6 Steps to Build a Solid Social Media Marketing Strategy

Are you looking to perfect your social media marketing strategy for your brand or business? Many find social media marketing a daunting task, but once you break it down, it can be a huge success. This kind of marketing is a powerful way to reach prospects, customers and create content that is valuable to your target audience and following. If you aren’t already active on social media, you can bet that your competitors are, and they are talking to your potential customers through Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Tik Tok, and far beyond! Don’t miss out on the many opportunities afforded to marketers through social media. Keep reading to learn how you can create a compelling and successful social media marketing strategy.

#1 Set Clear Goals

An essential factor to creating a social media campaign that delivers excellent results is fully realizing and understanding your goals. At this point, you have to ask yourself, “What do I want from social media?”. It is critical to determine if you are looking to increase brand awareness, generate new leads and sales, grow your brand’s audience, boost engagement, or drive more traffic to your site.

Your goals will determine how you approach your social media strategy. While some of these goals may seem similar, they require vastly different strategies. Without a clear idea of what you or your business is trying to accomplish, it will be much more challenging to create a strategy that leads to the desired result. Setting clear goals is the only way to start your marketing strategy on the right foot.

#2 Know Your Target Audience

The only way to create an effective social media marketing strategy is to have a comprehensive understanding of who you want to communicate with – in other words, your target audience. The data and information that you collect should be reliable and up to date. While it may be tempting to make assumptions based on previous data or gut instinct, making assumptions can be dangerous, especially when creating a marketing strategy.

A great way to determine which platforms you should be active and present on is by focusing on where your core audience spends most of their time and the platforms they interact with the most. You will have to create different strategies for different platforms as they serve different purposes to your target audience. For example, Facebook is a more text or story-driven platform while Instagram focuses almost entirely on the visuals.

#3 Establish Your Most Important Metrics And KPIs

Marketing is about storytelling, and to find your story, you need to start with the data. While it is certainly not the most exciting part of marketing, there are so many aspects and elements of your target audience and your marketing efforts that come to light when leading with data. For this reason, your social media strategy should be data-driven. Metrics such as views, shares, conversion, and retention rates help outline what success looks like for your campaign and whether you are on your way to achieving it.

To measure your metrics, you will need to determine which KPIs will give you the whole story. This is the point in which you ask yourself, “ Am I going to focus on reach, clicks, engagement, leads, sales, or a combination?”. A great piece of advice that we find ourselves sharing with our clients is that page likes do not necessarily translate into sales! In this example, if your goal is to increase sales, it is crucial to look beyond page likes and consider other KPIs such as cost per acquisition, average order value, ROI, and customer lifetime value.

#4 Create Engaging Social Content

This is where the creative side of social media comes into play. Once you have set your goals and determined your target audience, you have to create engaging content that helps you attain your desired result. Take the time to audit your competitors and establish how you can stand out. Explore the many different content formats and use the most suitable ones for your long and short-term goals.

During this part of the process, you need to ensure that you are focused on consistency and maintaining a steady branding approach. Creating a brand creative guideline ensures that your content is consistent and recognizable. And most importantly, show the human side of your brand – that is what social media is for!

#5 Be As Timely As Possible

Using your page insights, determine when your audience spends most of their time and ensure that you post and engage while they are active. This is why knowing your audience well is so crucial to social media marketing and creating an effective strategy. Online behavior varies significantly according to audience and demographics. For example, 12-2 PM and 8 PM-12 AM tend to be the most active dayparts for social media interaction. However, our research has shown that 11 AM is the best time to reach housewives, and weekends are best for reaching property buyers, which is why you need to know your audience.

Beyond posting, when they will be on the platform to see and interact with your content, you have to interact. Speed is of the essence, so when a customer asks a question or voices a concern, you have to respond – and fast!

#6 Analyze What’s Working, What Isn’t, And How To Keep Improving

Regularly monitor your campaigns’ performances to find areas that you can tweak to optimize your results. Diligently monitor metrics and KPIs to use as valuable insight for future campaigns and advertising efforts. As you track and report your KPIs, continuously ask yourself if the metrics and KPIs that you set make sense for your campaign and how you choose to measure it. This step’s primary purpose is to allow yourself to adapt your strategy throughout the year for maximum results.

The Bottom Line

Social media marketing is no longer an option. It is an essential marketing approach and must be utilized to ensure an effective marketing campaign. Many of the steps necessary to the success of your social media marketing strategy are what you have already been using for other marketing outlets. Learning how to create an effective and solid social media marketing campaign will help you achieve your goals and grow your brand or business by connecting and communicating with your target audience on a regular basis.