I don’t need to tell this audience about the importance of SEO for your business. However, one area of the digital marketing realm that I do feel could use some building up is social media marketing. Social media can accomplish so many things for your business if you leverage it in the right ways.

From building your brand to generating cold, hard sales, social media has a lot going for it. Here are some tips for optimizing your social media marketing strategy.

Establish Goals

Just as in SEO, you will need to know what you want to accomplish from the outset of your social media marketing campaigns. Your goals will determine how you should approach everything going forward.

For instance, your goals might be one or any combination of the following:

• Grow brand awareness.

• Drive new leads.

• Increase website traffic.

• Make new sales.

• Boost customer relations.

Which goal will be right for your business will depend on where you are in your growth. A new business will probably want to focus first on building brand awareness before devoting too many resources to the other goals.

Once you have a good foothold in that, you will of course want to go after leads and sales, and when you’ve done that, keeping your social media-based customer relations on track will be vital.

Find Your Audience

Your chances of getting conversions from social media marketing increase with every interaction with a potential or existing customer. Communicating directly with people on social media helps you find and grow your audience. Through that process, you will learn what people want and how you can give it to them.

One way to do it is to take a look at your social media analytics and other data that indicates which types of audiences tend to use which platforms. For instance, slightly more men than women use YouTube, while you will find a much larger female audience on Pinterest. You can then tailor your social media outreach based on who you are targeting.

Read more: How To Optimize Your Social Media Marketing Strategy