Online marketing is an absolute must in this day and age if you plan to elevate your business and grow its reach. And amongst different kinds of online marketing, social media marketing is definitely essential, considering the fact that the majority of your target audience actually uses social media in their everyday life.
That said, it’s crucial to come up with an effective social media strategy so that you can strive to achieve your business goals in a more measurable and efficient manner. Every like, comment, reply and post should have their own purpose within your social media strategy. In that respect, you can never go wrong with thorough planning as you utilize the basic steps of social media marketing strategy.
Set Goals and Track Metrics
You can’t go into marketing without previously knowing what goals you want to achieve or what metrics are meaningful for you. In that sense, social media marketing is the same and requires you to set up S.M.A.R.T. goals with metrics that can be easily tracked. S.M.A.R.T. goal framework includes goals that are Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Time-bound.
Furthermore, you can decide what metrics are valuable to you and track them for more insight into how your strategy works. These can be conversion rates, web referrals, lead generated targets, engagement from social posts, and so on.
Get to Know Your Audience
The best thing you can do for your business and effective social media strategy is to learn who your audience is as well as the things they want to see on their social news feeds. In that respect, creating an ideal buyer persona will also help you customize your ads together with your posts so that you boost the chances of your posts getting likes, shares, and so on.
Of course, don’t disregard the power of social media analytics. Without the analysis of your followers, you won’t know their basic demographics and other details, which can be crucial for targeting your ads and posts better.
Learn More About Your Competitors
Just like you should get to know your audience, it’s important to learn as much as possible about your competition. This is especially true for their own social media strategies, the things that work great for them as well as those that don’t work so well. In that respect, you can gain crucial insight into deserving and effective social media strategies for your own business. For instance, you might want to focus on a social media platform that your competitors fail to utilize instead of trying to battle on the platform where they already have huge success.
Perform a Social Media Audit
In case you’re already using social media, it would be best to take a step back in order to analyse your previous efforts. This is where a social media audit can prove to be extremely useful. Essentially, you need to get the answers for a couple of very important questions such as what’s working and what’s not for your business, who connects with you, where your audience is, and so on.
This new knowledge will help you decide whether your current account is worth keeping or it might be better to start from scratch. In case you find other accounts across platforms using your brand name, don’t hesitate to report them. Also, verify your own accounts.
Choose Your Networks and Optimize Accounts
There are many different social media networks these days and the previous analysis should prove to be useful when it comes to choosing ideal ones for your business. A great practice is to use different channels for different purposes; for instance, you can use Facebook for targeted ads and Instagram for sharing the company’s culture and background. It’s also wise to share these mission statements on actual networks so that your audience knows what to expect.
Furthermore, optimization of your social media channels is a must if you want to leave a good impression and actually boost your business. That said, don’t forget to fill all of the profile fields in order to provide as much information as possible to your audience. Also, include keywords that match your business. A very important aspect of social media are images and you should make it a point to share images in the correct sizing for specific channels.
Create a Social Media Calendar
Not only will a social media calendar make things easier for you, but the right types of posts together with the posting schedule are bound to attract your audience even more. Different channels have different ideal posting times.
What’s more, keep in mind that you should stick to the following rule: 50% of your social media content should drive back traffic to your blog, 25% should be content from other sources, 20% of content should be related to your business goals (such as ads and promotions) while 5% should deal with the personal image of your brand and company culture.
Once you put your social media strategy in motion, keep in mind that you’ll have to get back to it every once in a while. After all, the whole point of the above-mentioned steps is to get you more data about your audience and marketing efforts so that you can continuously work towards re-evaluating and adjusting your strategy for better results.
