How To Make An Effective Social Media Marketing Strategy?

Social media is one of the major aspects of our day to day life. That’s why businesses get into social media to connect with their audiences and customers. Actually, they know the importance of social media marketing but they don’t know how to utilize social media marketing for their business.

Most of the company hire young professionals usually the freshers one to handle their social media accounts because they are having the myth that young mind is more aware of social media and they can handle social media accounts better than an experienced digital marketer.

But now a day this strategy is not working for the business where we just post on social media and hope to get the higher engagements. Therefore the need for social media marketing strategy comes into existence. Social media marketing strategy is not a new concept but it is becoming an essential part of every business to get successful over social media.

It helps them to manage their social media account like a professional and measure it as per your KPIs. If you don’t create your social media marketing strategy and follow the same old age school method then it will give your competitor a chance to get more exposure over you.

It has been proven that most of the people would like to recommend the brands to other people if they have a good social media service experience with the brand. With the help of social media marketing strategies, you can also take advantage of influencers marketing.

Influencer marketing will help you to boost your social media marketing efforts. Therefore it should be part of your social media marketing strategy.
Here I am going to explain to you the 8 steps social media marketing strategy to follow in 2019.

Set Realistic Social Media Marketing Goals

Most of the business do the same mistake again and again, they don’t set the relevant and realistic social media marketing goals. They don’t spend the quality time to set up these goals. Therefore they face the problem to measure the goals as per their business KPIs. Most of them know that they have to be on social media but they don’t know what they have to be on social media.

Social media marketing goals should be a part of overall business planning. Business set their strategies goals for the business to progress in an effective way. Therefore it becomes essential for the business to make them define their social media marketing goals that should complement their business goals.

Make Sure Your Goals Are SMART

Make sure that you are going to create the smart goals for your social media marketing strategy. Because these goals will reflect the overall performance of your social media marketing efforts. There you have to ensure that your goals are SMART:-

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

The smarter the goals the more likely it helps you to achieve your desired results. Social media is full of challenges, therefore, you have to set attainable, realistic goals so that you will not get lost on social media.

Hereby realistic means suppose that you want to have 1 million followers on Instagram. But it is quite tough for those also who are performing well. So you should set the goals that can be achieved by your business within the limited time period. Don’t expect more than enough from social media.

Also, set the limitation for your social media marketing. We know that every business have their own industry, and all the industry not performs well on all the social media platforms. Therefore you should keep it into your mind and don’t try to get success on every social media platforms.

There are hundreds of social media platforms available in the world. If you work on all the social media platforms then there is always a chance that you are spreading your resources thinly.

Therefore you should target a couple of social media networks and need to perform well on the same social networks to spend your valuable time and money. Here are the suitable goals that a business can set in their social media marketing strategies.

• Increasing brand awareness
• Achieving a set higher quantity of sales
• Improving your ROI
• Driving people to increase in-store sales
• Grow your fan base

Understand Your Social Media Audience

Do you know the social media is full of various audiences? All social media audiences are not the same. People use social media for various purposes. For example, people use Instagram to engage with their favorite public figures.

On the other hand, people use LinkedIn for professional use only. Therefore you should choose the right social media platforms where you can find your targeted audiences. Influencer marketing also helps you to target a large number of people. So that you also have to make sure you engage with the right influencer who is having the audience that matches your targeted audiences.

You will not find the same audience on all the social media networks. For example, if you want to target middle-aged people than you should spend more time on Facebook. On the other hand, if you want to target the young generation then you should spend time on Snapchat and Instagram. But if you still want to target 25 to 34 years of age group then you should target Facebook.

At the starting of your social media marketing campaign, you should try your social media efforts on all the major social media networks. After that, you should measure which social media channel is helping you to meet your desired goals.

Success on social media is not that easy, you need to have a solid understanding of your customer base to get successful over social media. A buyers’ persona will help you to understand your customer base.

The better your buyers’ persona the better you can understands the demographics and psychology of your targeted customers. It will help you to get success over social media.

Determine Your Most Relevant Metrics

Metrics help us to get an idea that whether we are performing well on social media or not. Most of the business do the same mistake, they create a social presence and spend their valuable time and money on social media networks, without seeing that they are getting success or not.

There are lots of social media analytics available with each social media platforms. But the worst part of these social analytics is that it is not the same for every business. It varies as per the business industry. For this, you have to create metrics that will help you to measure your goals as per your industry.

I would not like to recommend that you should compare your social media efforts with someone else on the basis of some vanity metrics. For example, you should not compare your followers with your competitor’s followers. Because now a day the social media world is full of fake followers. And these followers are not having any value as a metric.

Apart from this, you have to compare your marketing goals on the basis of your own set metrics it will help you to get the answer that whether you are meeting your goals or not.

Suppose that if your goals in brand awareness then post reach and post engagement is your relevant statistics. It will help you to get how much people you have reached over social media and how much engagement you have received.

On the other hand, if you want to drive the sale directly, then you have to look at the number of click metrics. Tracking click will help you to get how many people are going to buy your products.

Investigate How Your Competitors Approach Social Media

There is not any place where you will not find your competitor. As I’ve mentioned above that social media is full of competition. Therefore there is also your competitor who are also running their own social media strategy.

To beat your competitor over social media, you have to know that what they are doing over social media. You should know that, what is their focus area? What is their targeted audience? What kind of keywords they are using? And so on.

Competitor analysis helps you to get better ideas of your competitor strengths and weaknesses. It will help you get a better understanding of what your potential customers are expecting from your business.
You can also find the weak point of your competitors and exploit this gap with your social media marketing efforts.

For example one of your competitor performing well over Facebook but still struggling with its online presence on Twitter. Note that your target audience is using both of these social media networks. So that you can take advantage of by putting your resources to get a better presence over twitter.

There are lots of tools available in the market that help you to spy on your competitor. So that you can discover what type of content your competitors are sharing? What type of content is working better for them? So that you can produce better content than them and beat them on social media.

You could use a tool like Buzzsumo to spy on your competitors and discover their most successful social pieces of content. Once you know what types of content resound for them on which social networks, you can produce and share similar, but better, material.

Create Suitable Content to Share with Your Followers

Content is always a king whether it is SEO or social media. Therefore to be successful over social media, you have to create high-quality content to share on social media.

Never done the mistake to share an excessive amount of promotional content. The major motive of social media is to get social, it is not a marketplace where you sell or market your products or services.

Therefore it is crucial that your content should be a perfect mixture of informative, entertaining as well as a small number of promotional materials.

Sharing is always caring over social media then you have to share other people’s content on your social media profile. Influencers follow the same approach they know what type of content is interesting for their followers. It helps them to gain their influencer status. You should also follow the same approach to get successful.

If you have previously determined that what your goals and discovered that what type of content works better for your competitors, then you get the reasonable idea that what type of content will work best for your targeted audiences.

The 4 common questions should ask by yourself when creating the content for social media.

• What is the optimal character count per social media channel?
• What is the number of hashtags for messages on each social channel?
• Should I be using emoji in my social media messages?
• What is the best content type for each channel?

Images and video play the significant role in social media. Visual content always has more chances to get shared on social media other than the text-based content. The reason behind the popularity of Instagram is that it is based on visual content.

Without having the visual content you can’t post on instagram. Video is the best form of visual content. Video is getting more popular by the passing years. It has been proven that people like to buy products of those items which has been seen by them in a promotional video.

Engage With Your Audience

Engagement with your targeted audiences will help you to get success over social media. People don’t access social media to read or watch content. They access social media to interact with other people to get social. Engagement is the secret weapon of lots of successful business over social media.

These businesses engage with their audiences on a regular basis.
That is why you have to spend more time on social media networks to interact with your targeted audiences.

Apart from posting on all the social media networks. You should spend some time on a couple of social media networks to get involved with your audiences.

It will help you to create the custom hashtags. These custom hashtags will encourage your audiences to share your stuff over social media. These hashtags will also help you to find out the post refers to your business.

Establish the Best Times to Post and Set up a Content Calendar

Timing plays a crucial role in social media. Randomly post on social media will not help you to get the best results. Most of the social media networks use the same kind of algorithms which is based on the more your post gets. That is why it is important to post at that time when your targeted audience is online.

You can use social scheduling tools to set up and organize multiple posts at the same time. You should post multiple time on social media networks to find out the best time to get more engagements.

Track Your Results and Adapt

This is the last but not the least step in social media marketing strategy. There is no guarantee that things will works as per your expectations whether you have created a solid social media marketing strategy. If you don’t track your results, then you will never know that you are having the success or failure with your social campaigns.

Tracking of results start with the process of setting up the goals and determine the most relevant metrics based on your business. Therefore you have to keep an eye on these metrics to track your social media progress.

You should also use the pre-build analytics tools given by the popular social media platforms such as Facebook insights, Twitter analytics, YouTube analytics, Pinterest analytics and so on. These analytics will also help you to track your performance.

These tools help you to see what type of content works best for you. So that you can create more content like that one. Also, focus on what type of content doesn’t work for your business over social media. Try to avoid these kinds of content and focus on your follower’s interest materials.

Conclusion

These 8 steps of a social media marketing strategy will help you to get more exposure on social media. Remember that if you build your social media marketing strategy on these 8 steps. It doesn’t mean that you will definitely get successful over social media.

These steps are just the base of the strategy and you have to create and implement the social media marketing strategy as your own. If you find that it doesn’t work for you as you were expecting then you make some changes to make it more effective. Other than that you can also take the help of social media marketing company to get successful over social media.