Without a strategy, it’ll be hard to achieve results from marketing on your social media platforms. Without understanding your goals, who your target audience are, what they want, you would just be posting for no reason.
Whether your goal is to grow your brand through social media or to level up as a social media marketer, developing a social media marketing strategy is essential.
With the help of a marketing strategy, your brand can tackle its goals with a sense of purpose.
Do you have your social media marketing strategy squared away for the second half of 2019? Here are the steps to creating an effective social media strategy, engaging audiences and optimizing your result;
1. Set Goals that Tackle your Biggest Challenges
To begin, create a strategy, you need to figure out what you want out of social media at large. Perhaps it’s to better engage your customers or it’s to gain a larger share of voice in your industry. Either way, remember to set measurable goals.
- Drive-in Sales
Are you creating quality content on social media to entice folks to come to see you? Many SME businesses are on the hunt for a social media marketing strategy that drives sales. To increase the quality of leads coming from your social channels you’ll need to better target your core audience, this can be done by using specific keywords, phrases or hashtags. - Create a loyal fanbase
Do you receive referrals from your customers? Do your customers respond to your questions and inquiries without any sort of initiation? your customers can be your best cheerleaders and sources of generating new ones, only if you provide quality services and know your way around convincing them.
- A voice in your industry
Find out what your competitors are doing that seems to be working, How they drive engagement or sales, such analysis can help you understand how to position your own brand both on social media and off.
These explicit goals can help you better understand what challenge to tackle. When in doubt, keep your social media strategy simple rather than mixing up too many objectives that’ll distract you.
2. Understand which Audiences are on which Platforms
Once you have identified your goal, the next thing to consider is your target audience. It is important you know what platform your audience use. Many marketers make assumptions which aren’t good enough, with demographic data and social media analytics tools out there you don’t have to make guesses anymore.
What you need to know about your audience, what networks your brand should approach and what type of content you should publish to influence your social media marketing strategy is already out in the open.
Before you can truly know what network to find your customers you should test your ads on multiple platforms, after which you focus your strategy on the platform that generates more leads.
Having analytics helps one to be more effective and efficient in testing out content. It’s so much easier to focus on the type of content that works best.
3. Focus on your Most Important Metrics
No matter your business industry, your social media strategy should be data-driven that means measuring and focusing on the social media metrics that matter.
While it is nice to have so many “likes” and shares, they become vanity metrics if they aren’t resulting in meaningful engagement or sales. It’s of no use having followers you can’t engage.
The right metrics will help you identify strengths, weaknesses, track improvement, solve problems e.t.c, you get to know the post your audience better engaged with that way you’ll tailor your content towards that area.
Some metrics you should measure:
Reach: The number of unique users who saw your post is what is referred to as post reach. How far is your content spreading? Is it actually reaching the user’s feed? In a world that is increasingly data-driven, tracking reach is arguably more important than ever.
Clicks: The number of clicks on your posts, company name or logo is what I mean by clicks. Link clicks help you understand how users move through your feed. Tracking click per campaign is key to understanding what drives curiosity or encourage people to buy.
Hashtag performance: What were your most used hashtags on your own site? Which hashtags were most associated with your brand? Hashtags create more engagement.
4. Make Research on your Competitors
Take a look at what your competitors are doing before you start creating your content.
The idea isn’t to copy or steal your competitors’ content. Instead, it’s to determine what’s working for them and how you can adapt your own campaigns accordingly. Taking a look at your competition’s presence will directly inform your own social media strategy and stir you to do better.
There is much room for your brand to set itself apart from your competitors in terms of content and voice. You can find your competitors simply through Google search.
By now you should have a big picture of what your social media strategy will look like.
Continuous analysis of your efforts will help you know how well you’re doing. This means looking at your highest-performing content and tweaking your campaigns accordingly. How effective is your social media strategy?
