What is a Social Media Marketing Strategy?

Fundamentally, social media marketing strategy is a summary of everything that you plan to do and hope to achieve in social media.

It guides your actions and let you know whether you are succeeding or failing.

Every post, like, reply and comment should serve with a purpose.

In a simple word, the more specific your strategy is, the more effective the execution will be.

You have to keep it specific and concise.

Don’t make your plan too lofty and broad that makes it unattainable or impossible to be measured.

Why Do You Need to Create Best Strategies for Social Media Marketing?

According to the research done, there is 97% of small businesses use social media to attract new customers.

But, there is 85% of business owners are not sure what social media tools to use.

Besides, the result also may reveal that there is 63% of consumers who seek businesses online are more likely to become the consumers of brands.

This demonstrated a massive potential for social media marketing to increase sales!

Social media marketing helps you to validate your brand, and it is no longer optional.

It is an essential way for companies to reach its consumers.

And when it is done correctly, tells those consumers that their brand is active and focused on the communication.

Hence, having a social media presence without an active social media marketing strategy could be just catastrophic for your business as having no plan at all.

How to Create the Best Social Media Marketing Strategies

Let’s walk you through the 5 step plan to create a winning social media strategy of your own.

Step 1: Align the Business Objectives with Social Media Marketing Goals

That’s right.

This is your first step which is creating a social media marketing strategy to establish your objectives and goals.

Without these goals, you have no way to gauge the success of your social media.

Thus, set the S.M.A.R.T Goals.

Each of your goals should include:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Attainable
• Relevant
• Time-bound

By setting the SMART framework, it helps to ensure your goals could lead to real business results, rather than just lofty ideas.

Thus, start by developing your social media marketing plan now by writing down at least three social media goals.

Make sure to regulate your social media goals as well along with your overall marketing strategy.

Step 2: Learn Everything about Your Audience

So, how are you going to learn about your audience?

It is quite easy.

You need to create audience personas.

By apprehending who your audience is and what they want to see on social is the crucial key in creating content that they will like, comment on or share.

It is also critical for planning how to convert your social media followers into customers for your business.

Creating your audience personas will allow you to think of your prospects, followers, and customers as real people with real wants and needs.

This definitely will help you think more clearly about what to offer them.

Step 3: Conduct the Research

The odds are, your competitors are already using social media – and that means you could learn from what they are already doing.

This is why you need to conduct the competitive analysis.

It allows you to understand who the competition is and what they are doing well and not so well.

Also, you will get a good sense of what to expect in your industry, which will help you to set social media targets on your own.

The analysis will also help you to find opportunities.

You might want to concentrate on the networks where your audience is underserved, rather than attempting to win the followers away from the dominant player.

Step 4: Set up Accounts & Improve Existing Profiles

As you select which social channels to use, you will also need to outline your strategy for each network.

If you can’t formulate a solid mission statement for a particular social network, you want to reconsider whether that network is worth it.

Once you have decided which networks to focus on, it is time for you to create profiles or to improve existing profile so they could align with your strategic plan.

In general, you have to make sure that you fill out all the profile fields and use keywords that people will use to search for your business.

Step 5: Test, Evaluate & Adjust Strategy

Indeed, your social media strategy is the vital document for your business, and you can’t assume you will get it right on the first try.

As you start to execute your plan and track your results, you may discover that some strategies would not work as you did anticipate.

While some are working even better than you might be expected.

Hence, re-evaluate, test and do it all again is the crucial step that you should do to gain the data.

Once the data start coming in, use it to re-evaluate your strategy frequently.

Constantly testing will allow grasping what works and what does not.

So, you could refine your strategy in no time.

 

The Checklist of Effective Social Media Marketing

This is the checklist of 8 steps social media marketing strategy to help you creating and auditing the best strategies for your social media marketing.

• What are your social media goals in 2019?
• Where will you reach your social media?
• What is your cores demographic?
• What is your core social media metrics?
• Who are your most prominent social media competitors & its’ top posts?
• What type of content will you produce?
• What are your best times to post on social?
• How will you track & analyse your efforts?

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