Times have really changed. Nowadays, there’s more to social media advertising than posting on Twitter and Facebook a few times daily. If you intend to engage your prospects, boost sales, and build your brand, you’ll need sufficient time and must put in the work.
You must do everything to beat the social media noise, outshine the plethora of business rivals, and even compete with celebrities, influencers, and other big names.
A concise social media strategy gives you the focus to avoid efforts that don’t align with your goals in such a competitive landscape with more networks and content than ever. That’s why we’ve come up with this comprehensive guide to creating and implementing a robust social media strategy from scratch.
Whether you’re entirely new to social networks or wish to re-examine your priorities, this guide has everything you need to know.
What Is Social Media Marketing?
In essence, this class of digital marketing leverages the potential of popular social networking sites to aid your marketing functions and achieve your branding objectives. But the task doesn’t just involve creating business pages and posting what and when you feel like it.
Instead, it requires a progressing strategy with attainable goals and entails:
- Maintaining and optimizing your brand’s social media profiles
- Posting videos, pictures, live videos, and stories that represent your company and attract a relevant audience.
- Responding to audience comments, likes, and shares, and monitoring your business reputation.
- Engaging with customers, influencers, and followers to build a community
A solid approach to social media marketing also leverages paid social media advertising that involves paying to have your company appear on the screens of numerous highly-targeted users.
The Essentials of a Successful Social Media Marketing Strategy
Every business has its view of what a successful social media marketing strategy entails, but the following essentials stand out:
Knowledge of Your Audience
You must understand your audience, including their favorite platforms, who else they’re following, and their preferred content.
Brand Identity
Consider the message you intend to convey and how you want your audience to feel about your content.
Content Strategy
Social is primarily spontaneous, but a structured content strategy ensures consistent voice and quality content.
Analytics
Your strategy should have quantifiable insights informing your plan, including your target audience, content appropriateness, and post timing.
Regular Activity
Social networks are real-time, so consistency is key. Post regularly, stay ahead of audience engagement, engage back, maintain accurate profiles, and keep up with trends.
Inbound Approach
Instead of using social networks to pitch, use exciting and valuable content to add value and organically promote your brand.
When you include all these essentials in your social media marketing strategy, you’ll enjoy the numerous benefits of social media marketing.
Potential Benefits of Solid Social Media Marketing
Overall versatility and usage have turned social media into one of the most effective marketing channels that are free to use. The primary benefits of this approach include:
Humanize Your Brand
Social networks can turn your brand into an active market participant. Your posts, profile, and interactions create an approachable persona for users to familiarize, connect with, and trust.
Drive Traffic
Between the ads, blog links in your posts, and links in your profile, social media is a leading channel to boost website traffic.
Generate Leads and Customers
Social networking sites can effectively generate leads and boost conversions through direct messaging, Facebook/Instagram shops, appointment booking, and call-to-action buttons.
Increase Brand Awareness
Social media platforms are visual, allowing you to establish a visual identity that spans vast audiences and boost brand awareness to enable better results with other campaigns.
Build Relationships
Social platforms open up indirect and direct lines of communication that let you connect directly, gather feedback, hold discussions, and network with your followers.
Generally, a bigger and more engaged social media audience will make it easier for you to meet your marketing objectives. That’s why you must always focus on the platforms with the most remarkable lead potential.
A Review of the Best Social Media Marketing Platforms
The best social networks to market your brand include:
- Facebook – This is the largest and most established social networking site, boasting over 1.96 billion daily users. The platform’s primary audience comprises an even spread of millennials and Generation X. Facebook is ideal for brand awareness and advertising.
- TikTok – TikTok is the industry leader in short-form video content and boasts over a billion monthly users globally. Its primary users are generation Z and millennials. The site is ideal for B2C and B2B marketing and is also the second-best in community building, trailing behind YouTube.
- Instagram – Instagram is the perfect choice for brands that seek to share visually compelling content for B2C advertising. The site offers advanced ecommerce tools. Moreover, it’s over a billion monthly users, mainly comprising millennials who get to discover brands, browse the different services and products, and complete purchases right within the app.
- Twitter – Unlike Instagram’s focus on visuals, Twitter is centered on words and is ideal for B2C and B2B advertising. The site boasts over 211 million daily active users, primarily millennials, and is ideal for community building, customer service, and public relations. It has expanded from 140-character tweets to include Twitter Moments, Twitter Spaces, and Twitter Communities.
- LinkedIn – Facebook’s professional cousin, LinkedIn, is perhaps the only social platform with a defined audience: professionals keen on networking to meet new opportunities. It has 774 million users globally, comprising millennials, baby boomers, and generation X. With a B2B industry impact, the site is ideal for business development, social selling, and B2B relationships.
- YouTube – HootSuite recently named YouTube the second most visited site. Its audience is primarily millennials, but the site boasts a strong audience across ages and gender. Moreover, the platform’s 315 million daily users make it the best platform for marketers to build a community. It’s ideal for long-form entertainment, how-to videos, and brand awareness.
- Snapchat – The popular platform leads the charge in terms of ephemeral content. It has 306 million daily users, primarily generation Z, and is ideal for B2C advertising and brand awareness.
While all these social networks are potentially powerful marketing platforms, only a comprehensive marketing strategy can guarantee success.
Creating Your Social Media Marketing Plan
Your company’s social media marketing strategy needs a roadmap for carrying it out. The plan adds structure to your efforts, allowing you to measure your success and spend your resources wisely.
Here are the steps to creating an elaborate plan for your social media campaign:
Choose Your Platforms
Select your preferred social network based on its popularity in your industry, bandwidth, and target audience. Only take a few sites you can actively maintain, starting with the most potentially viable ones and adding on more slowly.
Set Goals
Goals are important as they give you purpose, vision, and direction. You can use them to determine your efforts’ or campaign’s effectiveness and impact on engagement, performance, and sales.
Establish The Most Important KPIs and Metrics
Your campaign must be data-driven. Focus on essential metrics instead of vanity performance indicators. Digging into information relevant to your goals will help you assess progress. Crucial metrics include:
- Reach
- Clicks
- Engagement
- Hashtag performance
- Organic and paid likes.
- Sentiment
Know Your Competition.
A detailed competitor analysis lets you understand your business rivals, areas where they excel, and their weaknesses. You’ll understand what’s expected in your industry, which can help you set attainable targets and spot opportunities.
Create Unique and Engaging Content
Social media platforms have billions of users globally, so you can expect that a section of your followers has encountered your rival’s content. Therefore, always insist on outstanding content that offers readers a reason to follow your page and interact with your company.
Organize A Schedule for Your Posts
Social media management solutions can ensure your content is shared as scheduled. You can prepare videos and pictures, write captions, and schedule the individual posts in advance. The tools also enable automatic content sharing on schedule and effective interaction and engagement monitoring. This saves your time, allowing you to focus on other business tasks.
Report and Adjust Regularly
Use the different social platforms’ analytics to determine the posts generating the most engagement, follower base growth, and audience demographics. Scale up and harness what’s effective and nix what’s not.
Best Practices for Successful Social Media Marketing
Are you ready to commence with social media marketing? The following social media marketing tips can kick off and ensure the success of your campaigns:
- Content reigns supreme in social media marketing, so create diverse, valuable content like quick tips, how-tos, insights and data, announcements and updates, and local or industry news.
- Social media projects your brand image on different platforms and formats, so stay consistent with your brand’s core identity.
- Don’t just log into your sites and schedule posts–participate. Go ahead and check who’s engaging with your post and engage them back by liking, sharing, and responding to their comments.
- Leverage content creation tools with awesome templates and attractive features that let you create professionally-looking visuals consistent with your brand.
- Social networks are crowded, so you need regular content to gain traction with the audience. The key is repurposing, reposting, and recycling your content across platforms.
- You must track data to determine your social media marketing’s success. Therefore, use Google Analytics to measure the most effective techniques and pick the ones that are better off ignored.
- Learn from your business rivals by keeping tabs on their social media tactics, campaigns, interaction levels, and promoted products.
Social media marketing is highly cost-effective with incredible granular targeting features. This lets you focus your budget on the most appropriate audience via Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest ads.
Final Thoughts
Now is the time to get the most from social media marketing. This compelling, affordable way for any business to reach customers and prospects offers a level playing ground for entities of all sizes to gain audiences, generate leads and boost sales. So don’t miss out.
Follow the above guidelines and tips to achieve success with your marketing.
