Social media marketing strategy is the key ingredient for doing social media marketing. A social media marketing strategy is a master plan to build awareness for your business and grow your following on social media. Without a strategy, you might be posting on social media platforms for the sake of posting.
But without understanding what your goals are, who your target audience is, and what they want, it’ll be hard to achieve results on social media.
Social media marketing strategy includes setting marketing goals, choosing the right networks to use and measuring your desired result.
Your purpose for a social media marketing campaign keeps varying from business to business and requires an understanding of your company’s goals and objectives.
FUN TIP : here’s an interesting tip about social media marketing strategy. You can also have a strategy for each of your social media channels, such as a Facebook marketing strategy and Instagram marketing strategy and so on, which all lead up to your overall social media marketing strategy.
One of the simplest ways of creating a social media marketing strategy is by asking yourself THE 5W’s :
1. Why does your business want to be on social media?
To set your social media marketing goals, you have to think about what you want to accomplish. Creating a goal that is Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound will help you understand your goals to be in social media.
Different businesses will have different social media marketing goals, so consider your options and let your goals guide the rest of your strategy.
General social media marketing goals are:
- Increasing brand awareness
- Generating more leads.
- Driving website traffic
- Improving online sales
- Interaction with your customers
- Boost brand engagement
- Grow revenue
Start by identifying a few goals that will be most beneficial for your business.
PRO TIP : A strong goal includes a number and a time frame.
2. Who is your target audience?
Once you’ve figured out why, the next step is to consider your target audience.
There are many ways to build marketing personas by understanding who they are? (E.g. job title, age, gender, salary, location, etc.), what are they interested in that you can provide? (Eg. entertainment, information, high value content etc,.), where are they mostly active? ( Facebook, Instagram, Twitter etc), when do they look for the type of content you can provide? (weekends, weekdays, during daily commute ), how do they consume the content? (E.g. read social media posts, watch videos, etc.).
You don’t have to start from scratch. If your business has been running for a while, you will have a good sense of your target audience.
Each platform has its own targeting features, but many allow you to target audience members based on demographics, locations, expressed interest, or behavior to reach your relevant audience. Spend some time refining your desired audience before publishing any advertisement.
3. What are you going to share?
When you see this question, you might be wondering about the types of content like videos or images? But wait, more than the type of content you share, the kind of theme you share is more important.
Don’t forget to provide an overview of your business, your contact details, and a link to your website. You probably want your profile image to be something recognizable, like your logo and your company’s vision. Make sure your images are the proper sizes and display well on desktop and mobile views.
Make a list of all the different types of content you’d like to share on an ongoing basis. Keep in mind that you don’t want all your content to be self-serving and promotional. A common social media best practice is to follow the 80/20 rule, which means 80 percent of your content is useful, educational, or entertaining and 20 percent is sales-driven.
4. Where are you going to share?
Determining and choosing the right Social Media Channels starts with understanding your target audience and which social networks they are most likely to use.
The social media marketing channels you choose to focus on should also be well-suited to your social media marketing goals.
If you’re new to social media, Facebook or Instagram is often the best place to start. While deciding which channels to develop a presence on, think about your customers, their demographics and your competitors. In social media marketing, it is very important to know which channels are they likely to use? If you need help digging into your target audience, take some time to know about the social media channels and each channel’s key demographic, and what it’s best for.
5. When are you going to share?
The last but the most important part of strategy is figuring out when to share your content.
Let’s go back and see the higher level now. To decide the appropriate time and day of the week you want to post, you must look deep into the behaviour of your target audience.
There might not be a best time to post but it really depends on your audience. So the first general step is to focus on the patterns of behavior of your target audience.
To know about your customer’s behaviors, you will have to review some common metrics like – your social media platform’s followers and likes, the reach on your social media posts, the number and time of Likes, Comments, and Shares your content is receiving, the number of times your posts are clicked on.
This will help you in understanding your audience’s persona and therefore help in an effective social media marketing strategy.
PRO TIP : Look at your overall performance on a monthly basis, at least!
Also review the statistics of every individual post every once in a week. This will help you in understanding more about what type of content helps in achieving best results for your specific goals.
Bottom line : How to execute this strategy?
If looking at this social media marketing strategy makes social media marketing look like it’s a tough job, focus on taking one step at a time. This might be difficult and slow but if you take enough time to create a plan with clear goals you want to achieve, a consistent and precise content schedule and regular monitoring of analytics will definitely help obtain an engaged audience who are willing to buy your product and services.
