Over the years, social media has become increasingly important for premium cigar businesses as a means of marketing and promotion. As with anything within your business, however, the best results will come with a well-thought-out plan and strategy. Social media is marketing that uses digital platforms to promote your brand, services, and products to your ideal customers.
Because your business involves a highly regulated and scrutinized product category—tobacco—you will unfortunately face many more hurdles and obstacles when engaging with your customers online. This does not mean you should throw in the towel early on. Social media has many benefits, including reaching and engaging with your target audience, strengthening your brand, creating a loyal customer base, and increasing your business’s revenue. A good social media plan involves both strategy and planning.
Ingredients of a Good Plan
Suppose your social media plan involves the posting of a random photo once a week to Instagram or posting to Facebook whenever your store or brand has an event coming up. In that case, you should give your overall strategy more thought. A mistake many make in creating their social media plan is not getting specific enough with the end goal.
Before piecing together your strategy, begin with the most essential part of your business—its customers. An effective social media strategy targets and appeals to your ideal customer. If you have not already done so, create a buyer persona for your business. This will be useful for planning your social media and overall marketing. A buyer persona paints and defines who you are trying to reach with your marketing efforts. Write down your ideal customer’s age, location, interests, favorite social media platform, and preferred type of content. The more details you can include in this buyer persona, the better.
The next key ingredient to a social media plan is your intent. What is it that you hope to accomplish through social media? Don’t mindlessly post content. Instead, post with a real purpose. Post to sell, entertain, highlight an event or promote your staff.
“A content strategy should be based on the goal you want to achieve,” says Mechelle Merkerson, a content creator who works within the premium cigar category and founder of Cigars with “M.” She says, “For example, if your goal is higher revenue, have events to draw in customers and invest in educating your staff with the help of Tobacconist University or a cigar education consultant so that when customers come in, your staff is knowledgeable.”
Many businesses focus on their loyal customers, which is always a good plan, but they forget about reaching the customers they don’t yet have. You can also create a social media strategy for growing your customer base outside of your current customers. Think of the type of customer you need to future-proof your business. By doing this, the content you create and share will not only reach your current loyal customer base, it can also help you gain the attention of new customers.
Make a Plan
Any strategy is a game of trial and error. You should take note of how your content resonates with your audience. When you post a video on TikTok or YouTube, how many views does it get? How many people comment that they are excited about an upcoming event you’ve announced on Facebook? Do photos or videos get you more likes and comments on Instagram? These metrics, generally called analytics, are essential to your strategy. Once you determine what your customers respond to and like, create more content like this. Also, note what social media platforms and apps are getting the most engagement and activity. It’s okay to scale back on platforms that don’t seem to work and focus more on those that do. That’s part of a good strategy.
Creating content to post can be daunting, but it doesn’t have to be. There are plenty of tools and apps that can make the content creation process much easier with pre-made templates, graphic generators and video editing, including Adobe Express, Canva and CapCut. As you create your content, look at what other businesses like yours are creating and look outside the industry for inspiration. Offer your customers more of what they want in the form of different content—text updates, photos, videos (both short and long-form).
Many social media platforms offer a scheduling feature that will allow you to create content and get it ready for posting ahead of when you’re ready for it to go live. Several scheduling tools, including Sendible, Pallyy, SocialBee, and Hootsuite, can enable you to schedule your social media posts all in one place while offering some form of analytics to help you fine-tune your social media strategy. If you need help learning how the different social media platforms work, an excellent free resource is YouTube.
– Photography by Valiant Made, Andras Vas, and Rodion Kutsaiev. Story by Antoine Reid, content director at Premium Cigar Association (PCA). You can reach him at [email protected].
This story first appeared in PCA The Magazine, Volume 4, 2023. To receive a copy of this magazine you must be a current member of PCA. Join or renew today at premiumcigars.org/membership.