for marketing activities. This involves producing quality content, connecting with followers, using analytics results, and running ads. Social media marketing allows businesses to establish an online presence, create a touchpoint for customers, and increase sales, among other things. Because of these, businesses aim to create a social media marketing strategy tailored to their brands’ needs. If you’re an aspiring or established virtual assistant looking to provide social media marketing services, here are some tips to help you improve your social media marketing strategies.
Create Goals and Objectives
Start by creating marketing objectives for your social media platforms. Remember to align them with the business objectives or marketing goals of the company. For example, your company aims to grow the brand in the best channels possible. That business objective can be complemented with the social media marketing goal of raising brand awareness through Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.
Your goals will eventually let you identify which numbers or metrics you should track to observe your progress toward that goal. In the earlier example, you can set a more specific milestone like having 2,500 followers on Twitter by Q4 2021.
Build Your Audience Profile
Your audience can help you identify what kind of content you should create as you carry out your strategy. Find out as much as you can about them, their preferences, their favorite platforms, and their behavior on the internet. There’s a whole selection of analytics tools on the internet that can help you do this. A popular option is Facebook Business Suite. There’s also a huge availability of market research you can find with a quick search. The more you know about your market, the better you can attract them to your content, and to your business.
Research Your Competition
Researching about the competition can also provide you important information that you can use in your strategy. For example, take inspiration from what your top competitors do because that’s what works for your market. Similarly, if you can find low-performing competitors, learn from them and compare their content to see what you should avoid. Hootsuite has a tool for social listening to let you monitor your competition’s behavior.
Audit Existing Content
If your client is already on social media, use the opportunity to do a review of all the existing content. This involves checking the performance of all their previously posted content. Performing a content audit can also help you build your strategy around what already works for your brand. Keep those going and re-design ideas that do not. You can also take this time to evaluate which platforms work best for your growth phase. The best use of your resources is to focus on the platform(s) that work, and developing the others later when you have a larger audience.
Set Up and Build Profiles
Imagine if you just posted the same things on Facebook and Twitter, right? Facebook long-form posts don’t automatically translate to a thread on Twitter. Similarly, it won’t automatically turn into a typographic image for Instagram. Every social media platform offers different kinds of experiences for your audience. Find out how you can best use that to your brand’s advantage. Create your accounts and set up your profiles. Then, design content for each platform according to the goals you have for them. This will help you decide and create better content faster for your platform(s) of choice.
Setup a Content Calendar
Set up a calendar for all your content. This helps you approach social media marketing in an organized manner. At this point, you should know that social media marketing is best done on a schedule based on the times when users are most active per platform. This means you automatically have deadlines to make based on your platform of choice. For social media managers, it’s common to have a calendar that also works as a project management tool when following a social media marketing strategy. Check out apps like Asana, Trello, Clickup, and Planoly. This will help you not only remember deadlines but also track your progress with each task as you work.
Build and Use a Style Guide
Build a style guide or brand kit. Your style guide is your rulebook when you’re creating content. You can have a file that has the written rules and samples that you should follow. Put that in a folder with all the necessary stuff like your logos, templates, and whatnot, and let that be your reference at all times. This helps all your content become recognizable and attributable to your brand. If you’re establishing brand recall and recognition, this can be extremely helpful. If you wish, you can even create a written guide for your entire social media marketing strategy.
Stay Consistent
Finally, just remember to stay consistent with your strategy. Follow a schedule and a style. This helps your customers perceive your brand as reliable and credible. Commit to your strategy to gain your audience’s trust and attention. Eventually, you will be rewarded with a growing community that watches out for your content, and engagement from customers whose trust you’ve already acquired.
Improving Your Strategies
Social media marketing is relatively new but the information around it has grown exponentially over the past few years. This means you have everything you need to build a social media marketing strategy. As a virtual assistant, you may be asked to create a strategy from scratch or to improve on an existing one. Take this guide and use it to find your way to an effective social media marketing strategy for your client.
If you are interested in becoming a virtual assistant, submit your resume and fill out this form. We are previously hiring for the Executive Virtual Assistant (EVA) and Inside Sales Associate (ISA) role. Previous virtual assistant experience is not required, but at least six months of call center experience is required.
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