Discover the insider tips for crafting an effective social media strategy that increases followers and drives higher traffic, leads, and profits for your business.
Social media is where everyone either is visible or wants to be seen. With more than 4 billion users, no other platform can provide better exposure, given that you make the right moves. The only catch is that with great opportunities comes greater competition. It is a legitimate concern for businesses to scale rapidly and gain mass visibility among the right audience to actually use social media to their advantage. The first and most important action you need to take is to develop smart social media marketing strategies that are aligned with your business goals. These are the touchstones you can start from to see what works for you and adjust your plans accordingly. Let’s try to understand what these social media strategies entail.
What is a Social Media Strategy?
A social media strategy is a well-documented plan of action containing all the necessary information regarding your social media marketing activities. It is basically a map that directs your social media marketing team’s every move. This includes your business goals, target audience, platforms you will concentrate on, content verticals, and much more. Having an agile social media marketing strategy in place is crucial for taking quick and definitive actions. Creating strategies directs your focus on opportunities and challenges, helping you plan ahead for all possible situations. In this blog, we are going to take you through the process of creating a social media marketing strategy step by step for businesses to bridge the gap and mend the loopholes.
1. Define Your Business Goals
Not all your goals can be fulfilled simultaneously. You have to start from scratch and write down your business objectives in an order of priority. Going at them one at a time will make your efforts more effective. Even a single end goal might seem too daunting and unreachable. So, break these goals down into smaller, achievable targets, which make them seem realistic. By setting SMART goals i.e., making your goals specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and time-bound, you give your team clear direction to plan and proceed. Aimlessly chasing social media success without any end goals in sight would only result in wasting your time and resources. After segmenting your goals, you have to pinpoint KPIs or metrics that would enable you to track your progress and complete your target. You will have to go through this process for each high-level goal you set your eyes on. So, we will outline all the main goals that businesses seek to achieve using social media marketing strategy and how you can track them to completion.
2. Understand Your Target Audience
As marketers, know that all your social media marketing strategies must be focused on your target audience. So, make it a priority to sketch out a clear image of your target audience to give direction to your social media marketing strategy. Lots of marketers out there ignore to define their target group before they begin marketing. Not surprisingly, their attempts prove to be unfruitful as they do not know the people they are marketing to! If you’re wondering why you need to conduct target audience research for social media marketing? We’ve got the answer.
3. Select the Optimal Social Media Platforms for Your Brand
The success of your social media marketing initiatives also depends on which social media platforms you choose for marketing. But what businesses do is create accounts on every social media platform that comes their way. Large brands like Starbucks and Target might be able to sustain this approach, but smaller businesses have to function on limited resources. If you are the latter type, its vital that you set your sights on the right social media platform or platforms to succeed in your marketing efforts. Wondering how to make this crucial choice?
Facebook: The majority of users are aged between 25-34, where 43.7% are females and 56.3% are males. Facebook stands out as an exceptional advertising platform.
Instagram: Favoured by Gen-Z with an almost equal age distribution. Instagram offers easier organic growth for businesses than Facebook, thanks to its Discover page, hashtags, and location tools. It’s also a prime platform for influencer marketing.
TikTok: This famous video-sharing platform also boasts a user base of 18-24 years of age with a 50-50 male-to-female ratio. TikTok is considered the best for spreading brand awareness by showing off product tutorials and use cases. It’s the place you can easily go viral on.
YouTube: The largest user segment, aged 25-34, has a gender split favoring males at 54.4% and females at 45.6%. Renowned for its highly engaged comment section, it’s perfect for fostering a community. Plus, it’s an optimal platform for marketing both long and short-form videos.
LinkedIn: With over a billion users, LinkedIn attracts 25 to 34-year-olds the most, with 43.7% female and 57.3% male users. Crucial for personal brand marketing and network expansion, it’s indispensable for B2B companies. It also proves effective for luxury goods, services, and technical firms such as software providers.
X (formerly Twitter): 38% of users fall between 18 to 34 years old, with 66% being males and females 34%. Twitter ads provide a direct route to your audience, surpassing the wait for organic reach. Promoted Tweets are a swift way to expand your reach, enabling people to discover your profile.
Pinterest: With 30% of users aged 25 to 34 and a remarkable 76.2% being female, Pinterest is a must for any company with a visual marketing strategy. It’s an ideal platform for delivering captivating content to highly motivated online shoppers. The average time spent on Pinterest (per session) is a whopping 14.2 minutes. However, every business has unique constraints, so you must consider your available resources, such as time, budget, and team capacity, in choosing the right platform. Prioritize the platforms that best align with your social media marketing goals, target audience, and available resources.
4. Analyze Your Competitors
This might be the most insightful and informative step you perform while creating your social media marketing strategy. There is no scarcity of businesses with a prominent social media presence. Hence, it’s most likely that you will find competitors in your industry whom you can conduct an in-depth analysis on to figure out what kind of strategies they employ and what works among their audience.
5. Develop a Unique Brand Voice for Social Media
Do you know what distinguishes you the most from your competitors, particularly on social media? It is your brand voice. Your brand voice helps establish a connection between you and your audience. It can also help your brand develop trust and credibility with your target demographics.
6. Optimize Your Social Media Profiles for Maximum Impact
The next crucial step for social media marketing is to optimize your social media profiles. This process is about integrating the necessary information into your profile, including who you are, what you do, and your area of expertise. The basic idea behind optimizing your profile is to ensure that you showcase your capabilities and make a good impression on visitors to convert them into your followers.
7. Develop a Compelling Content Plan
Now that you have outlined the most important criteria for your social media marketing strategy, it is time to create a winning content plan. It must be a well-etched plan with relevant, interesting and timely content. You have to dive deep into the details for creating a content strategy as this will guide all your specific moves on social media, such as how to craft your content, what type of posts to publish on which profile, the publishing frequencies and time slots.
8. Analyze Your Social Media Performance
Once you start executing your social media marketing strategy by posting consistently, begin monitoring your pages’ reception, engagement, and content garnering. This can be done with the data provided by social media analytics. This data contains crucial metrics that help you understand whether the social media marketing strategy you created is working in your favor or not. Keeping in mind the importance of social media analytics, platforms have built-in analytics sections to provide insights to their users on their performance results.
9. Build a Strong Community Around Your Brand
Building a community helps you engage with your audience. It helps you to create a sense of belonging and establish trust among your customers. To build your community, begin by engaging with your followers, responding to comments and messages, and participating in conversations related to your industry or niche.
10. Additional Step: Leverage Paid Advertising for A Boost
Ad spending on social media marketing is projected to reach $219 billion in 2024. Wondering why marketers invest this much on ads on social? Its because Paid advertising helps you reach a larger audience and target specific demographics relevant to your business. It also allows brands and businesses to attract new followers and find potential customers. Here is how you can leverage paid advertising for social media marketing:
