11 Steps In Creating A Smart Social Media Marketing Strategy
A successful social media marketing strategy doesn’t just require you to announce your existence, it’s pretty much deeper than that. Unlike few years ago, competition has tightened up more, as cyberspace is becoming increasingly crowded. What – marketing and business strategies – worked a few years ago is becoming less effective in light of dynamics – technological and demographical – of today’s social media environment.
What social media content strategy is effective in engaging the digitally literate users of social media?
Well, read on to learn more about the eleven ways your marketing team should leverage to win the hearts and minds of the digital generation. Let’s dive deep!
1. Set Up What You Want To Achieve With Your Social Media Marketing Strategy
It’s difficult to undertake a journey without a purpose. You need to set up what you want to achieve at the end of your journey; you need to create goals. However, you can’t set up goals if you don’t know exactly what you want. At the same time, you want social media marketing strategies that work; you’d not be wanting to waste your time, resources and effort on things that aren’t workable. While plenty of options exists, it can confuse and overwhelm you. However, if you’re clueless about what you want, don’t fret. The secret lies in providing a great content; a content that appeals to everyone. In addition, strive for content that’s not just eye-catching, but also easily readable and shareable. All your readers, despite their differences, should be able to savor your content. While creating a great content is one thing, an engaging one is a different kettle of fish.But, how do you create visually appealing yet engaging content?
Your content should arouse the emotions of the readers. To do so, it’s crucial to understand who you’re communicating with – your audience. Remember, these are the people your business is targeting. They’re more likely to become buyers of your goods and services; hence, you need to understand them. What appeals to them? What are their tastes, values and preferences? While nothing’s further from the truth of the saying, “one man’s meat is another man’s poison”, you should always keep this in mind while developing your content. Once you attain a firm understanding of your target audience, it’ll be much easier to draw up your goals of social media marketing strategies. And those goals should be realistic. Like, you don’t expect to gain more than 100,000 followers per week. Break down your goals into achievable bits; start small and build up piecemeal. Furthermore, avoid setting up too many objectives and targets, as this would create lots of diversions from your main goal. Concentrate on a particular goal or target, and maximize on it. And most importantly, write down your goals so that you don’t forget them. Recent statistics seem to indicate that individuals and companies who pen down their goals are 30 times more likely to achieve them than those who don’t.What Kind Of Goals Should You Consider Setting Up For An Effective Social Media Marketing Strategy?
- Promote your brand: Strive to leave a lasting positive impression on your users. One way is to create a great content that’s engaging and appealing to your audience. Incorporate an emotional aspect in your messages, and don’t sound too promotional.
- Aim for higher conversions. While high traffic is good, it isn’t of much use if a great bulk of it doesn’t convert. It’s better to have a lower traffic with higher conversions than vice versa. To get to people who’re more likely to buy your goods and services, center your content around what they’re looking for. For example, you can use tools like Google Keyword Planner, Ahref or SEMrush to find what keywords or phrases people search for most often. Then, you can create a social media post around them.
- Aim for in-person sales. Someone – if they’re not your regular buyers – who’s visiting your physical store is more likely to have learned about your business online. In addition, it’s more probable that the person has already made up their mind by the time they step inside your store. That’s how important is to sell your brand online and to leave a lasting positive impression. What could be appealing about your online business? Things like keeping users up-to-date with your products and rewarding loyal customers.
- Maximize returns on your investments. It won’t hurt if you regularly audit your sales and marketing channels on social media. This would enable you to know how much you spend on posting ads, developing and managing products, etc. With this knowledge, you’d know which channels work much more effective, and invest in those ones accordingly.
- Build loyal followings. While this can’t happen overnight, it requires lots of patience and persistence from you. Getting to understand and build a persona list takes time, but it pays off eventually.
- Imitate your competitors. Because a social media content strategy works for a competitor doesn’t necessarily mean that it’d work for you. However, it’s a good idea to learn from your competitors to get a pulse of what’s happening in the industry. While there’s no one-size-fits-all approach, learning from your competitors can inspire you to innovate a bespoke approach that works for you.
2. Set Up A Social Media Management Budget
Once you set up your attainable goals, it’s a good idea to know how much money your social media marketing strategy requires. How much you allocate depends on how you perceive social media as a marketing channel. However, there’s little doubt that the power of social media is growing when it comes to marketing. Increasingly, many young adults are using social media to interact with brands. Hence, it’s important that you invest more money in social media. However, if your budget can’t allow, don’t worry. There are resources to assist you. Just ensure that you’ve allocated these areas sufficient funds:- Content
- Analytics tools
- Community engagement
- Social media management
- Paid ads
3. Understand Your Target Audience: The Most Important Social Media Marketing Strategy
Understanding your target audience is very important because it enables you to create a message that they can relate (or resonate) with. As such, you need to create a message that’s in sync with the feelings, moods or emotions of the specific audience at a particular time. This is a segment that should engage with your content the most – and possibly become your buyers. Moreover, analyzing the characteristics of that demography – age bracket, income group, gender, occupation, etc. Fortunately, social media have some metrics that you can track – likes, retweets, shares, claps, comments, etc. And the good thing about social media channels, whether they be Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or Snapchat, is that they give you a breakdown of engagement levels. Most have a dashboard that displays charts, graphs or statistics in your account. While it’s a good idea to have a general data about what demography uses what social media the most, it’s good to get insights about your customers.4. Find Out About Metrics That Matter Most
While measures of social media engagement give you a clue about how effective your social media marketing strategy is, not all provide a whole picture of your brand strength. For example, having many followers and likes don’t necessarily reflect high levels of engagement with your brand, content or business. However, what measures really matter the most that you need to keep in mind when pursuing your goals?- Link clicks. This figure represents how many times users click your name, content or logo. It reflects the level of advancement of your users down the marketing funnel. Hence, it enables you to understand what turns the heads of users to click or what motivates them to buy your products.
- Reach. It shows the extent to which your content arrives at the screen of your users. The higher the reach, the more likely users see your content.
- Engagement. This is perhaps the most important metric you should be keen about. It shows how users react or respond to your content whether it be through comments, shares, likes, etc. It’s found by dividing the sum of all interactions by the number of impressions.
- Hashtags. Tagging your content with #’s helps users to reach your content or website from social media. The more popular a hashtag is, the more likely people are going to click it and arrive at your content for more information.
- Paid and organic likes. Getting people to like your content naturally isn’t a bed of roses. It involves more than providing great content; it involves having a higher authority. While it’s not easy to get people to like your posts on social media channels such as Facebook, LinkedIn or Instagram, it’s much easier if you pay for them.
- Sentiments. People express their emotions by how they react to your content – images, and texts. Your content should have enough emotional appeal to move people to respond to it. If a content touches upon an issue people care about, they’re more likely to respond to it either through excitement, laughter, smiles, anxiety, grief, anger, etc.