We are living in the social media era, and nobody can deny the great influence of social media in our daily lives. Apparently, social media platforms have become a plethora of advertisements and promotions for all scales of businesses. However, despite the abundance of marketers and small and large scale companies on these social channels, the strategy of targeting the relevant audience makes it sufficient for all brands.
Social media helps businesses generate decent revenue by allowing them to advertise their products and services on social media platforms. With almost 4.14 billion active social media users as of October 2020, covering almost 58 percent of the global population, social media has become a giant advertisement platform.
It might seem as easy as getting the likes and comments of your friends on your personal social media account. However, getting your customers’ attention to your business’s social media channel is not as simple as it seems.
To acquire your audiences’ attention, gain followers, engagement, and traffic, you need to build an effective social media marketing strategy. A social media marketing strategy helps you to post sensibly that drive sale and bring more leads.
How to Create an Effective Social Media Marketing Strategy?
Without having a goal and key performance indicators for your social media accounts, you cannot acquire the aim of growing through social media promotions.
The first thing that you need to do is customer research. Acquiring knowledge about your audience is essential because only then you can decide where your potential customers exist. You should learn which social media platform encompasses the most relevant audience for your product and services.
Not every social media platform needs the same effort and attention from your marketing team. Since different social media platforms are used by different audiences, so, you have to plan different strategies for these platforms. Let’s understand this with a personal example, you might have accounts on all of the popular social media channels, but you must use one more than the other. This is where the preferences matter.
Before you jump into making a strategy, you should learn that it is wise to build a platform-focused strategy for each platform, be it Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, Snapchat, TikTok, and others.
In general, your social media marketing strategy focuses on the following questions:
- What objectives do you have with your social media presence?
- Who is your target audience?
- What are your competitors doing?
- What content will you create?
- Where and when are you going to share your post?
- How long should you take to acquire a milestone?
- Are you getting the anticipated results within a specific time?
- If no, what should you add or remove from your current strategy?
Create an Effective Social Media Marketing Strategy
1) Know your business objectives
This is one of the most crucial phases of an effective social media marketing strategy. The marketing team should sit together and come up with goals that they expect to achieve through social media marketing. The eventual goal of every company is to increase sales, but the checkpoint come along this way has its own importance. An effective strategy should include all those primary goals. Those primary goals hat every business strives to achieve are the following:
- Social media presence increases brand awareness and recognition among the target audience.
- Posting on these channels boost engagement among users.
- By being present on social media, you offer instant customer service to a global audience.
- With social media, you can learn about your brand’s popularity and mentions on these platforms.
- It fosters existing leads and helps generate new ones.
- Social media presence can build a community that follows and talk about your products.
- Eventually, social media significantly drive traffic to your website and increases sales and revenue.
You should be focusing on the objectives depending on your business requirement and your social media marketing team’s size. If you have a large team for social media marketing, you can allocate some of the team members to the objective of increasing brand awareness and some to drive traffic to the website. It’s important to have certain goals for posting and sharing; otherwise, you will be aiming in the air with no or minimal results.
2) Determine your Target Audience
Determining the target audience before you start putting efforts into digital marketing efforts is crucial to your business success. Initially, you can identify your target audience depending on specific scenarios. For instance, if you are a mobile app development company, your target audience may include small and large-scale businesses, entrepreneurs, and business investors in the hunt for a better idea. This is a manual way of assuming where most of your target audience lies.
Moreover, you can go ahead with proper customer research with actual demographics and data. You can find out your target audience, their interest, and preferences through social media analytics tools. It is beneficial to build buyer personas.
A buyer persona is a combination of all the basic details, including age, gender, location, demographics, lifestyle, and income. With having a precise knowledge about the routine and living standards of your audience, you would be better able to plan a marketing strategy that engages them. A detailed buyer persona enables you to place your entire marketing strategy surrounding that. It’s a one-time effort that pays off a long way.
3) Analyze the competition
In business, it is always precautionary to keep an eye on your competitors. What is your competitor doing? where are they moving, and do the audience like where they are moving? Especially as a beginner, you need to have a keen analysis of your competitors. You should learn about their strategy and tactics that lead them towards growth and success.
You can use certain tools that help you get an insight into your competitors. Those tools can help you learn about your competitors’ social media marketing plans and strategies that lead them to success.
This way, you will get a clear view as to which kind of social media strategies they have been using that is driving their success. However, it is not necessary that what works for your competitors work for you as well. So, beware not to copy the exact strategy of competitors and others. On social media, what works better is individuality and creativity. You can analyze your competitors’ strategies and tweak them to suit your unique situation.
Just know that in the game of social media, creativity is required, and when you have that, you can choose a completely different strategy and idea and set yourself apart from your competitor. In addition to this, you can use social media competitive analysis tools to compare your performance with your competitors and identify your flaws and errors.
4) Create Effective Content
To create highly engaging and valuable content for your social media campaigns, you should understand the importance of a brand’s voice, tone, and message. Your posts and campaigns must be in alignment with the voice your company holds. To do so, it is crucial to come up with a theme that articulates your brand’s message on different social media platforms. Here are the following tips you can use to express your brand message on social media:
- To begin with, use social media management tools to help you schedule your posts in advance and run a smooth and organized digital campaign.
- Use User-generated content on your social media accounts. This is a two-edged sword that keeps your audience engaged and helps you deal with eth content gap in your strategy. In fact, posting user-generated content helps your audience learn about your brand’s popularity among others.
- You can ask a question or run a poll at your business account. This engages your audience and helps you understand their preferences. Keep posting stories and engaging videos on your social media account. Make sure the length of the videos does not go more than a minute or two. Very long videos can work reverse as it could be boring for your audience. A knowledgeable video with well-executed content and the right hashtags can bring millions of views and engagement.
- Whether it is text, images, polls, videos, or stories, it should have some value for your audience. Moreover, if your content involves sentiments of your target audience, it may work wonders for your product/services
5) The Right Posting platform
When you plan your social media posting strategy, you generally think about a particular platform that you prefer over others. The post design, content, size, and theme are in accordance with that specific channel. It is essential to decide what platforms you are going to focus on for posting.
It is not necessary to post your content on every single platform. Post the content on media where your target audience is present and those who provide the potential to grow. What else you should be focusing on is your brand power – something where your brand shines the most. It depends on the nature of your product, as well. Sometimes it’s that outstanding photography that attracts users to your post. At other times, its lesson-oriented videos that make user stop scrolling on their newsfeed. Whatever help you grab the attention of the relevant people should be the focus of your social media strategy. Getting aware of your brand power will also help you shape your social media post and then decide the right platform that catches your audiences’ attention.
6) The Post Schedule and Timely Responses
It is imperative to make a posting schedule. Your relevant audience is active and interacts more at certain times than others. Ideally, you should post the engagement ratio is high. Primarily when you are relying on organic reach, the timing holds crucial importance. More to this, ponce you share your post on any of your social media accounts, make sure you stay available to answer any queries and concerns from your audience.
This takes our focus to another important area; response to customers on an urgent basis. By responding immediately to your customers, you eliminate the chances of losing your customers. This also helps you maintain users’ interest in your products and lead them towards conversion. Any company that is present to cater to customer responses, interacts, and gives value to its followers is bound to receive recognition and success.
You can use social media monitoring tools to stay on top of social media marketing. These tools help you to learn about peak engagement hours and adjust your posting schedule accordingly.
7) Monitor and Improve
Social media is a place where it keeps evolving every day. The trend keeps coming and going every now and then. Multiple social media channels keep introducing new and exciting ways for advertisement and promotions. Therefore, it is essential for brands to analyze and improve their campaigns over time. Sticking to the same strategy for a long duration can be risky for your brand promotions.
Be aware of the kind of content that is working to bring leads and increase awareness about your brand. With this knowledge, you can adjust your post, content, and strategy according to the current demands. Track your performance on a consistent basis and keep watching the progress of your social media campaigns. This helps you make the necessary changes in the next campaign with the analysis of your previous post.
Final Words
It was all the basics for devising a winning social marketing strategy that produces results you desire with maximized brand visibility, user engagement, relevant content strategy, and sales.