Social media marketing is an important part of a strategy to do well. Without a plan, you will lose a golden opportunity to generate leads and connect with your future customers. Without understanding what your goals are and who your target audience is and what they want, getting results on social media can be difficult.

If you want to develop your brand through social media or become a social media marketer, you need to build a social media marketing strategy. A right approach will help you to make your brand presence online. There is a way to do this, and it should be noted that there are many crossovers in the social media marketing strategy and social media marketing plan.

Before discussing the strategy have a look at 5W’s of Social Media Marketing Strategy as the easiest way to create your social media marketing strategy is to ask yourself 5W’s.

5W’s of Social Media Marketing Strategy

The easiest way to create your social media marketing strategy is to ask yourself 5W’s:

1. Why would your business want to be on social media?
2. Who is your target group?
3. What are you going to post?
4. Where are you going to share your content?
5. When are you sharing your content?

1. Why would Your Business Want to be on Social Media?

The answer to this question must be clear in your mind. It’s about your social media objectives. Are you on social media to encourage your legacy? For directing traffic to your website? Or serve your customers?

 

In general, there are 9 Social Media Goals which you may have:

1. Increase brand awareness
2. Drive traffic to your website
3. Create new leads
4. Increase revenue (by signing or increasing sales)
5. Increase brand engagement
6. Build a community around your business
7. Provide social customer service
8. Increase references in magazines
9. Listen to the conversation about your brand

You may have more than one social media goal, and that’s fine. 

Generally, if you don’t have a small team it’s best to focus on specific goals where different individuals or sets of individuals can take on different purposes.

2. Who is your Target Audience?

Once you identify your objective to be on social media, the next thing is your target audience. Understanding your target audience can help you more easily answer the following questions: what, where, and when, i.e., what type of content you should publish? Which social media platform is most suitable for your business, at what time you should post your content so that it will reach most of your target audience etc.

Identify your Target Audience to answer these questions:
.

1. What interests your Target Audience?
2. Where do they usually hang out online?
3. When do they see the type of content you offer?
4. How do they consume content?

You probably don’t need to begin from scratch. If your organization has been running for a while, you already have a good grasp of your target audience. Whatever it takes to write it down, you can share it with a team or use it for your future reference.

3. What are you going to share?

As you look at this question, you may be thinking about the types of content you want to post. For example, do you desire to post videos or pictures?

Stop for a moment, though!

We’re discussing your social media marketing strategy here, so take a step back and expect at a higher level. Instead of the type of content to be shared, “theme” might be the right word. It’s great to have a variety of themes to keep your audience engaged without interruption.

This is where a better understanding of your target audience can help. Look at your marketing personality

and examine the following questions:

1. What goals and challenges does your target audience have?
2. How can you help to solve those challenges?

4. Where are you going to share?

The next step is determining where you desire to share your content. In other words, what social media platforms do your brand want to have?

Before we go any further, acknowledge that your brand doesn’t have to be on every social media platform. We have already made that mistake. Being on lower platforms gives you more focus and better time to create better content. 

 

Your presence on social media depends upon your target audience, so try to choose the social media platform which your target audience uses the most.

 

5. When are you sharing?

When you want to share your content, the last major part of your strategy makes sense. You may run into research for the best time to post.

Stop it…

Let’s take a step back and revisit it from a higher level. Before deciding on the day of the week and the time you want to post, consider the behaviour of your target audience.

Do they generally use social networks to search for the type of content you share?

So for this step, focus on the regular behaviour patterns of your target group. When you create your social media marketing strategy, you can experiment and find the best time for your brand.

How will you place the Strategy?

There you have it – your social media marketing strategy!

But that is not the end of it. As mentioned above, the strategy you lead is one; You have a plan on how to get there. You have decided where to go; Now you need the steps of the strategy. How do you fill in your social media profile? What should be your voice and tone? Which posts (i.e., image, link, video, etc.) should you use?

Here is a 30-day social media marketing plan, one can use to achieve their strategies.

Also See This: Building Brand Authority for your Business

30 Steps for Social Media Marketing Strategy

Step 1: Set Social Goals

Setting clear social marketing goals is the first step to changing your strategy. Think about exactly what you want to achieve socially.

Here are several examples you can set socially:

1. Increase brand awareness
2. Increase brand engagement
3. Create new leads
4. Build a community around your business
5. Establish authority and industry expertise

The goal here is to benefit your social endeavours. Once you set your social goals, the content and share your product should consistently support those goals.

Step 2: Define your Success Matrix

How do you phrase the victory of your social endeavours? Decide which metric is going to provide you with the right kind of data. So you can decide if it is socially successful.

When you set your success metrics, set clear criteria for your social campaigns so that you know when to succeed if you are monitoring audience engagement, what is the successful engagement rate for your social content?

The dimensions you track will vary depending on the type of content you produce, the location you post, and the objectives you set for your social marketing efforts.

If you miss the goals set by your team, check out our blog posts on all our social media metrics.

Step 3: List your Challenges

The task is simple: list the challenges which you are facing while doing social media marketing. Think of any obstacles that prevent your social content from making your most significant impact.

As you list your challenges, write simple explanations of how these barriers affect your marketing efforts or overall business success.

Step 4: Brainstorm Solution

Surround your marketing team and think of possible solutions to the challenges already listed.

Provide evidence to make sure you know “what an effective solution is?” so that when you’re ready to gather resources and justify your budget.

Step 5: Analyze the Competition

If you don’t have ideas, try running a competitive analysis. Don’t imitate your competitors’ content, but use their social strategies for inspiration.

 

Your brand and all its competitors have the same ideal customer personality. So focus on your social efforts and the type of content that will be most competitive.

Here are some questions to assess your competitor’s social marketing efforts:

1. Which marketing channels are my competitors, and which of those channels are successful?
2. What are my competitors talking about? Do those things lead to higher audience engagement?
3. Are there areas where we can beat our opponents in our social strategy?

Social analytics solutions are an effective way to contrast your attempts with your competitors.

Also see this: Getting High Engagements on LinkedIn Posts

Step 6: Determine your Strengths and Weaknesses

Dive deeper into your social strategy and determine where you are successful and where there is room for growth. It may also be a rationale idea to survey with your marketing team. Where the team finds areas of success or room for improvement, for each criterion about your social marketing strategy, decide if this is one of your strengths or weaknesses.

Step 7: Audit your Content

By conducting social media audits, to determine your best performance and most popular channels, you can create content that will benefit your audience in the future and post your content most effectively.

This step will upgrade your social media content strategy. If your posts are not engaging and resonate with your followers, you will not succeed. Use your audit to review the content you share and determine which posts have had the most impact.

Step 8: Make a List of Relevant Keywords

Using social media listening, you can identify keywords that are associated with your brand. And use those keywords while sharing content and help guide the creation process.

Step 9: Set your Brand Voice

Creating a brand voice will have a consistent voice across all your social channels.

This voice should align with your audience’s interests and match their communication style while staying true to your brand. Start by selecting three words that are characteristic of your brand. If your brand is a person, how would you describe them? Once you have chosen these terms, don’t explain what your brand means and what it takes to create your content.

Step 10: Optimize your Social Profile

Even though most of your time is spent creating content and scheduling posts, the information included in your profile is crucial to the success of your social marketing efforts.

When you decide on your brand voice, you can now create your profile to align with that voice.

See also: 1 Biggest Reason for you to Delete LinkedIn Account [2020]

 

Step 11: Develop your Buyer Personality

Changing your social marketing strategy requires reinventing your existing buyer personality or creating a new one from scratch. It is essential to develop your buyer personality so that you know who you are marketing to and can build on the content and offerings you have recognised. Begin with writing down everything you know about your target customer and do research to fill any gaps.

For a Strong Buyer Personality, try to summarize the following information:
.

1. Demographics
2. Lifestyle
3. Business
4. Purchasing behaviour
5. Finance

Step 12: Listen to Your Audience

Listening to your listeners will help you gain more insight into the minds of your followers, which will allow you to be more strategic in your social marketing efforts. By using social media listening, you can learn a lot about your audience to convey a more effective strategy.

Here’s what you need to hear while Observing your Viewers on Social Networks:

1. What your viewers are discussing and what they share most?
2. Which things are they saying about your brand, industry, products, services, and competitors?
3. What your audience is sharing (including dark socials)?
4. Engage with on-trend topics and related events that impact your audience?

Step 13: Research Industry Trends and Topics

To produce topical and relevant content and engage in socially relevant conversations. You need to stick to what’s happening in your industry.

To empower your company in your industry, join the conversation around high-interest topics. Do ongoing research to ensure that the content you produce is in line with the current interests of your community.

Here are some resources to boost your research:

1. News
2. Webinars
3. Forum
4. Blog

Step 14: Join Other Departments

Connect with other segments of your organisation as you continue to research industry trends and topics as inspiration for your content creation. Keep in mind that marketing is one aspect of the business, and other teams can also provide information about your company, which can help you brainstorm.

Step 15: Choose Your Content-Type

As you engage your audience, start thinking about the types of content that will benefit your brand the most.

Check out the buyer persona you’ve created to see if the image associated with a blog post surpasses Twitter chat or Facebook Live broadcast. Consider the resources accessible to you to regulate if you can make a great video or develop an infographic using the same content. For top outcomes, change your content to keep your audience engrossed. If you post the same content the next day or week, your audience will inevitably break down.

 

Types of content you can start Incorporating into your Social Media Marketing Strategies:

1. GIFs
2. Article information
3. “How to” posts
4. Poll
5. Competitions
6. Something created by the user
7. Photo and video

Before you can start searching for content to share on social, you need to find what your audience likes. One course of action to do this is to make previous social media posts more successful.

Step 16: Developing a Posting Schedule

This stage depends on a variety of things, such as your company, your audience, your campaigns, and social networks.

Frequency of Sharing Posts on Social Media Platforms:

1. Facebook: 3-10 times a week
2. Twitter: At least 5 times a day
3. LinkedIn: 2-5 times a week
4. Google+: 3-10 times a week
5. Pinterest: 5-10 times per day

Your post frequency is likely to depend on the amount, experience, and authority of your social media team. So it may not seem like you have to spend less than stellar content to meet these guidelines.

Also See this: 5 Best Marketing Campaigns in India

Step 17: Brainstorming Content Ideas

It’s time to tackle your creativity and plan for content that resonates with your audience. Think about what your business is doing well and how you can turn it into engaging content. Look at some of your old content and see if you can recreate it or reformat it for a different channel. 

Which types of discussions are popular among your target audience, how can you contribute to those discussions with the latest content?

 

Step 18: Gather Resources

Once you have decided the type of content. That best suits your business and determine the synergy for content delivery. Then start gathering your resources. What kind of content do you think should be included in your social strategy and what resources are needed to make them real. Here are several questions you should consider when you start collecting your resources.

Step 19: Create Your Content

It’s time to work! Start the construction process and divide enough time to complete the project. Be sure to create social content that speaks to your customer’s personality, matches your brand voice, and fits easily into your posting schedule.

 

Step 20: Optimize Your Content

In the production process, you need to optimise your content so that your efforts are not found in the most social field.

Strategies to optimize your social content to increase your reach and engagement:

1. Include the hashtag
2. Reduce Link
3. Include images
4. Friendly content for various social channels

Step 21: Call-to-Action

Not all content you share on social needs will encourage customers to take action. You may also find that some of your most popular posts show off your brand personality or make your audience laugh. And when you are using CTA’s try to use it appropriately.

Step 22: Connect More Resources

Connecting your audience with more resources will benefit your brand in some way.

First, by connecting your audience with more resources (especially proprietary sources), you are appealing them to grasp more about your brand, industry, or related content. The more they learn about you and connect with your brand, the more likely they are to convert. At general measure, we often share links to our favourite blog posts for our audience to learn more about social networks, best marketing practices, and trending topics.

Also see this: How Social Media is Affecting YOUR Business?

 

Step 23: Increase Your Efforts

When you start promoting your content socially, think of ways, you can expand your message to reach more audiences.

Short list of Methods to Increase the Scope of your Content:

1. Take advantage of the employee advocacy tool.
2. Encourage customers to share their experience with you.
3. Use influencers to expand the reach of your content.

Step 24: Play Behind Your Best Stuff

When you promote and improve your content, you will quickly notice that some content works better than others, in terms of commitment and transformation. Promote this high performance through paid advertising. You can target the most specific audience, attract qualified traffic and leads, and increase your customer base.

While algorithms for large social networks like Facebook and Instagram now favour paid content over organic content. It is crucial to invest in payment to give your content a chance to fight for innovation.

The Social Media Network You Choose Depends on 3 Main Factors:
.

1. On which social media platform your target customers are most focused?
2. Where are they most accessible?
3. Where to run ads for your target customers?

Step 25: Engage With Your Audience

Digital marketing expert Jay Bair said, “Lack of feedback is a reaction. It’s retaliation that says, ‘we don’t care about you.’

It is essential to connect with your audience and respond. Connecting with your audience in two-way communication increases brand trust and builds authenticity in your brand. When you watch your audience’s response to your content, you gain valuable insight into the effectiveness of your content.

Read comments on your social posts and provide feedback when appropriate. The comments section is an excellent tool for social marketers looking for feedback on their content. It can also inspire ideas for future content if the audience asks relevant questions and provides practical comments.

Step 26: Keep Track of Your Content

Tracking of shared content is an effective way to measure the engagement and track your content speed across social channels. This beneficial for future content ideas as well.

Step 27: Compare Results to Goals

Take a look at the goals you set out at the beginning of these 30 days.

Let’s take an example from the first day, and your goal is to promote brand engagement. To accomplish that goal, you need to increase the number of likes, shares, mentions, and comments by 20% by the end of the fourth quarter.

Using just measured social analytics, you can compare month-to-month engagement for all of your social profiles to see if you’re on track to meet your social marketing goals. It will give the idea of how much efforts are required or whether you need a change in your ongoing strategies or not.

 

Step 28: Report

Share the results of your social marketing efforts with your marketing team.

This is an opportunity to show the goals you have established and your progress towards those goals. You should use rigorous evidence such as content evidence tracking, listening, and data collected through social analysis to report on the success of your social marketing efforts.

With just measured social analytics, you can create your report using dynamic graphs and charts to showcase your content across different social channels. Social analytics can help you determine which of your channels leads to the highest conversion rates, trends across engagement levels. And help you keep true business value in your marketing efforts.

Step 29: Revisit and Re-Read Your Strategy

Most savvy marketers know that marketing strategies are in constant flow. Revisit your strategy, revise your marketing goals, and optimize them based on the data you collect.

Step 30: Celebrate Your Change

Congratulations! You have successfully done this through a 30-day social marketing transformation program. Celebrate your new strategy and your efforts to increase your social marketing.

Focus on the Big Picture

Developing a social media marketing strategy is probably the most difficult task because you need to go back and look at the bigger picture. You need to stay away from feedback on high-level ideas, such as scheduling and commenting on your daily tasks.

These Social Media Marketing Strategies will definitely help you to achieve your Social Media and Business Goals.

 

Hope this article is helpful to you. For such more information register yourself on our website.

 

Know more about us: LinkedIn | Facebook | YouTube