You can’t have a marketing department without a social media marketing strategy to drive the train. With over 70% of Americans using social media of some form, it’s vital that companies adjust their marketing to reflect the trend.
When you create a social media marketing strategy, you want to be engaging and effective. Your end goal will be to influence, sell, or modify the behavior of the audience.
This guide can help turn your brand into a budding empire.
Who Are You Targeting?
Before you start making posts or pushing campaigns on social media platforms, consider who you are targeting. High-quality campaigns will eat your budget and yield no returns if the audience of the marketing is wrong.
By using search engine optimization tools, a person can easily see the demographics and statistics for their area or industry.
The research you do can make sure every dollar is effectively used. For example, don’t spend hundreds or thousands of dollars marketing to men on Pinterest. That platform is overwhelmingly women-dominated.
There are no social media platforms that can cover all your marketing demographics; however, Instagram and Tik Tok have developed popular followings among Millenials and Generation Z.
Businesses like home health care services and nursing homes shouldn’t try to market to the elderly or disabled. Those marketing efforts should be focused on their children or grandchildren. They’re more likely to be online, and they’ll be the ones paying for it.
Social Media Marketing Strategy Goals
Create goals to set a direction for the entire marketing department. These goals will be the driving force for everyone involved with a campaign.
Ask yourself what you want to accomplish with a social marketing campaign. If you don’t have an end goal, then it can be difficult to track results and keep workers on task.
Some of the goals you may want to reach include the following:
More user engagement
Increased web traffic
Generate leads
Expand your reach
Ideally, you want visitors to your Twitter and Facebook to do more than browse. A successful social media marketing strategy encourages engagement such as “likes” and comments.
If you’re selling a product, the marketing strategy should push users to the website. Increasing web traffic increases your conversion rates.
When loyal visitors or followers share a social media post, then there’s a possibility dozens or hundreds of other people could see it. Out of that group of people, you could gain an extra follower or customer.
All goals should be realistic, but they should also push your marketing department to its full potential.
Opposition Research
Who is your biggest rival? Do you have successful competitors in the same geographic location?
Look at a competitor’s website and social media posts. If they are constantly getting engagement and shares, then you may want to consider following a similar pattern as them.
If their posts and content are struggling to get views or engagement, then examine the reasons why and avoid them.
There are various tools and services you can use to evaluate the effectiveness of your competitors. Don’t steal their strategy, but take the best parts of their campaign and fold it into your own.
An inexpensive and low-tech research method is to talk to someone you know who uses an opponent. They can provide raw emotions and feelings about what they see on social media and how it directs their actions.
Measuring Metrics
Just because a business has several “likes” doesn’t mean it is wildly successful. Engagement is usually an indicator of success, but a company’s employees can add to the activity to boost the numbers.
Here are some common metrics to follow:
Engagement
Reach
Clicks
Organic likes
Paid likes
When you’re using analytics to evaluate engagement, know that is social interaction divided by how many times the content was displayed. This metric can reveal how enticed the audience is to interact with your content.
Reach counts each unique (new) visitor. The higher the reach, the more chances you have to get a sales lead.
It’s not a bad thing to have repeat visitors, but don’t be fooled when you see 300 visitors. There’s a chance that you only got 20 unique visitors.
Don’t you want to know what pages or content people are visiting? Clicks will show you the numbers of what’s popular. Dive deeper into your own content and figure out why people are drawn to those pages or social media posts.
If you paid for advertisements on Instagram or Facebook, then you will see paid versus organic “likes”. You want to see how well your paid advertisement stacks up against organic social media content.
Using these metrics tells you what works and how close you are to reaching goals.
Excellent Content
Each post the marketing department makes should go through all the same high standards to achieve maximum effect. Online users can tell when the content is not at full throttle.
Remember to moderate and update content when it becomes appropriate. A company needs to reply to complaints or praise with a professional comment.
If there’s something not factual or insensitive that misses the editing process, go back and update the material. Tweets can’t be edited, so a creator must delete the tweet and start over or issue a second tweet correcting the first.
When a company creates excellent content and replies quickly to engagement, you create an atmosphere of caring and professionalism.
Marketing Strategy Is Just the Beginning
A smart company knows that social media marketing strategy is just the beginning. If you follow this guide, you can start strong and pick up momentum.
The more flexibility and adaptability you achieve, the stronger your social media presence.
Take your marketing into the future by appealing to what’s trending. Consumers and influencers are getting younger and smarter.
Don’t stop your social media marketing education with this article. If you’re ready to take the next step, please contact us today.
