How to Craft a Social Media Strategy to Achieve Your Business Goals

Have you ever been in a situation where you put in so much effort for the social media strategy but the output doesn’t correlate with your input.

This means financial resources spent, physical and mental stress acquired in planning and executing these strategies and many others. This is primarily because your business goals do not match your social media goals.

The first step to take is to ask the important questions like:

What are my business goals?
Why do I want to be on Social Media?
How can I synergize my business objectives and social media goals such that they are uniform and each one complements the other?
A “one size fits all” approach is rarely ever a viable and lasting solution. .

Properly defining this would guide your efforts in creating a social media strategy, content creation and everything you do. It would guide your “Sales Funnel”

Different brands and various individuals are on social for different reasons, some of which are:

Building brand awareness,
Enhancing basic social presence
Developing social commerce
Exploring the micro moments in customer journey to influence future decision making
Making sales
Generating leads
Increasing enquiries
It is also paramount to note that strategy comes in different phrases, each of which can determine the flow of effort or actions.

Let us use two hospitals as a case study:

Case 1 — St. Nicholas Hospital.

Case 2 — Bukayo Specialist Hospital

Let’s make a hypothesis (since we have no data) that St. Nicholas Hospital’s strategy would not primarily be to generate leads and sales. It might be geared towards social presence, customer service, brand narrative control in cohesion with the overall brand guide.

Off the top of my head with in-depth research, I would identify St. Nicholas Target Audience (TA) as the following:

Age: 28–65
Monthly income: 300k — 1.5 m a month
They understand health insurance, they could have a family or not.
Very educated and wide scope of knowledge
Go for quality and comfort first, price comes later
Presence of ego or certain command of prestige
Family and single persons
I would assume St. Nicholas’ need to be on social would be for brand narrative control, customer service, social presence and where possible, influencing people’s future decision making.

So the Big Idea we want to tie Brand perception are:

Comfort + Quality + Class

This would guide strategy and content direction. All content pillars must speak one or a combination of these.Then actual content would be spat out of these pillars.

Content Pillars
Pictures of Hospital that speak great ambience, classy sitting area and ward
Working Professionals profile
Pictures of doctors and professionals while working (e.g., Doctors and nurses well-kitted, doctor attending to a patient)
Pictures of quality facilities, especially the ones that are scarce in Nigeria or Africa laying emphasis on this
Feature hospital’s “special features”.
Short code helplines.
Community projects.
Previous partnerships, especially with international bodies.
Metrics for Performance Measurement would include but will not be limited to:
Brand sentiment
Mentions,
Following
Reach
Impression
Etc.
Let’s move on to case Study 2; Bukayo Specialist Hospital. These are totally different.

For the purpose of this study, assume their business goals include generating leads, enquiries and sales where possible.So you want to make sure your social media SEO is good for the specialisations you offer. You want to stylishly add in in your bio, not clutter it but add two or three

Now, let’s define the Target Audience (TA).

Let’s assume they specialise in three main medical areas;

Skin
Eye
Children
So your Target Audience would be:

Mothers (for paediatrics)
Majorly ladies (for skins or dermatologists)
A mix of both genders (for ophthalmologists)
P.S: Note that you will need to properly expand information for each TA backed by both data and guided assumptions.

So it’s slightly tricky, you have to cater to 3 sets of people while still avoiding content overload.

Business goals have been established earlier. We can easily tell that Twitter and Facebook are key. So content pillars could be the following. I would prefer we tailor to each platform specifically.

We want all content to speak the following across all channels.

Value/Helpful + Thought leader + Caring

Instagram (Channel 1)

Tips
Specialist doctors
Live video with expert addressing weekly topical issues
Brand collaboration with skin care enthusiasts
Before and After
Facebook (Channel 2)

Tips
Specialist doctors
Brand collaboration with skin care enthusiasts
Before and After
Facebook group
Group outreach
Twitter (Channel 3)

Tips
Tweetchat
Brand listening and joining convo
Specialist doctors
Brand collaboration with skin care enthusiasts
Before and After
Occasional threads to build thought leadership
Lead Generation

Infographics,
Skin care monthly routine in a calendar,
Etc
Metrics for measurements
It is said that you can not measure what you do not track, but you could also track the wrong metrics resulting in wrong/irrelevant reports. Because we’ve earlier established our social media goals as generating leads, enquiries and sales, it becomes easy to know what is working and what isn’t and where you need to tweak to achieve better results. You should track and measure the following;

Website clicks
Source of website clicks
Mentions/Enquiries
Downloads
Leads
Recommendations
Referrals
Brand Sentiment
2 hospitals; Different Goals.

I hope this has helped clarify that two brands can have totally separate goals and a one-size approach rarely ever produces desired results.

Thank you for reading up to this point and if you liked this article, please hit the clap and follow me.

Social Media        Social Media Strategy        Online Marketing    Digital Marketing    Content Marketing


Bukayo Ewuoso
I help brands and small businesses achieve digital growth & performance in the most effective way to match their business goal. linkedin.com/in/bukayoewuoso


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