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.

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