How do you create a social media marketing strategy that works? What should you focus on?
Social media has become a powerful tool for businesses to reach their target audience. If you want to succeed in today’s competitive marketplace, you need to master social media marketing.
To get started, you need to define your goals. Then, choose the platforms where you plan to promote your brand. Finally, develop a comprehensive strategy to help your social media team achieve those goals.
Let us take a closer look at what it entails.
What Is a Social Media Marketing Strategy?
How do you get started with social media marketing? What should your social media campaign focus on? How much time should you allocate to each platform?
Social media has become a powerful tool for businesses to connect with customers. The key to success in social media marketing is creating a social strategy that fits your brand and audience.
There are several ways to create a successful social media marketing campaign. This article will discuss the five main components of a social media marketing plan.
If your customers want to communicate via LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, or any other social account, who are you to stop them? Make sure you market through all platforms your customers might use.
Suppose your prospects or customers tell you they spend 40% of their online time on Facebook and 20% on Twitter. You know which primary and secondary social networks you should focus on.
To market to your customers on social media, you need to create an active social media marketing strategy. Your strategy will guide your content type, e.g., user-generated content (UGC), the social media network, and your social media post scheduling. It would also help to keep abreast of the latest social media trend. Create and share informative and educational content, such as blog posts, etc., to improve your engagement with your audience.
An article in Social Media Today notes that a great social media strategy is built on a big-picture mentality – beyond thinking about what you want each post to do, you need to look at the overall state of your social media presence before you can move forward.
This Sprout Social post says that the pressure is undoubtedly on brands in an era where 46% of users say they’ll unfollow an overly promotional brand. It notes that 41% of users say they’d unfollow a brand that shared too much irrelevant content. You need to be patient and allow sufficient time for your strategy to yield results.
A social media marketing strategy is a plan for using different social media platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc., to drive traffic to your website. Social media marketing helps businesses build relationships with customers through social networks. Social media marketing aims to increase brand awareness, grow audiences, retain visitors, and gain new customers.
5 Ways to Create a Social Media Marketing Strategy
Here are five ways to create a social media marketing strategy.
Know Your Audience
The first step to creating a social media marketing strategy is knowing your target market. Who are they? What do they care about? Which platforms do they use? How can you connect with them? Once you have this information, you can create a buyer persona and use it as a marketing tool to get inspiration to develop social content that addresses their needs.
Define Your Goals
According to this CoSchedule article, 88% of those who set goals achieve them. However, you must ensure that your social media goal aligns with your business objectives.
What is your marketing team trying to accomplish on social media? Decide whether you are seeking fame, brand recognition, prospecting for leads, or interested in generating sales or customer service.
It would help if you were clear on your goals for your social media presence, as this will help form a firm foundation upon which you will build your strategy.
Your business goals need to be realistic. For example, if you expect to increase sales by 1,000%, you won’t succeed.
Defining your goals helps keep you focused and stay on track. You should know what results you want before starting. Do you want to use your social media account to increase brand awareness? Or do you want to generate leads? Use these results as touchstones throughout your campaign. If you’re going to increase sales, measure those results too.
Define Your Metrics
Once you have defined your goals, you need to decide how to measure results, i.e., your social media marketing efforts, to reach your goals.
Measuring the success of your efforts on each content type is critical to determining how well your strategies work. You need to invest in the right social media management tool. You can create your social media content calendar and manage various aspects of your online presence with the right tool.
Without data on your social media activity, you don’t have any way of knowing if what you’re doing works. Measuring different metrics gives you insight into how effective your campaigns are. For example, counting the number of visitors to your website lets you know whether or not people find what they’re looking for. Measuring time spent on your site provides a better idea of how much traffic you’re getting from specific sources. Measuring the engagement rate will also help you schedule posts to the right social platform at the right time. Avoid wasting time with vanity metrics.
As they mentioned here, it is necessary to know social media metrics, such as the percentage of visits from social media that take the action you’re driving on a web page.
Measuring your ROI is difficult, as there is no universal benchmark, and it varies from one business to another. We usually encourage business owners to hire or outsource this to a professional social media marketer.
To know which social media platforms to incorporate as part of its social media strategy, a company needs to systematically track top platforms where the company and its brands are being discussed.
So you have to define the metrics useful for your own business. Are you seeking fame? Then track such metrics as retweets, likes, comments, shares or pins.
What are you trying to accomplish on social media? Decide whether you are seeking fame, brand recognition, prospecting for leads, or interested in generating sales or customer service. Click To TweetAre you seeking brand recognition? Then track such metrics as Facebook engagements, email click-through rates, YouTube viewership, Pinterest pins and repins.
Are you interested in generating leads or sales? Then track conversations with your target audience.
Are you interested in using social media as a customer service tool? Then it would help if you track your rate of answers, tips or suggestions that your brand loyalists provide and whether their comments are positive, negative or neutral.
Decide on Your Tactics
Set Up a plan. As part of your digital marketing strategy, you must decide which media channels you will use to interact with your audience. If your business is a B2B (Business-to-Business), you should look at social media channels like LinkedIn.
If your business is a B2C (Business-to-Consumer), you should look at social media channels such as Facebook and Instagram reels.
In addition to giving you valuable information about your existing and potential customers, social media is also an excellent place to get insights into your current and potential team members. According to this article, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram can give you tons of valuable information about the people you’re interested in working with
Research your posting schedule and the best times to post and interact with your audience on your chosen channels.
According to HubSpot, social media isn’t an exact science, so you must establish a consistent posting and engagement schedule to see results.
Execute Your Strategy and Revise
According to this CoSchedule article, you need a documented social media strategy because marketers who document their strategy are 538% more likely to report success. The article notes that those who record processes are 466% more likely to succeed.
For best results, you should have a social media strategy template and a social media calendar detailing all you want to post to each social media channel and the ideal times to post to the social channel for the day, week, month, or even the whole year!
The more detailed your social media calendar is, the better. It will help you identify your ideal social media follower, the right social media platform, and what quality content to invest in.
Closing Thoughts
In conclusion, creating a social media marketing strategy involves understanding your audience, what they like, and how to best reach them. It will help you know how to use social media effectively and give you a roadmap for success.
Remember that, as the name implies, with social media, you ought to be social and not ‘selly, selly’ with the content you create for your social presence. Your social media content strategy should educate and entertain your followers on your social media profile. Social media engagement is vital to your success.
No one on social media is interested in whatever crap you are selling. Instead, you have to use your social media presence to show interest in your ideal customer and how you can help meet their needs.
Is your social media effort yielding any positive results? Do you want more advice on creating your own social media strategy? Schedule a consultation.
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