Whatever work you do, you need to have a plan in place. And, the same goes for anything you do with social media. If you have some guidelines, you can gauge your progress. A specific plan with achievable goals is a good way to go.
We bring you 12 ways to create a viable social media marketing strategy.
Social Media Marketing Explained
A social media marketing strategy is written content that defines how you aim to achieve your social media marketing objectives. The document outlines tactics, goals, metrics, and means of monitoring your progress.
Your social media strategy should be relevant to your products and your brand. Any good social media strategy will define the roles and responsibilities of each person involved in the process.
#1 Identify Your Goals
The first and the most obvious point is to identify your goals. If you are great in sales but do not have a specific goal in place, you could fail if you are not trying to sell the right products.
Using the SMART system to set your goals is a good idea. The acronym SMART stands for:
S-Specific goals
M-Measurable results
A-Attainable targets
R-Relevant strategies
T-Time-bound
#2 Know Your Audience
You need to know your audience. Who is the type of people? What category of users is going to associate your brand with them? For example, your videos could advertise heavily and take the viewer to your website and take them to a social media platform.
Or you may create videos only for social media. Whatever you do, decide who your audience is to be more successful.
#3 Decide on Your Platforms
Cultivating followers on multiple platforms can be a big mistake if not done properly. It could end up in your social media efforts being weak and ineffective.
Use powerful social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and of course, YouTube generously to promote your brand.
#4 Have a Game Plan
Get a pen and paper and start writing down your strategy. You could write stuff like upcoming festivals and events. Make a list of relevant hashtags. But most of all, make sure that whatever you write down in your plan covers all your features, campaigns, and primary events.
#5 Track Your Metrics
Today, every platform like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube offers powerful analytical tools. Make the best of them to track down your metrics, follow them, and optimize them.
Things like measuring click-throughs, cost-per-click, and the maximum number of views are all measurable metrics that show you the pulse of your social media strategy and how it is performing.
#6 Create Persona
If you want to target particular audiences, as we mentioned above, here is what you need to do: Make a list of your potential customers based on location, typical job title, interests, age, and average income.
When you get started, you may find many more categories. Keep in mind all these categories and target your audience accordingly.
#7 Consider Social Media Video Formats
It is difficult to know how your videos and images will look on different platforms. But there is a lot of material available on the internet. You can use an online video editor to add finesse to your videos before posting them. For instance, Facebook Stories are short videos that disappear after 24 hours.
You also have Instagram Stories, and your feed video can be in landscape and portrait. Again, Twitter is well-known for its Twitter Fleets. So, you need to consider the various video formats of different social media platforms to optimize the presentation of your content.
#8 Create a Social Media Calendar
One of the best ideas to be organized is to have a social media calendar in place. Create a spreadsheet and put the whole year into it, dividing it into months, weeks, and days.
Add different events and timings of what you want to post and when. It enables you to move your content according to the time and day you want to post it. It effectively makes your content most relevant.
#9 Tell Stories
Everyone loves a story. It is a human tendency. So, when you talk about a product, a great strategy is to tell the story of that product. It will be more appealing to an audience than merely looking at the product features.
Telling a story increases your audience engagement, and it becomes more aligned to your product and your brand.
#10 Enlist a Qualified Person
Handling social media is a specialized skill that everyone cannot do. A common mistake is to assign social media management to an employee who has the least workload. It deserves more importance than that.
Social media management involves special skills and prior experience. A qualified social media manager can think strategically, have organizational skills, and have prior experience in brand promotion on social media.
A qualified social media manager will ensure that your social media campaigns are strong and effective.
#11 Behind the Scenes
Despite all the hype you generate about your product and brand, ultimately, your audience and you are human. Therefore, you need to humanize your brand. Give your audience a sneak peek into the human aspect of your product.
Show them your employees, your office. Tell them about the logistics and effort that real people put towards creating your product and bringing it to them. For example, if you have team-building activities on a Friday, you could share them with your audience to participate.
#12 Know Your Competition
You need to assume your competitors already have a great social media marketing strategy in place. Therefore, it is a good idea to spend considerable time looking at how your competitors promote their products and brand.
You may also see some loopholes in your strategies that you have missed out on by observing how your competitors operate. So, observing how your competitors operate is a great way of polishing your social media marketing campaigns.
Conclusion
Social media continues to be the single most powerful medium for targeted marketing today. If you proceed smartly and follow these useful tips, you can promote your product and brand efficient and controlled manner.
Have a social media marketing strategy in place to become a force to be reckoned with in today’s competitive marketing world.
