With new trends and tools emerging every year in the social media marketing world, many businesses are taking advantage of social media to promote their products and services. Thanks to numerous benefits, a social media presence can work wonders for any brand.
But not all businesses approach social media marketing the way they should.
While some prefer hiring a social media marketing agency, some do it by themselves. If you have a social media business page that’s sitting idle or have newly created one, then you need a good strategy to leverage your marketing efforts.
A well-documented social media marketing strategy could significantly help you set tangible goals and achieve more ROI on your budget. In this post, you’ll learn the essential steps which will help you create a solid social media strategy for your business.
Excited? Let’s dig in.
Firstly, it’s important to reflect on your social media presence before you create a good strategy.
The best way to do that? Create a review checklist.
It can help you answer questions like “Which social networks are most used by your target audience?”, “Which social networks are ideal to the nature of your business?”, “Which social networks are your competitors present on?” etc.
For example, if your business is more on the corporate side, then emphasizing more on LinkedIn would work best. If your business has a more friendlier approach, then promoting it on Instagram and Snapchat would be the way to go.
Doing this will help you focus on key social networks that are actually beneficial for your business and ignore the irrelevant ones on the list.
Next up, write down measurable goals that can be accomplished using the selected social networks.
Your goals can be anything from bringing more conversions, to increasing the brand awareness of your company, or even maintaining online reputation.
For example, your goal could be: “Achieve 1,000 Facebook page likes in 30 days.”
By having such clear and realistic goals, you’ll have a higher chance of achieving them. It will help you in channeling your efforts in the right direction.
This is one of the most fundamental aspect of any social media strategy. Without knowing your ideal target audience, you’ll end up targeting the wrong set of people and will defeat the entire purpose of your marketing.
Figure out who could be the perfect audience who will buy and use your products and services. Be as specific as possible.
These are some key points you can use when collecting your audience data:
You can also dive deeper and think on the lines of their specific behaviors, desires, goals, and places of interest to make your targeting more specific.
Another thing you can look for is the ideal time spent by your target audience on the internet as well as their preferred social networking channels.
Now that you know who you’ll be targeting, you’ll need some benchmarks on which you can measure the results of your marketing efforts.
Defining key metrics like clicks, conversion rates, reach and engagement could well help you track the success of your campaign.
If you aren’t sure of which ones are relevant, choose those that would help you in answering your goal. For example, if your goal is to get 1,000 page likes on Facebook in 30 days, then metrics like Net Likes, Organic Likes, Paid Likes could be taken as relevant ones.
It goes without saying that good quality and engaging content will create most of the impact. So you’d want to create a robust content plan for your social media strategy that’s well thought out.
Some popular types of content that gets instant engagement include social media posts, infographics, blogs, and videos. You can leverage existing content in different ways or create fresh content as per newer trends. Either way, it should entertain and educate your target audience.
That’s one of the golden rules to effective content marketing.
Always think outside the box. Such content ideas leave a lasting impression on your target audience.
Pro tip: Create a content calendar. It’ll help you organize your content and optimize your strategy even further.
As a company on social media your goal is to represent yourself in the most humane manner as possible. You don’t want to start selling right away and get negative attention from the crowd.
Interacting with your audience and addressing their concerns will bring you more than just customers. It will build your brand reputation and advocacy. You can also team up with a social media marketing agency to help you with your online reputation management.
For interaction, you can track relevant hashtags, reply mentions and even inbox messages on social networks.
Managing an entire stack of social networks can get tedious which is why you need a tool to help you manage all of your social media accounts from one place. Investing in a social media management tool is hence recommended.
We suggest using Hootsuite or Buffer as they are amongst the most widely used account management tools for social media.
You can use them to schedule your posts, track responses from audiences, and even analyze results.
Last but not the least, to check how your social media campaign has performed it’s important to measure the defined metrics with every possible bits of data.
Data is a crucial element which can tell you how well your campaign performed across all channels. It can tell you the number of engagements for your content, leads generated, and even the reach count.
If your data brings out underwhelming numbers for one of the campaigns, you can take it as an indicator and further improve upon other metrics. After optimal analysis and testing, you can then get an idea of what does and doesn’t work.
Social media marketing is one of the best ways to engage with your consumers and build brand awareness. It’s an effective digital marketing strategy that can significantly uptick your ROI without splurging your marketing spends.
While you may create a robust social media strategy yourself, doing competitor research and coming up with effective campaign ideas isn’t everyone’s forte. That’s where a digital marketing agency can help you out.
And we are one ourselves. We are a top-rated digital marketing company specializing in social media marketing/ORM services and can help you take care of all your social media marketing needs. Check us out for some great social media marketing packages and let us know how we can help.
