This article’s aim is to give you the inside track on being more efficient and successful when it comes to social media marketing strategy.
At the end of this article, you’ll have a better understanding of:
- What a social media marketing strategy is.
- Why you definitely need one.
- How a social media marketing strategy will improve your chances of success.
- The critical steps involved in planning a successful strategy
Let’s jump into it.
What can your brand gain by developing a social media strategy?
A really common mistake made by marketers is to confuse your objectives or your goals for the strategy.
For example, you want to reach 10,000 followers on Instagram or want to increase your newsletter signups by 20% annually. However, they are not a strategy as they fail to identify how this growth will be achieved.
The decisions you make within your strategy and how you reach your desired outcome will be different for every kind of business. They are shaped by your company’s vision, mission, and values.
Let’s look at the different social media strategies and how they can help your business.
Increased Inbound Traffic
Social media is one of the most cost-effective ways to use digital marketing to share content and make your business more visible.
Pro Tip: Start interacting with your followers and creating social media profiles for your business. Then, you can obtain “likes” and “shares” from your employees, and business partners.
By doing so, your content’s interaction with other people will spread the word about your brand and begin to build your company’s reputation.
Every time you share a post, a new network of people will be exposed to it, potentially turning into customers, so the more people who know about your business, the better.
Better Visibility Means Better Conversion Rates
Your company will have more chances to convert customers due to its increased visibility. Every comment, image, video, and blog post has the potential to bring visitors to your business’s website and boost traffic.
Customers who follow your brand’s social media accounts frequently develop a greater level of trust in your company’s credibility when the brand is active online.
When they need your products or services, they’ll probably tell a friend about your brand, giving your company social proof of its quality.
Social Media Marketing Is Cost-Effective
For almost all social networking platforms, signing up and creating a profile is free, and any paid promotions you decide to invest in are relatively inexpensive compared to other marketing strategies.
Being cost-effective gives you a huge advantage because you can get a better ROI.
Pro Tip: Always start small if you decide to use paid social media advertising to learn what to expect.
Become an Authority in Your Field
Your business’s authority can be increased through customer satisfaction and brand loyalty. A great way to do so is to share insightful and well-written content on social media.
Share content, promote your authority, connect with your audience, and communicate.
How to Create a Powerful Social Media Marketing Strategy For Your Brand
Let’s see in more detail the seven steps on how to create a powerful social media marketing strategy for your brand.
Choose The Right Goals and Metrics To track
Establish clear objectives and goals as the first step in developing a successful social media marketing strategy. Without objectives, you have no real way to quantify achievement and profit.
Your social media marketing objectives should be SMART: particular, measurable, doable, pertinent, and time-bound.
It is simple to track the number of followers and likes, but it is difficult to demonstrate their true value. Instead, focus on conversion, engagement, and click-through rates. You might want to keep track of different objectives or even different purposes for each social media platform.
Click-through rates, for instance, would be tracked if you were to use LinkedIn to get people to your website. You might keep track of the number of Instagram Story views if you use Instagram to spread brand awareness. Cost-per-click (CPC) is a common success metric for Facebook advertising.
Your marketing goals should be in line with your social media goals.
Create and Research a Complete Target Customer Profile
Learn how to target and engage your customers, followers, and fans on social media by getting to know them as real people with real wants and needs.
When it comes to your ideal client, you should be aware of the following:
- Age
- Location
- Average income
- Typical job title or industry
- Interests
Analytics on social media can also give you a lot of useful information about who your followers are. You can improve your audience targeting and refine your strategy with these insights. You could also consider taking social media marketing courses from time to time which can also help you stay on top of changes in a space as dynamic as social media.
Be Familiar With Your Competition
A good way to establish your social media marketing strategy is to look at what your competitors are doing on social networks.
By doing a competitive analysis you will better understand the strengths and weaknesses of both your business and that of your rivals. You’ll learn a lot about what’s expected in your industry, which will help you set your own goals for social media.
You will then be able to spot opportunities more easily and take advantage of the competition.
Conduct social media searches for the competitor’s company name and other relevant keywords. For example, find out what they are saying about you and what they are sharing. How much engagement do their influencer marketing campaigns bring in, if any?
Analyze Your Current Social Media Accounts
Any visible interaction with your brand on social media is considered as engagement. Likes, comments, and shares on your posts, for instance, are all examples of engagement.
- Reach-based engagement rate: The number of viewers who chose to interact with your content. This can be calculated for each post individually or as an average over time.
- Per post engagement rate: Measures how quickly followers respond to your content.
- Daily engagement rate: Meaning how frequently your followers interact with your account daily.
Get Inspiration From Great Social Media Branding
Get inspired! While it is essential for your brand to be distinctive, you can still learn from successful social media businesses.
Success stories on social media can typically be found in the business section of the social network’s website.
Lastly, you can simply ask your followers what they want from you if you have a social media presence. Just make sure you do what they ask for and follow through.
Create a Content Calendar
Of course, sharing great content is important, but planning when to share it to get the most out of it is just as important.
Set a posting schedule your social media content calendar will show you when and what kinds of content you will publish on each channel. It is the ideal location for planning all of your social media activities, including re-sharing user-generated content, blog posts, videos, sharing links, and images.
Also, the time you spend interacting with the audience should also be included in your social media content calendar, although you should also allow for some spontaneous engagement.
By doing so, your posts will be published at the best times to post if your calendar is followed.
Pro Tip: With Publer, you plan and schedule your content quickly and easily and visualize all your posts in an interactive view.
Track Analytics and Adjust
So the last social media marketing strategy is measuring and reporting. This is an important step because you will understand if your strategy is effective or not.
We recommend you assess your social media strategy after at least a month. It will help you with insights such as:
- How many followers did you gain over the last 30 days?
- What’s your engagement been like?
- What topics seem to have worked well?
- Which haven’t what was it about the post or ads that did perform well?
You can start determining these things either by looking at the native analytics available on the social media platform or by connecting your account to a third-party analytics platform.
Key Takeaways
Let’s have a quick look at what have you learned in today’s article about social media strategy.
- Social media is one of the most cost-effective ways to use digital marketing to share content and make your business more visible.
- Choose the right goals and metrics to track your content.
- A good way to establish your social media marketing strategy is to look at what your competitors are doing on social networks.
- With Publer, you plan and schedule your content quickly and easily and visualize all your posts in an interactive view.
- Measuring and reporting is an important step because you will understand if your strategy is effective or not.
What do you think about today’s article? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
Denisa Lamaj
