How to Create a Successful Social Media Marketing Strategy
Social media marketing is the process of using social media channels to connect with your target audience to develop your brand, increase website traffic, and increase sales.
It involves creating and publishing excellent content on your social media platforms, managing ads on your social media platforms, listening and engaging with your followers, and evaluating your results.
Key Social Media Channels
Currently, the key social media platforms include; Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Snapchat, and YouTube. Numerous social media management tools can enhance the success of your social media marketing strategy. How then can you create the right social media marketing strategy for your business? Let’s find out.
Set Viable Social Media Marketing Goals that Complement Your Business Objectives
Determining your goals helps you evaluate the success of your business as well as the return on investment. Your goals should be Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bound (SMART). To succeed in this step, you will want to:
Assess your Social Presence
Before you can plan for your future goals, you need to evaluate your current position. Some of the areas you should consider in this step include:
- Networks where you are most active
- Your most valuable networks
- Whether your networks are optimised, and
- The comparison between your profile and that of your competitors
Determine Your Ideal Customer
Remember, the main objective of marketing is to understand your customer's needs. Being specific in this stage is critical. For instance, there is a difference between identifying your target market as parents, and determining your ideal customer as a parent aged between 35 and 45 years, living in the USA, earns $50,000, loves engaging in outdoor activities, and mostly uses Instagram.
Establishing your ideal customer will be more beneficial to your business. Whether you are a seasoned marketer or a novice, advertising to the wrong audience fails. To establish a highly focused buyer character, you need to consider the following factors.
- Age
- Job title
- Location
- Pain points
- Income and
- Preferred social media platform
Develop a Mission Statement for Your Social Media Platforms
The mission statement you choose for your social media will influence your future actions. The statement will define your plans for your social media platforms which should manifest in your brand identity.
Your mission statement should incorporate the needs of your ideal customer. An ideal mission statement can be to utilise social media to provide digital marketing awareness to existing and potential customers with emphasis on social media marketing.
Your mission statement will be your guiding principle, helping you figure out what to create and share on your platforms. Avoid publishing content outside of your mission statement. Businesses that do so are bound to fail. People are more inclined towards experts and focused people as opposed to generalists
Run a Competitive Assessment
A competitive assessment enables you to establish your competition and figure out the strategies they are using. You may want to diversify and find out which of their strategies are successful, and those that are doing badly. This will give you an insight on what to expect, and allow you to set your own social media targets.
A competitive assessment will come in handy to help you locate opportunities. For instance; if your competitors are on Facebook but have no presence on Instagram or Twitter, you could leverage the channels where there’s less competition as opposed to winning customers from your competitor.
Research Your Competitors
With the growing popularity of social media, chances are that your competitors are already using social media to market their brand. This makes it easier for you as you can learn from them, especially if you are a new entrepreneur.
Determine the Key Success Metrics
How can you establish whether or not your social media marketing efforts are successful in terms of profits? Use the following metrics.
- Conversion rate
- Reach
- Total time that visitors spent on your website
- Total shares
- Sentiments and
- Brand mentions
Finally
An effective social media strategy is a progressive process that can change whenever necessary. Create your social media marketing strategy and optimise it as you continue developing your business and learning your audience.