Contrary to popular belief, there’s much more to creating a social media marketing strategy besides posting on Facebook and Twitter. Building a brand image, engaging with an audience, and boosting sales take immense time and energy.
You must aim to be unique, as compared to your contenders. To do this, you need a solid social media strategy. Having a strategy in place is more than half of the work done.
Without devising a strategy, you may be posting on social media platforms only for the sake of it. Without comprehending your objectives, your ideal target audience, and their needs, it’ll be challenging to achieve results on social media.
Whether you want to grow your brand through social media or step up as a social media marketing professional, fostering a social media marketing strategy is fundamental.
Perhaps the most straightforward method for creating your social media strategy is to ask yourself the 5Ws:
- Which reason makes you want to be on social media?
- Who is your ideal target audience?
- What content would you be sharing?
- Where are you going to share it?
- When will you be posting your content?
You can have a strategy for each of your social channels, for example, a different approach for Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn, which all constitute your comprehensive social media marketing strategy.
The following are how you can create your marketing plans and social media marketing strategies.
Why Does Your Brand Want To Be On Social Media?
The first inquiry to respond to is the Why.
This question connects to your social media objectives. Is it safe to say that you are on social media to advertise your product? To redirect people to your website? Or to serve your clients?
There are eight online media objectives you can have:
- Increase brand recognition
- Redirect people to your website
- Create new leads
- Boost revenue
- Improve brand commitment
- Create a community around your business
- Get more press coverage
- Pay attention to discussions regarding your brand
Creating Comprehensive Buyer Personas
Even if you make the best campaign ever, the campaign will fall short if you’re not focusing on the right audience. That is the reason why you want to recognize your optimal target audience before crafting a campaign.
A buyer persona is essentially a report that contains broad details of your perfect clients. It assists you with creating messages in your campaigns that can resonate with your target group.
The following are some of the details that are included within your buyer persona:
- Name
- Sex
- Age
- Salary
- Address
- Pain Points
- Most preferred social media platforms
- Leisure activities
- Interests
Realizing these details will assist you with creating messages to develop trust and persuade your prospective customers to make a move.
Pick Your Social Media Platforms
When you are running a social media campaign, you’re probably getting improved results when you concentrate on just a few platforms.
Through your buyer personas, you will get a perception of your target audience’s preferred social media platforms.
Most times, it also relies upon the type of product or service you’re offering. For example, LinkedIn is a powerful platform for B2B organizations because numerous decision-makers are active on it.
Another method for choosing social media platforms for your campaign is looking at previous results on your website analytics. Which channels have brought in more visitors to your website previously? Which channels have acquired more leads? Are there any handy fixes you can make?
Another, more modest thing to consider is, what is your brand’s “USP (Unique Selling Proposition)”? Are you extraordinary at photography, music, or composing? There are a few platforms that are best for specific content types.
For instance, photographs are perfect for Instagram, long-form video content on YouTube, and formal write-ups on LinkedIn. However, this is a minor point since social media platforms are constantly evolving to provide pretty much every kind of content these days.
Timing Of Sharing Your Content
The central part of your strategy is sorting out when you should share your content. You may want to hop into research to find the best time(s) to post.
Stop right there and relax.
How about we take a step back and look at this from a more elevated level again? Before choosing precisely which time and days of the week, you should post, think about the practices of your target audience.
When do they typically utilize social media to find the kind of content you’ll share?
Here are a few examples to keep in mind:
- Sports supporters are active on social media before, during, and soon after the events to find and interact with content regarding the said event.
- Athletes may be more active on Instagram while relaxing after their morning or evening exercises.
- Individuals who love to travel may be more active during the weekends when making arrangements for their next trip.
Create A Social Media Calendar
When running a social media campaign, timing is of the most importance.
Utilizing a social media calendar, you can lay out your content from the start until the very end of your campaign.
With a schedule set up, your team can concentrate on what should be done at a specific time. A few significant tasks to have on your calendar are as follows:
- Content creation outline to ensure that your content is made on schedule
- Content curation to determine when to share your content
- Employee support posts: If/when your employees share updates from their accounts
- Updates for each social media channel throughout the campaign
Your social media calendar will assist you with ensuring that you don’t miss any significant steps in your strategy while also helping you be more productive with your time.
Examine Your Competitors’ Social Media Strategies
Most businesses don’t work in seclusion. You will probably have competitors who will also run a social media strategy. You will have to know what they are doing and who they are targeting.
You can rapidly conduct a competitor analysis report which will assist you to comprehend their strengths and shortcomings. This should provide you with a superior view of what potential clients anticipate from businesses in your sector.
Lay Out A Realistic Social Media Budget
Social media marketing is a feasible type of marketing, and you should be prepared to assign a budget appropriately. You can’t anticipate social media success if you simply tag it onto the previous list of obligations your current office staff performs.
Then again, you shouldn’t spend more on social media marketing than you can practically earn in increased sales or possibly in brand awareness and brand resonance, assuming that is where your objectives lie.
Similarly, as with any type of marketing, you should analyze a return on investment (ROI) from your social media budget, bearing in mind the objectives you set earlier in your strategy.
As you approach setting up your budget, you need to consider the amount you mean to spend on your digital marketing across all channels. Later, ask yourself how much you are ready to dedicate to social media marketing from that budget.
Make Suitable Content For Your Followers
The following are some of the questions you should ask yourself while you are making content:
- What is the ideal character count for every platform?
- What is the maximum number of hashtags for every platform?
- Would it be a good idea to add emoticons to your social media messages?
- What is the ideal type of content for each platform?
Also, remember the significance of pictures and videos. Visual content is more likely to be shared on online media when contrasted with other types of content. So, make sure that you leverage video content to improve your brand engagement.
Remember To Promote Your Social Channels
Although great content will eventually sell your social channels, you still need to acquire your initial followers. Individuals need to find your channels before they can decide to follow you.
You can promote your accounts in different ways, some profoundly apparent, others more indirectly.
You should put buttons for all your social media platforms at different sections on your website – on your landing page, in your footer, and on your About and Communications pages.
If you have created an email list, remember to reference your social channels for any messages and email newsletters you send.
You can likewise promote your social channels offline. Make it a point to add them to your store signage and other advertisements.
Monitor Your Results
Regardless of how much you plan your social efforts, there is no assurance that things will work out just as you anticipated. If you don’t monitor your results, you will never be able to realize the success of your social media marketing campaigns.
You initiated the process by deciding your campaign objectives and later decided on your most relevant metrics. Subsequently, you will need to watch out for how these metrics are developing to ensure that your campaign turns out to be successful.
Final Thoughts
Developing a social media marketing technique is most likely the hardest thing to do as it expects you to take a step back and look at the bigger picture. You need to shift your mentality away from your daily assignments.
It is enormously rewarding and helpful to have a social media marketing strategy. It will assist you with accomplishing your social media and business objectives to turn your brand into a massive success!
Tags: Marketing, Social Media, social media campaign, Social media channels, Social Media Marketing, Social Media Platforms, Social Media Strategies, Social Media Strategy