Welcome to the wonderful world of social media, where marketing is done left, right, and center and brands are in a race to expand their outreach. In a bid to get the best outcomes from their social media marketing efforts, brands are looking to craft strategies that make them stand out and look the best they can.
For those who aren’t really sure what it means, a social media marketing strategy is basically a summary of all that you have planned or are planning to do on your social media accounts. The strategy gives you a sense of direction and helps you prioritize every post, like, reply, and comment and find some purpose in it.
Crafting a good social media marketing strategy is the first step towards success on social media, and you need to make sure that you achieve all of your goals by adhering to the strategy.
Knowing the need for direction and experience in this field, we’ll discuss some steps that you can take to get results from your social media marketing campaign. These steps have been gathered from the experience of some of the pros in the business, and they will guide you towards social media glory in this age of marketing.
Set Social Media Goals
The first step to succeeding on social media is to set goals in line with the objectives of your business. The goals should follow the S.M.A.R.T criteria:
- Specific
- Measurable
- Achievable
- Relevant
- Time-Bound
The S.M.A.R.T framework is essential for creating the right goals. It takes everything into perspective, from your company’s objectives to the time you have to achieve the end target. Follow this framework while setting your goals and you will have nothing to worry about later down the line.
You can breakdown the goals into small objectives to ensure that you’re on the right track with your social media tactics. To stay ahead of your main competitors, you should have meaningful metrics in place as they will help you in achieving the right results. For instance, you can start by tracking the number of likes, shares, and comments on every post. Interactivity is the key to social media marketing, so make sure that’s one of the objective you’ll try to achieve.
To stay ahead of your main competitors, you should have meaningful metrics in place as they will help you in achieving the right results. #letsgaux #smm Click To Tweet
Study Your Audience
We see so many brands nowadays trying to achieve the best results from their social media campaigns without studying their audience in detail. Let’s not follow in their footsteps and actually try to understand who’s going to be looking at us. Once you have the persona of your ideal customer in mind, you can create better content for them. You’ll be able to see from their perspective.
If you want to turn followers on your social media into customers, you have to know about their behavioral patterns such as their likes and dislikes among many other things. Understanding consumer expectations is one of the prerequisites of marketing.
Research the Market
Having talked about studying your consumers and their likes and dislikes, this is where research comes into the question. It is extremely important that you study who your customers are and do some research on their preferences. Through proper research on your end consumers or audience, you can craft your strategy better to meet the goals that they might have.
Besides studying your target market, you can also direct your research into studying what your competitors are doing online. While you can check their stats and interactivity to form an idea of what you’re up against, you can also see what they are doing to learn from their methods.
Researching what your competitors are already doing can help you identify the opportunities present online as well. Let’s imagine that you have multiple competitors present on Instagram and Facebook, but Twitter has been left unexplored as of yet. In such a case, you should try developing a campaign there so that you are able to get the attention of users on the platform.
Conduct Social Media Audit
Once you have started your social media marketing campaign, you shouldn’t slack off one bit. Start by conducting a social media audit to make sure that you’re on the right track. Ask yourself questions during this audit.
Some questions that you can ask yourself include:
- What is working for you? What isn’t?
- Who is connected with you on social media?
- How does your social media campaign currently stand in comparison with the one being run by your competition?
- Which networks are being used by your target audience?
The answers to these questions and many others would give you a clear perspective on where you stand on all social media handles. If any of your social media handles are performing really poorly, take a look into your analytics to see whether it’s worth keeping or not. Or if there are any ways you can improve it.
You can ask these questions to decide whether an account is worth keeping:
- Is your audience on this platform?
- If they are on the platform, how are they using it?
- Can you achieve any meaningful business progression by maintaining this account?
- Why aren’t your customers interacting with you here yet?
Find Inspiration
Finding inspiration is necessary for creating the right social media success story. You can start by searching for social media success stories from award-winning accounts and campaigns. A sneak into these stories will help give you the motivation that you need to truly achieve your own goals through your account as well.
Study all the brands that are at the top of their game on social media. Most of them started with zero likes and followers, but went onto achieve true greatness.
