You need a unique social media marketing strategy to make online marketing work for you. However, the ability to create a formidable social media strategy is tricky for some entrepreneurs.
If you are experiencing this challenge, too, there is no reason to stress about it. I’ll teach you the tips and tricks of creating a strategy in a few minutes. The lessons you’ll learn today will focus on the core building blocks of creating a unique social media strategy for your business.
Why You Need to Learn How to Create a Social Media Marketing Strategy
There is no better way to say it, but social media is not an option for your business. It is a necessity if you want to stand a chance of being competitive in the modern business environment.
Social media statistics show there were over 4.6 billion active social media users at the start of 2022. That is about 60% of the global human population. In addition, active social media users spend an average of 2.27 hours a day online. Online users also use an average number of 7.5 social platforms each month.
These statistics alone are enough to paint a picture of your business's potential social media offers. It should trigger enough interest to start learning how to create a social media marketing strategy.
Moreover, you will be glad to know that effective social media marketing guarantees full customer engagement. You can chat with your customers and develop lasting business relationships. That is why social media remains one of the greatest modern innovations. It may be in the top brackets with the invention of the wheel.
Ingredients for Creating a Unique Social Media Marketing Strategy
Creating your social media strategy is easy once you understand what it should help your business achieve. In this regard, your social media strategy is a packaged answer to the following important questions:
Why do you want to be on social media?
Who is your target audience?
What are you going to share?
Where are you going to share?
When are you going to share?
You’ll answer these questions by following the below steps to create your unique social media strategy.
1. Develop Goals that Align To Your Business Needs
Joining social media is comparable to a trip to the mall. You will find many people headed there, but everyone is going there for various reasons. Some people are also just there to kill time.
Therefore, your first step to creating an effective strategy is to define why your business is on social media. Specifically, you should be clear on the goals you aim to accomplish with your social media marketing efforts. Use the following general social media marketing goals in creating specific goals to include in your strategy:
Increase brand awareness
Drive traffic to your website
Generate new leads
Grow revenue (by increasing signups or sales)
Boost brand engagement
Build a community around your business
Provide social customer service
Based on a 2021 Sprout Social Index, the top reasons businesses engage in social media marketing are to increase brand awareness (58%) and community engagement (41%).
But that doesn't means these should be your top goals for engaging in social media marketing. Instead, you should evaluate the specific problems you feel social media marketing will help you resolve.
Your quest to resolve these challenges should effectively inform your social media marketing strategy. Better still, you can have several goals your social media strategy should help you achieve.
For example, if you want to create brand awareness, you‘ll learn a lot from Nike's social media strategies. The brand reminds you of its presence by using top athletes "just doing it" or supporting social causes bound to create a Buzz on social media.
2. Research Your Target Audience
Martin Luther King Jr gave effective speeches because he understood his audience. Luther King's words triggered action because he knew where to say them and to whom to share what message.
Again Nike is a perfect example of a brand that has mastered its target audience. If you engage in any form of workout, such as jogging, chances are you wear Nike Shoes. Why? Because Nike always shares videos of top athletes and ordinary people running around their neighborhood wearing Nike athletic shoes. That got you thinking that you can keep fit by getting yourself a pair of Nike athletic shoes for working out.
From the above illustration, you can see how Nike has built their ideal buyer persona. They have done their market research and understand all the demographic attributes of their target customers.
You probably think creating a perfect buyer persona took a huge investment from Nike. In reality, it doesn't have to. You can use social media analytics to get tons of valuable information about your target customers. The most vital information you should learn about your target audience is their pain points. That is their most pressing need.
Note: your social media strategy should show you off to your target audience as the best option to help them ease their pain points.
3. Choose the Right Social Media Platform
Developing a buyer persona for your target customers eases the decision-making process. For example, now that you understand your target audience, you know the platforms they prefer to spend most of their time on.
Remember, you cannot change your customer preferences. Your only option is to join them and work towards optimizing your profile on those platforms.
Search for top keywords in your industry and incorporate them into your chosen social media profiles. Also, be consistent with your branding. You cannot create an effective brand awareness campaign if you use a different branding style on social media, your website, and physical stores.
On the other hand, it would be best to understand the most effective usage of each social media platform. For example, if you’re targeting Gen Z, TikTok is the best platform to reach them. Therefore, your social media strategy must include how to create trendy short videos best suited for TikTok.
However, if you are targeting professionals or B2B commerce, your platforms of choice should feature LinkedIn. Therefore, most content should include highly informative/educative materials like blogs, industry-related content, or e-books.
4. Plan and Create Compelling Content
Your social media strategy is only as successful as the quality of content you share with your target audience. You may get everything else right, but at the end of the day, your target audience interacts with the content you create.
The type of content you post on your social media platforms impacts the customer experience with your brand. It will determine the number of target audiences that will interact or develop a relationship with your brand.
Your buyer persona will significantly influence the type of content you develop. For example, if you target small business owners, some of your content should be informative.
On the other hand, your social media marketing goals will also influence the kind of content you create. For example, if creating brand awareness is your top marketing goal, then visual content like videos has to form a large bulk of your social media content.
Note: having a content calendar is always a good idea since you will post on at least two social media platforms. Use the calendar to schedule your content for posting at the optimum time for each social media platform.
5. Check Out Your Competition
Preparing your social media strategy may prove less challenging once you study your competitors' approach to social media marketing. You can embark on a benchmarking mission to determine what your competitors do differently on their social media pages.
For example, use social media listening in your benchmarking mission. The technique will help you gather insight into your competitor's preferred social media platforms and the type of content they post. It is also ideal for researching the competitive keywords your rivals use on their social media content.
If you are a startup, competitor research will do you good in developing your social media research. For example, the information you find will guide you on the type of potential content customers in the industry prefer. Moreover, it will help you identify social media marketing gaps to fill with your new marketing strategy.
6. Track Your Performance
Establishing performance metrics is the only way to keep your strategy in check. You need to know the effectiveness of your strategy and whether you are on course to achieve the goals you set in the beginning.
To do this, you must establish several KPIs that you will track. Among the metrics you can track include the following:
Clicks – shows the traffic rate to your social media platforms. It will give you an idea of which social media platform your target audience visits most. You can use this data to generate leads for your sales funnel.
Impressions - the number of times your target audience has seen your social media content. It will inform your strategy on the keywords to use, posting frequency, when to schedule your posts, and how to improve your content.
Engagement – number of people interacting with your content directly. It allows you to determine whether you are creating quality content and if it is reaching enough of your target audience.
Conversion rate – number of people who convert into customers.
There are online tools to track your social media performance. That includes free tools like Facebook Insights and Google Analytics.
Create Your Social Media Strategy with Us Now
Don't panic yet if you still haven't figured out how to develop the right social media strategy for your business. Outsource your social media strategy and management to us while you focus on your core business functions.
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