How to Create Social Media Marketing Strategy for your Business
Are you just getting into social media? We can help your business create a social media marketing strategy from scratch. So while you’re a beginner to social media, we can offer our experience and professional support to help your social media marketing take off.
What is the Social Media Marketing Strategy?
A social media strategy is an action plan to reach an audience and deliver results on social media. This marketing strategy explains how to do what you plan to do and how to gauge your performance.
With cut-throat competition, your strategy needs to be on top to win the game of social media if you don’t want to continue to lose money on goals not served. Marketing strategies play an important role in social media marketing with a focus on key performance indicators (KPIs).
Why Does your Business Need to Invest in Social Media Marketing?
Social media is the best place to reach potential customers and generate leads for your business. So whether you’re a big or small business, it’s a powerful marketing channel which you won’t want to ignore.
As more and more people use social media to discover and learn more about their favourite brands, you too can dive into the vast world of social platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn and reap benefits like improved sales and leads.
What is the Purpose of Social Media Strategy?
Since you’re new, you might ask, “why social media strategy?”
What is the purpose of a marketing strategy when you can go out and start posting on whatever platform you’ve chosen for your business?
Broadly, three purposes guide your social media strategy. One is to inform, the second is to educate, and the third is to entertain.
And the final aim is to gradually guide your target audience through the sales funnel till they make a purchase.
Due to the lack of understanding of social media trends and techniques, beginners find themselves in blind alleys.
But you easily avoid being trapped in the complexity of social platforms if you outsource social media marketing to an experienced agency like Vistoplex Media.
However, we will still guide you through the entire process and help you build a robust and workable social media strategy from scratch. Let’s begin!
Create Social Media Strategy in 8 Steps
1. Understand your Audience
Knowledge is power. If you don’t know who your audience is, you can’t have a well-planned action plan. So the first thing for you to do is to zero in on your potential audience.
Building on that, you can create a well-informed social media strategy.
– Who are they?
– Where can I find them?
– Audience demographics?
– What problems do they have?
– Audience interests and preferences?
Powered with this information, you can create relatable content that your audience might find helpful and valuable.
Based on the sites your audience frequently uses, you can choose the right platform for your business such as Instagram, Facebook, or YouTube.
2. Set SMART Goals to Meet your Objectives
Setting S.M.A.R.T. goals means they should be specific, measurable (should be quantifiable), attainable (set realistic & achievable goals), relevant, and time-bound (you should be able to get results within a set timeframe).
When you work on your goals and objectives, you’re likely to get exceptional return on investment (ROI) with increased engagement, click-through, and conversion rates.
Some KPIs to look out for on different social media sites include click-through rate for LinkedIn, story views for Instagram, and cost-per-click (CPC) for Facebook. Based on these metrics you can judge whether or not your strategy is working.
3. Set Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
There should be clear metrics to measure your goals against. With the help of KPIs, you can measure the performance of your campaigns. Therefore, defining those social media marketing metrics is important. Here are a few:
- Engagement Rate: This is the ratio of total impressions your post received and the number of likes, comments, and shares it managed to get. The formula to calculate the engagement rate is simple. Just divide the total number of likes, shares, and comments by the post’s total impressions.
- Clicks: The number of times people click on your post.
- Reach: The total impressions your post receives.
Suppose, if you want to increase brand awareness and launch a campaign with that goal in mind. The KPI or metric to focus on is tracking the number of impressions and shares.
4. Focus on the Channel Relevant to your Audience
Depending on demographics, choose your channel accordingly. For example, if your target audience is adults go with Facebook.
If you’re targeting millennials, choose Instagram, Snapchat or YouTube as your preferred social media marketing channel.
Besides demographics, also focus on audience personas to find the best channel for promoting your brand. With relevant channels selected, the next thing to do is to create your company profiles on them.
Your profiles should align perfectly with your audience personas. To make them relevant to your target audience, use relevant keywords, graphics, and posts.
5. Analyse your Competitors’ Social Accounts
It’s likely that your competitors also use social media, so keeping an eye on them to figure out what they’re up to will help inform your own strategy.
It’s necessary to know what they’re doing to get an idea of what is working for them and spot opportunities to target.
6. Use Social Media Listening to Keep an Eye on Competitors
Check out your competitors’ social profiles regularly to keep track of hashtags and keywords they target, and they have optimized their profiles, account handles, and posts can influence how you do social marketing or run campaigns.
7. Start Creating Social Media Content
Once you’ve completed steps 1 to 6, it’s time to create the content and start publishing on your social channels. For content, take inspiration from what your competitors publish.
But be original and unique to make your own place on social networking sites. Create different varieties of social media posts.
Some should just be for entertainment purposes, some intended to inform, while others should educate your target audience. With different varieties of posts, you can promote your business more effectively.
But make sure your graphics represent your branding when it comes to the colour scheme, style, and voice to make your brand identifiable to your target audience.
8. Create a Post Calendar
You can get the most out of social media by posting regularly. Therefore it’s best that you schedule your posts according to your content calendar.
This way you will maximize your social media ROI by posting regularly matching with the best post timings and driving maximum engagement.
9. Track Performance and Tweak your Strategy Accordingly
This all would mean nothing if you don’t measure your results regularly to see what’s and what’s not working. Like there’s no guarantee that you’ll do it right the first time.
After every campaign, it’s important to track results. When you compare the results of different campaigns, you’ll know which one to go with.
Therefore, at the beginning do a lot of testing and keep re-evaluating results over and again. That’s what makes analytics so important to keep track of social posts that drive the most engagement and traffic to your business.
Based on the metrics, you can make necessary adjustments to your social media strategy in order to drive maximum results and boost ROI.
Wrap-Up: Social Media Marketing Strategy for Small Businesses
As you already know, there’s much to capitalise on when it comes to social media. You can leverage the expansive reach of social networking sites to get more people to know about your business and have them visit your website only to be converted into buyers if your landing pages meet their expectations.
But only a solid foundation rooted in data can help you maximise the gains to be drawn from social sites with billions of monthly active users. That’s to say, before going forward with social media marketing having a robust strategy in place is a must.
That begins with understanding the persona of your target audience and what they need most desperately that you can furnish them with. When you know where to locate your target audience, the next thing to do is set SMART goals and work out the plan as to how to reach them most effectively.
What can really help your content resonate with your audience is to take clues from your competitors as regards what content form is best working for them. Beyond that, what else is central to your social media strategy is sticking to the social media content calendar to make sure you publish regularly. And finally that you track the performance of your marketing efforts on social media to tweak your strategy accordingly.
However, if all this looks too complex to be handled efficiently by you, we would love to help position your standings across social networking sites. With our managed social media marketing services, we’d help you achieve organic as well as paid social results with our data-driven social media strategy. Contact us by emailing us at hello@vistoplexmedia.co.uk or calling 0208 050 1545.