A sound social media marketing strategy can help you boost brand awareness and build relationships with your target audience.
Each social media strategy looks a bit different depending on your industry, target audience, and business goals.
For many small businesses and entrepreneurs, the idea of creating a social media strategy can be overwhelming.
It’s true, there are many aspects of a social media strategy to consider. For your strategy to be effective, it must be specific and targeted.
Today, we’ll share a simple guide for creating a social media strategy.
Here are the steps you need for planning, creating, and post winning content on social networks.
Why Use Social Media Marketing?
Social media was formerly viewed as just something for fun, but in reality, social networks are powerful business tools. Social media marketing is the strategy of leveraging social media channels for business.
Why bother with social media when you already have your website, SEO, and email marketing to deal with? Social media marketing offers many important benefits including:
- Boost brand awareness
- Understand perception of your brand and products via social listening
- Offer timely customer support via social media platforms
- Foster an engaged community of your target audience
- Promote products and services to your target market
Social Media Strategy
A social media strategy is the outline for how you’ll tackle the social media goals you set. The strategy provides you with guidance and the “how-to” for getting the most of social media.
Within the strategy, you’ll outline all of the social networks you have and plan to add, including channel-specific goals for each platform.
Ultimately, a good strategy lays out the responsibilities of all team members. It also defines how and when you’ll measure progress.
As you might imagine, having a strong strategy is the key to getting the best results on social media.
Let’s dive into how to create a winning social media marketing strategy.
Set Useful Goals
The rest of your strategy depends on your goals. Follow the “SMART” goal strategy to choose goals that are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound. Your SMART goals should align with your key business objectives as well.
To measure your progress toward your goals, you must track important metrics. While it’s easy to measure how many followers you have, this number doesn’t provide clear value. You can have 1 million followers, but if you’re only getting 10 engagements per post those 1 million followers aren’t useful. Focus on the metrics that provide the most value like conversion, engagement, and click-through rates.
Get to Know Your Audience
Social media is all about connecting with your audience. To effectively determine what to post, you must know your audience very well. Dig deep into your target audience, creating customer personas based on age, location, hobbies, challenges, etc.
When creating your audience personas, go based on data. Learn about social media analytics so you know where to reach your most relevant audience. Based on the information you discover, you can determine which platforms to prioritize and how to target your ads
Evaluate the Competition
You aren’t the only one trying to sell using social media. Perform a competitive analysis to find out what your competitors are doing. You can learn what works for them while also finding things they could do better. The competitive analysis gives you a framework for your industry while also revealing opportunities.
Examine your competitors’ social media accounts. Look at what they are sharing and how the audience responds. There are many social media listening tools to help you monitor your competitors on social networks.
Perform a Social Media Audit
If you already have a social media presence, perform a social media audit. You need to figure out what you’re doing well and how you can improve. Evaluate the following:
- Successful strategies vs unsuccessful strategies
- Who engages the most with your content
- The networks your target audience uses
- Your social media presence vs competitors
Be honest with yourself as you perform the audit. Ultimately, you want to have accounts that are going to be useful. Being on every platform isn’t the goal, you need to be where your audience is. If you have an account that’s not doing much for your business, evaluate if it’s where your audience is. If the account is on a platform that your audience uses, consider how they use the platform and what you can do to meet your goals with the channel.
Optimize Profiles
Determine which social networks will be the most helpful for reaching your business goals. You may need to leverage different platforms for different purposes. Make this clear by writing out a mission statement for each platform that you will use. Layout your specific goal in the statement.
Once you’ve determined which platforms to use, set up and optimize your profiles. Fill out all of the fields in the profile with accurate information. Include relevant keywords in your profile descriptions. Adhere to consistent branding across all networks.
Gather Inspiration
You certainly want to craft a unique social media presence, but that doesn’t mean you can’t draw inspiration from successful social media marketing campaigns.
Check out some of the brands with the most successful social media accounts and campaigns. Look for common themes of what the brands do well. Why are they successful? How do people engage with the brand? Even if the brand is in another industry, think about ways you can apply the broad concepts to your social media content.
Another source of inspiration is your followers/audience. Look at what they talk about and engage with online. What can you post that will suit their needs and wants? If you already have an audience, ask them what they want to see from you.
Plan Your Social Media Calendar
To ensure consistent, high-quality content, you need a plan. A content calendar will help you stay on track so that you always know what you are posting.
Create a posting schedule for how often and when you will post on each channel. Within the posting schedule, develop a plan for specific posts. Laying everything out will help you see opportunities for repurposing. Rather than creating an entirely new post for each channel, you can find ways to optimize the main concept for all of your networks.
When planning your content, you need a mix of content types. You want to include content that drives website traffic, was curated from other sources, supports lead-generation goals, and shares about your company culture. A great general rule to follow is that 80% of posts should educate, inform, or entertain your audience and 20% can promote your products/brand.
Once you have a calendar planned, you can schedule content ahead of time. This will keep you ahead of the curve and streamline your social media marketing process.
Continuously Improve
Leave some room in your social media strategy for improvement. Social media marketing is not a one-and-done deal, it’s something you must always adjust to keep up with algorithm changes and customer demand.
Evaluate your performance metrics so you can see which posts are most effective. Evaluate your strategy based on the metrics and find ways to improve. Test new graphics, content ideas, CTAs, etc.
Social media is a fast-paced dynamic space that you must move quickly to stay on track with. Adjust your plan based on what is and is not working. Don’t be afraid to head back to the drawing board to improve your goals and plan.