Quick and Easy Steps to Create a Winning Social Media Strategy
A Good social media marketing benefits companies to increase their brand awareness, build customer relationship and also to reach out to more people online. A proven social media strategy will increase the traffic of your website thus, providing better returns on investments as compared to any other paid medium. These are just some of the advantages of creating a social media marketing strategy. Competition on social media is fierce and to stand out from heaps of marketers and brands it is important that you have a social media strategy in place.
To help you create an ideal social media marketing strategy that is quick and easy to implement we have created some easy steps.
Step 1: Work on social media marketing objectives
Just like any business strategy where you need to first define objectives, the same goes for social media as well. This important step which is often neglected actually determines the success of the social media campaigns. So before directly going into identifying channels, creating content; always set your campaign objectives. It will help you and your team to be focused and it will also help you to assess your strategy. We have some commonly used objectives for you:
- Increase website traffic
- Creating brand authority
- Customer engagement
- Improve sales by lead generation
There can be a secondary level of goals as well such as – getting 10,000 organic likes in the next 6 months. Having your objectives defined will also help you to effectively allocate your social media platforms. So, for example, Facebook can be an effective tool to manage your customer support and Instagram can help you bring more opportunities for sales.
Step2: Conduct a Social Media Audit
A social media audit will help you to know your current position. So, if you already have social media accounts then it is necessary that you conduct a social media audit. It is more like a self-audit where you can select your competitors and evaluate, or it can be even done in a non-competing manner and analyze them for inspiration. Big brands like ITC, Godrej are all social media savvy. There is a lot of insightful things you may come across while researching big brands and understand what may work for you.
Here are the things that you can compare with other brands:
- Content-type
- Engagement level
- Frequency of posts
- Artwork and video style
- Content tonality
- Use of bots in Facebook messenger
- Use of hashtags
- External (Third Party) use of content
Oneway successful brands analyze their campaign is by checking the level of engagement. Make sure you check your analytic reports thoroughly.
Step 3: The target audience
You must have come across this terminology while doing your graduation. In social media marketing, target audience forms the basis of your entire campaign. This is what will drive your content strategy and selection of delivery platforms as well.
Here is how you can segment your target audience:
- Location
- Demographic
- Psychographic (can be buying habits, income, etc)
- Behavioral
The above are text-book type of segmentation. Social media allows you to segment your audience in a better manner as well. For example, you can get data about:
- Website visitors
- Existing users
- User engagement data
- User behavioral pipeline
To be successful in your campaign it is important that you reach the right customer audience because tailored content always has higher value as compared to general content available online.
Step 4: Your content strategy
After completing steps 1, 2 and 3 you will have enough data to make a content strategy. Some of things which you should keep in mind will planning your content strategy is the type of content that you will produce. Will it be more of videos? Or you will be sharing ore stuff. Will your audience love a particular form of artwork and so on? We have written an entire article on content strategy which be found here:
Step 5: Social media calendar
The most effective way to get your content organized is to prepare a social media calendar. There may be many promotional activities that you may want to conduct which can be included in social media calendar. Once your content is ready, define what amount of content should go in which platforms based on the objectives we have identified. Working on content based on objectives will help to make a better calendar. A social media calendar will also help to create a right mix for a particular month which will engage your audience more. One can follow certain rule for content. It can be 80/20 rules which states 80 percent of content should be non-branded content and 20 percent branded content. Mention the post date and time in your calendar once you have analyzed user behavior from step- 2 and 3. Allocate some time for engagement and interaction. Almost 50% of audience unfollow a brand from social media due to lack of engagement activities. In this digital era, people still like personal interaction whichever platform you choose to interact.
Step 6: Track your Social Media Marketing Strategy
No social media marketing strategy will work unless it is monitored or tracked properly. You may feel motivated when your audience is commenting on your posts or sharing them. However, it is always to analyze the campaign with your defined objectives. You can use some indicators to track your campaign:
- Unique traffic coming to your website
- Tagging by audience
- Direct traffic
- Average value of order
- Support wait time
- Backlink analysis
- Online tools to analyze
You may strike out activities that are not working for campaign and focus on goals and better results.
Conclusion:
If you follow these steps, you may find your old strategy in a different direction. However, once you implement an effective social media marketing strategy or plan these steps you will start to see positive results. Social media strategy is dynamic just like other strategies. One needs to improve, update or even change it after monitoring it.
We are amongst the top Social media marketing company in Mumbai. To get a free social media audit and get a free consultation contact us and we will get back to you.
