How to Build a Social Media Strategy
IMPORTANCE OF SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING STRATEGY FOR YOUR COMPANY
No matter what sort of business you carry or how massive (or small) it is, social media marketing is essential. There are more than 4.2 billion users of social media worldwide – which means that these platforms are the strongest to reach a greater audience. Having a social media plan in mind will make sure that your social media strategies are more successful and help to maintain your broader business requirements. However, you will need a good social media marketing plan to do this.
Because social media is now more and more around us, businesses are starting to see the value of adding it to their marketing strategy.
6 STEPS TO BUILD A SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING STRATEGY
In this guide, we’re going to take you through the six steps required to develop a social media marketing plan that will deliver results. Let’s start with the top!
1. IDENTIFY YOUR GOALS.
Most companies have a social media presence, but most have not defined their main goals. It is crucial to set concrete benchmarks to track your progress.
While different businesses will have different requirements, there are three common social media purposes that relate to most businesses.
– Increase brand awareness
– Sell your goods or services.
– Drive the traffic on your site.
2. IDENTIFY YOUR TARGET AUDIENCE
“When it comes to your target market, the more you know the better it is.”
Social media marketing is mostly about speaking to your audience directly. Of course, this isn’t likely to be a great success unless you understand who your audience is. Approximately 50 % of consumers will not engage with a brand that provides insufficient content relative to their values and wants, and most will interact more deeply with companies that offer content that is highly relevant.
In other words, you must understand exactly who your audience is, what they want, and how they’re interacting with social media.
3. CHOOSE TARGET PLATFORMS
In a perfect world, you could spend time promoting your brand through each social networking site out there. However, money and resources are limited – particularly for new to medium-sized enterprises. Therefore, a crucial component of your social media marketing plan is to know where you’re going to focus your energy.
You’ll need to use the following method to do this:
– Determine how many platforms you want to focus on at the start.
– Understand the relative viewership of the social media platforms.
– Finally, consider the type of content you might like to develop, and what kind of platforms it will be most relevant to.
4. KNOW THE COMPETITION
Your competitors are another important consideration. Because they’re already using social media, that means you can take lessons from what they’re doing.
Carry out a competitive analysis.
Competitive analysis can help you learn who the competition is and what they’re doing well. You’ll get a strong idea of what’s required in your industry, which will help you set your own social media goals. It’s also going to help you find opportunities.
5. TIME YOUR CONTENT
Next, create a timeline, preferably 12 weeks in advance, to identify events, promotional offers, or product launches you are aware of. Identify the content ideas that you’d like to produce that can complement those events. It’s like developing a media plan where you will be timing your efforts so that they are consistent and relevant to other activities that your business or customers are participating in. You’ll find that it’s going to be much easier to handle content creation efforts and enable you to prepare properly.
6. MEASURING SUCCESS
As you know, the ability to access the success of marketing activities is crucial to the marketing plan of any company. Social media marketing is not as easy to measure as other media platforms, but this can be done.
Depending on your success metrics, you might want to look at content consumption. Who’s going to read your content? Where do they come from? You can also see how much or little is being contributed and how many visitors connect with your content. Here are some variables to be included in your measurement process:
– Share of voice
– Consciousness
– Engagement
– Influence
– Popularity
CONCLUSION
Social Media’s vast presence means that it presents the perfect way to find and attract your target audience. At the same time, this popularity also means that it can be difficult to make a lot of progress without a clear road map.
Luckily, a strong social media marketing plan can help you find your way and achieve success on key platforms. To put one together, you will need to:
– Create clear and actionable goals.
– Get to know your target audience.
– Choose the platforms to be targeted.
– Develop a plan for posting social media.
– Start creating and posting content.
– Track the results of your marketing plan for social media.
Build your brand awareness across the web and make meaningful connections with your customers and followers through social media marketing (SMM).
MEJIX provides social media marketing services to small businesses, businesses, and multi-location companies. Whether you own a startup or a Fortune 500 company, our social media marketing experts can assist you with your campaign. Partner with us and let our social media marketing agency enhance your brand’s visibility and integrity!
