Developing an effective social media marketing strategy doesn’t always have to be tedious. There are certain key steps you must take to ensure get the process completed in less time.
According to Oberlo, users spend an average of two hours and 25 minutes per day on social media. Furthermore, 73% of marketers believe that social media marketing has been “somewhat effective” or “very effective” for their business.
This shows how important marketing through social media is for any business that wants to thrive and increase the numbers on their profit margin.
What is Social Media Marketing?
Social media marketing is the practice that involves the promotion and marketing of a brand’s product or service. With social media user number growing actively, this aspect of marketing has become incredibly throng with different brands showcasing their products to their target market.
By utilizing social media marketing you reach out to a wide market that can patronize your goods and services while sticking your brand name in the minds of your customers and target market.
What is a Social Media Strategy?
A social media strategy seeks to adopt the techniques outlining the plans of action that will help boost the overall results of a brand’s presence on social media. It takes into consideration the required metrics that will make it easy to measure the goals.
A good social media strategy takes into consideration the social media channels that give the best results to the brand. It spells out every social media account your brand is running and its current performance.
Conclusively, an excellent social media marketing strategy takes into consideration the roles of every member of the social media team. In cases wherein you run in-house, this is an aspect you must look into properly, as any failure can cripple the system.
Creating An Effective Social Media Marketing Strategy
Every effective social media marketing strategy must follow certain steps for it to cause that positive effect on the numbers of a business in terms of sales. These steps include:
Step 1: Set Goals
Goals are vital in motivating you to try out new things, aim to be better, and also increase income and impact. Many brands set financial goals and performance goals, but hardly ever set goals for their social media marketing. This ignorance makes their competition snap away their customers online.
A social media goal must be strategic and has to fully contribute to the overall success of the brand in terms of brand awareness and sales. When a goal doesn’t help achieve any of the above, the goal shouldn’t be a priority. For example, having a huge number of likes on your content is not a goal.
A great goal would be to increase the number of click-through-rates for an advertising campaign or boosting the number of followers on the social media account of a brand.
Step 2: Understand Your Competition
As a professional running some aspects of your business through social media, you need to monitor your competitors tracking their performance in different aspects. You can check their most active pages and the places wherein they yield the highest results.
For example, when your competition continues promoting a particular content, pay keen attention to that promotion. And you don’t need to do this by constantly monitoring their comment sections as you can use the right social media marketing tools to track everything.
Step 3: Master Your Audience
Mastering your audience is a vital aspect of building your brand’s presence and influence on social media. When you know your audience, it will help you tailor your social media calendar and activities to fit their interests, which will bring engagement to your platforms.
For example, a platform like Snapchat has increased engagement from younger users (especially teenagers) compared to some others. The chart also reveals that there are more female active users than males which is the core reason so many of their features have a feminine touch.
A great social media analysis will give you all the insight you need for the type of brand you have, taking into consideration the kinds of contents that give you greater engagement and higher returns.
Step 4: Run a Social Media Audit
Running a complete social media audit frequently is an effective social media marketing strategy technique you must adopt. Duplicate content, errors, and low performance channels are important metrics you track for overall marketing success on social media.
On your audit, you can track down dummy accounts or fake accounts linking to your business which is highly detrimental to your brand game. You can report these accounts to the platforms who will penalise them severely protecting your customers from falling into dubious hands.
Step 5: Improve Profiles
Constantly improving your profiles by adding necessary features into them is a great social media marketing strategy that will help your brand stay in sync with the latest trends.
A substantial part of improving your social media profiles will depend on the platforms wherein you do a lot of business. And this decision is simple when you understand how each social media platform works and the advantages it can bring to your business.
Read more: How To Choose The Right Social Media Platform For Your Business
The image above represents the social media channels with the largest traffic in terms of the number of users (both active and inactive) which can help you when you seek numbers. However, listing each social media channel and creating a goal in which you seek to achieve therein will help you a lot.
Step 6: Create a Content Calendar
Publishing content constantly is a vital part of social media marketing and strategy. However, when you constantly post without a plan, you can lose your inspiration which will cause laxity and inactivity on your business pages.
You can avoid all these problems by creating a content calendar that will help you post content frequently and uniformly across all your platforms. However, this shouldn’t eliminate the need to input certain spontaneous content that can drive engagement high.
A great rule would be to make 80% of your content direct traffic to your business, discuss branding and market your products to your audience. Half of your remaining percentage can be allocated to the risky and highly engaging content that will increase engagement.
Step 7: Adjust Strategy
Poor management and an efficient control system are usually the true causes of many failed strategies in business and social media.
Many businesses on social media stick to certain trends, hashtags, and content development styles. While this might work for some time, they become obsolete in the long run which will reduce the rate at which your leads convert to customers.
Frequently adjusting strategies by implementing newer ones and diluting older ones will keep your content fresh, relatable, current, and in sync with your audience. A great way to build ideas on a workable strategy is to introduce surveys for your audience members.
Conclusion
A social media strategy seeks to adopt the techniques outlining the plans of action that will help boost the overall results of a brand’s presence on social media. When you want to venture into social media marketing, using a bulletproof strategy will save you money and time.
A dominant strategy is built through experience and you might not want to keep testing when you can get the desired results immediately.
Socialander is a team of responsible professionals who understand social media marketing strategies and the platforms that work effectively for every type of brand and business. You can reach out to us when you book a free marketing consultation with our team by clicking “I want a Free Consultation Session”, and we will help you scale your business on social media.
