A social media marketing strategy is an amalgamation of everything you wish to do and hope to achieve across social media platforms for your brand. Social media guides your actions and allows you infer whether you’re succeeding or failing. The more specific and concise your strategy is, the more effective the execution will be. The KISS principle applies here,Keep the strategy simple. Make sure your strategy is achievable and measurable.
Every social engagement should serve a purpose. A social media marketing strategy will help your brand tackle its goals with a sense of purpose. We’ve broken down our social media marketing guide into the 5 key steps you need to follow for an impactful social media campaign.
- Set SMART Social Media Goals: Before you even jump into brainstorming ideas and graphics you need to sit down with your team and figure out, what do you want from social media. To create a winning strategy you need to hence establish your objectives and goals, without which you will have no way to measure success or return on investment (ROI). Each of your goals should be SMART as it will guide your actions and ensure they lead to real business results.
Specific - State exactly what you want to accomplish (this should answer the questions: who, what, where, why)
Measurable - How will you demonstrate and evaluate your campaign (This should answer, which goal has been met?)
Attainable - You have all the freedom to stretch and challenge yourself with the goals you set. But make sure it's attainable.
Relevant - Here you answer the question, how does the goal related to your key responsibilities and how is it aligned it your objectives.
Time-bound - Set 1 or 2 target days for completion of a goal. (Here you answer the question, by when can your goal be accomplished?)
- Know your audience:
Knowing who your audience as well as your ideal customer is critical before you start designing your social media campaign. This will help you understand what they expect on social media. This is a critical criteria if you are looking at turning social media followers into customers for your business. Creating a audience/buyer persona allows you to think of your potential fans, followers, and customers as people with wants and needs for which you solutionize. This persona will allow you to explore more clearly about what's the best you can offer them.
Making assumptions is a dangerous game for marketers. You think Facebook is a better network for reaching Baby Boomers than Millennials? Well, research shows that Millennials still exceed Boomers on the platform. You may land up spending time and money on a platform where your audience is not there. In addition to this, Social media analytics is a tool which can provide you with valuable information about who your followers are, where they live, which languages they speak, and their interacting styles/patterns with your brand on social media. These insights allow you to retarget your strategy and have a better reach for your social ads.
- Watch on your competitors:
Before you kick-start with brainstorming on how your website content will look like?, you should have a fair idea on how your competitors website looks like. The idea here is not to be a copycat or steal some competitive data but, to understand what's working for them and what can you adapt for our web page accordingly. This study, will also allow you to spot opportunities. E.g. If one of your competitors is dominant on Facebook instead of running a race on facebook you may want to channelise your energies to a network platform where your target audience is untapped/underserved.
4. Social media mix - Answer the 3W’s:
Plotting a perfect content mix shall be derived when you answer the what-where-when of social media. Sharing great content is the “What” of social media but it is equally important to have a plan in place. This will answer the where and when of social media which means on which platform and how often do you need to give unique content to your audience for maximum impact. You can also digdeep and decide how would you divide your content.E.g. 50% of your content will be unique and informative, 20% will be through other reputable sources, 15% will lead to business goals (sales) and 5% will display company culture and the team. Each company is unique and needs a unique/well thought social media mix for best results.
5. Test - Adjust - Repeat:
There’s no denying that a lot of social media campaigns is a matter of trial-and-error. Monitoring the metrics behind your campaigns in real-time gives you the opportunity to make small tweaks to your social media marketing strategy rather than sweeping, time-consuming alterations. This dynamic approach to marketing is apt in a day and age where social media is constantly evolving. As you start to implement your social media campaign you will realise some campaigns did not give you the desired results whereas, some campaigns surprisingly over performed. Test your campaign to find out what works and what doesn't, Adjust your campaign around your findings regularly to stay real time and Repeat the same process for all your new social media campaigns. This process will allow you to save your social media budget from drowning i.e. dis-invest in non performing campaigns and feed over performing ones for great social media ROI.
Conclusion:
No matter how often you push a social media campaign to the right targeted audience, if your campaign is not engaging it isn’t going to get you your desired results. At iDigitize, we create attention-grabbing social media campaigns based on your business model and your audience data to target the right people. We believe that every brand needs a unique social media marketing plan to become the next online prodigy. We leverage the power of social media by creating an online community wherein people can communicate directly with the business in the digital space and beyond. Increase your popularity through various social media websites.
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