How to create a social media marketing strategy in 7 steps
Having a plan is an essential step for successful social media marketing. Understanding what your goals are, who your target audience is and their needs allow a business to attain best results on social media. Moreover, it’s essential to develop an excellent social media marketing strategy to grow your brand on social media and manage social media marketers.
Social media marketing platforms include Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn, among others. Businesses use these platforms to reach out and engage with their customers to promote their brands. However, your marketing strategy should be precise and brief enough to make it easy for you to execute. Avoid making dubious plans that are unachievable and difficult to measure.
Let’s look at the advantages of social media marketing for a business.
#1. Improved brand loyalty
Most businesses today engage in sharing their brands on social media. Social media marketing acts as a powerful tool for building brand recognition by responding to customers’ queries and experiences.
However, one is expected to engage their audience actively on social media as this strengthens brand loyalty among the audience. Bank powerful on the importance of positive image for your brand on social media. Without a doubt, this move will automatically translate into increased brand loyalty as well as better sales.
#2. Increased brand awareness
Social media has proven to be the most popular marketing platform today. Creating a business page on a social network is the first step to begin. By doing so, you are assured of an increase in brand awareness as social. However, one is expected to come up with engaging and captivating content that would lure more followers.
You may also consider actively involving your influencers in the brand advertisement program by allowing them to share your content frequently. This also improves brand awareness.
#3. Increased engagement rate
Invest more in growing the number of loyal customers for your brand by engaging more with your customer and ensuring speedy reply on their queries. Excellent customer care ofa single loyal customer could bring you more clients within their network through referrals.
This is one of the most advantageous aspects of using social media as a marketing platform. When your customers are satisfied with what you are offering, they get to share good product reviews. This, in turn, leads to increased site visits and purchases.
#4. Cost-effectiveness
Having a social media marketing platform has proven to be less expensive as it barely costs you next to nil to create a profile on major social media sites. Even though a few channels charge extra, it still stands out as the most cost-effective marketing platform. Let’s also not forget the fact that social media operates throughout and your post is likely to remain there for an extended period. Ensure posting and monitoring your content regularly to keep track of your results.
#5. Boost in traffic
Most people prefer buying a brand that is highly recommended by other users. Great product reviews create more trust between the brand and the audience. Ensure to develop and share useful content around your brand.
This assures you of more positive feedback circulating your brand. Additionally, social media creates and increases traffic on your page depending on how well you market your product through sharing your brand across millions of followers, thereby increasing purchase.
#6. Improvement in SEO Ranking
Having your business on social media makes it easy for customers to find you on search engines such asGoogle. This increases brand awareness and can provide more customer engagement. For your business to rank higher, ensure you have high-quality content complemented with product information, marketing statistics, videos, and infographics.
Most people have the notion that highly rated products are of better quality; hence they will go for highly ranked products.
Let’s look at the various steps on how to create a perfect social media marketing strategy
Step 1. Set social media marketing goals that align with your business objectives
For a strategy to be effective, one must come up with smart goals and objectives. Aims and objectives act as a way to measure returns in business. Consider setting goals that are attainable, relevant, measurable, concise and specific. Additionally, analyzing one’s business objective may create brand loyalty, increase brand awareness, number of customers as well as increasing sales.
Once a business sets goals and objectives, it becomes easier to create a perfect social media marketing strategy that’s directed towards achieving those set objectives. Additionally, you could also join forces with your influencers and ask them to share your content widely to improve SEO ranking.
Step 2. Know your target audiences
This second step is crucial in that, when you are aware of your targeted customer, it’s easier to select a social media platform that works for your business. For example, if your audience spends most of their time on Facebook, it would be wise for you to consider Facebook as your primary platform.
Consider investing more on Facebook ads to reach your customers better. In addition to that, creating content that interests your audience is crucial in that they may turn into potential customers for your business. You could also consider coming up with questionnaires where users are required to answer various questions like age, location, job title income and problems that they need your business to solve. With this information, you can know your targeted audience better.
Considering the popularity of each social media platform, it’s advisable for a business to direct all its content on each to ensure it reaches more customers. Moreover, your social media marketing strategy should be in accordance with the various social media platforms as well as the set goals and objectives.
Lastly, consider gathering more information through social media analytics to know how they interact with your product, where they dwell and who they are. These insights allow you to come up with the perfect strategy that will lead to better targeting.
Step 3. Conduct a competitive analysis
Knowing your competitor genesis and location is crucial before designing any strategy. An extensive competitor analysis is highly warranted towards the same.
By doing so, the business can source information that works for the competitors and how your business can use that to their advantage. Searching through google is one of the easiest ways to find your competitors.
By just keying in the keywords, industry terms and phrases, you get to see a variety of those competitive businesses. Sprout Social is the most popular social media competitive analysis tool that allows you to source information from Facebook and Instagram among other social media platforms.
This will enable you to know the type of content your competitors are posting.Social listening act as another effective way of keeping up with competition. As you go through your competitor accounts, you may come across relevant information that will help you evaluate your own goals.
Moreover, information gathered from competitors gives your business a better idea on what most customers want; thus it will be easier to create a perfect marketing strategy.
Step 4. Build a strong and engaging social content
Your choice of words determines how well your content reaches diverse and potential customers. Having informative and full details about the product allows them to know what you are offering in depth.
The two main components that define good content include context and form. The type of information you post on social media can be in the form of images, videos, texts among others. It’s essential to choose the various forms wisely as that determines how well your brand will be heard. Engaging your audience with fun videos and images ensures your brand voice and the channel is trending.
Moreover, a business should consider posting timing, posting frequency to display the right content at the right frequency and timing. By doing so, you’dbe able to come up with a robust social media content strategy that targets more audience.It’s advisable to create a good content program that shows how often you will post to various social media platforms to avoid redundancy.
Step 5. Make timelessness a priority
Most customers prefer faster responses from various brands as well as relevant information. Social media acts as an excellent platform for brands to engage with their audience. This type of networking is crucial; hence it’s essential for businesses to ensure they don’t mess up any engagement opportunities.
Social customer care increases brand awareness that translates to increased sales and profit margins. A business gains popularity as a brand by actively engaging with its audience. Ensure that you are readily available to answer your customers’ queries as soon as possible to keep them motivated.
Tight turnaround timeis fundamentalas it allows you to come up with an active social media marketing strategy that enables you to gain customer respect as a brand. Moreover, investing more in customer satisfaction is vital for every marketing strategy to be effective.
Step 6. Collaborate with Influencers
Social media has many influencers including celebrities, TV stars, and journalist-bloggers, among others. With their vast network of followers, celebrities are most likely to market a brand and reach so many potential customers on social media.
It is absolutely paramount for every company to extend its reach by involving influencers to market their products.
There are various strategies that influencers use to market a particular brand which include:
#1. Product Launches
This is an excellent way where you can partner with influencers while introducing your new products on social media. Influencers could come up with exciting and interactive methods that the audience would notice quickly.
#2. Product reviews
Asking your influencers to post a useful product review online acts as a perfect lead and encourages more clients to purchase the recommended brand. Businesses are advised to present their products nicely to ensure they get positive feedback from their customers.
#3. Contests and giveaways
Asking influencers to support you in organizing giveaways and contests to market your array of products or services could build more brand awareness on social media. Most clients would buy in to a particular product or service when backed by a celebrity. This may translate to an increased sale.
#4. Takeovers
This is the process through which businesses allow influencers to temporarily run their social media account and post on their behalf for a given period. Positive reviews from celebrities on a certain product would be an added advantage for the business. In return, they’d be able to target a large group of audience thereby, spiking product sales.
Step 7. Testing and evaluating the marketing strategy
Having a perfect social media marketing strategy is a massive move for any business. However, it’s in your best interest to implement and track your various strategies to see how well they work.One could use UTM parameters to track social audience as they engage in your posts so you can see what content they prefer the most. You’d learn that some strategies work better than others, and thus, decide on the ones to invest in and the ones to lose.
Additionally, one could conduct online surveys by asking followers on whether you are meeting their needs or otherwise. One could use the information acquired to make sure they deliver accordingly.It’s advisable to refer to your social media strategy often and make changes regularly where necessary.
Conclusion
Social media marketing has proven to be a handy platform to achieve the objectives of your product. This objective could be an increase in brand awareness and loyalty, increased sales, improved social media ranking as well as growing website traffic. An excellent social media marketing strategy should be flexible and following the latest trends.
Additionally, it’s advisable to continuously monitor how the created strategy fares in the market and whether it’s been useful or not. All things considered, it’s equally rewarding to have a social media marketing strategy to achieve your business goals and objectives.