How to Create a Successful Social Media Marketing Strategy
In this day and age, it can feel like there's a new social media platform popping up every week. But despite the constant influx of new platforms, many brands are still missing out on opportunities to grow their businesses because they don't have a solid social media marketing strategy or even know how to create one. In this article, I'll outline five essential steps you can take to create an effective strategy for your brand:
1. Know which channels your audience is using
As a marketer, it's important to understand that each social media platform has its own audience with its own culture and jargon. There's no one-size-fits-all platform—the right channel for your message will depend on who you're trying to reach, what kind of content you want to share, and when they'll be most likely to see it.
For example: if you're trying to promote an event or product launch through Facebook Ads (Facebook's paid advertising platform), knowing how much time people spend looking at their newsfeeds will help you create ads that are likely to be seen by the right audience at the right time.
If your target customer base prefers Instagram stories over tweets or Facebook posts, then a series of short videos might appeal more than text updates from any other channel—even though Twitter may be better known within your industry than Instagram!
Understanding Social Media Analytics
Social media analytics are a powerful way to understand your audience and competitors, and they can help you measure the goals, strategy and performance of each social platform you use. In addition, they can tell you where your audience is engaging with content that you share across platforms. For example, if you share a blog post on Twitter but it doesn't perform well there (e.g., not many shares or likes), then maybe that's because it isn't relevant for the people who follow you on Twitter. However, if the same blog post performs well when shared on Facebook or LinkedIn then maybe those networks would be more appropriate for sharing future content on similar topics. While some analytics tools provide more detail than others around goals, strategy and performance metrics; all provide valuable insights into how to improve engagement with content over time as well as insight into how other people are using different channels within their own business strategies!
2. Create a social media calendar
A calendar is a simple way to keep track of what you're posting, when, and where. It's like an appointment book—without the pen and paper!
Create a social media calendar that includes all your most important channels (if you have more than one).
Make sure you include time for posting as well as monitoring. Monitoring is when you check in on what people are saying about your brand so that if there's any negative sentiment or feedback, it can be addressed quickly and effectively.
Using a tool like Hootsuite or Buffer can help automate the process of scheduling posts to all your accounts at once without having to switch between them manually every day (which would take up too much precious time!).
3. Curate compelling, relevant visuals
Create a library of relevant images. This is an essential part of curating compelling content, which is why it's important to do this early on in your social media strategy development process. You need to have a stockpile of quality images that you can use as either standalone posts or as visual elements within your content.
Use eye-catching visuals that align with the topic of discussion and with your brand aesthetic. It's important to always make sure that any image used alongside written content has been sourced from reliable sources and meets certain standards (i.e., high quality).
Choose visuals that support the topic at hand by being relevant to both the platform and audience (this will vary for each type of social media). If you're writing about travel destinations, for example, don't use a stock photo from Shutterstock unless you're talking specifically about how great it would be if everyone traveled more often!
4. Have a content strategy
A content strategy is a process that helps you plan, create and distribute content. A social media marketing strategy without a content strategy won’t be very successful because it doesn’t provide a framework for you to guide your actions.
A successful social media marketing strategy helps you prioritize your efforts and resources to create value for your audience by providing them with the right kind of content at the right time in the right place. It can help identify gaps in your content so that you can fill them up with useful information that solves their problems or answers their questions about something specific related to what they are already interested in knowing more about.
After all this preparation and planning, when it comes time to execute on any of these items in our plan we need someone who knows what they're doing - someone who has experience creating great (but not necessarily perfect) work under deadline pressure while keeping everything organized enough so that no one loses sight of what's most important: ROI (returns-on-investment).
5. Stay on top of analytics and measurement
As you know, social media marketing is a lot about being social. You’re going to need an audience to engage with and build relationships with.
But there’s another element of your strategy that needs attention: analytics and measurement. Analytics are the data points that will help inform your decisions as they relate to content creation and distribution, while measurement helps you understand what actions have been taken by your audience so that you can make informed decisions about where to go next in terms of content creation and distribution.
Analytics and measurement are the only ways to truly understand your customers, audience and goals; without them, you'll be operating in the dark.
Analytics and measurement are the only ways to truly understand your customers, audience and goals; without them, you'll be operating in the dark.
That said, tracking analytics can seem like an overwhelming task — but it doesn't have to be. You just need to make sure you're tracking the right metrics for what you're trying to accomplish with your social media marketing strategy.
In order for analytics and measurement tools to help with creating a successful social media marketing strategy:
Understand what success looks like for each goal or objective (e.g., increase sales by 25 percent)
Identify which platforms work best for each goal or objective (e.g., Pinterest for lead generation)
Oh, and one more thing: we’re always here to help! If you have questions about how to create an effective social media marketing strategy, just ask. We’ll be happy to give advice on what worked for us and what didn't work so well.
