How To Create A Social Media Marketing Strategy For Your Business

Getting started on social media is overwhelming. It’s not just Facebook anymore. There are many platforms with unique features and audiences. With so many businesses entering the field, playing the social media game in 2022 will be tougher. 

But it is also fun to reach out to new audiences and introduce your products and services.

If you think that it’s too late to start, here are some stats for you to ponder.

Instagram has 1 billion active monthly users.

Facebook has over 2.5 billion active monthly users, and Snapchat has more than half a billion active monthly users.

This is just the beginning.

Social media is no longer an option businesses can avoid for marketing. It is crucial to create and maintain an active presence on social media channels to reach your optimum marketing potential.

So how do the big companies do it? How do they ride trends and dominate all the new and old platforms with such ease? The secret is a well-thought-out marketing strategy.

A social media marketing strategy is the plan with all the steps to do with detailed goals for all social media profiles. Building a social media plan for your business is highly beneficial for the growth of these marketing channels. While crafting the plan, make it more process-oriented to improve performance.

A carefully planned social media strategy will lead to your brand’s further reach, increase customer retention, enhance brand credibility, and build community. A constant presence on social media platforms gives your business a much-needed professional outlook.

Also Read: How To Grow Your Local Business Through Digital Marketing?

Now that we know what a social media strategy is let’s see why an ultimate social media marketing strategy is crucial for executing a brand creation and awareness campaign.

Social media: an integral part of your marketing plan

It’s not the beginning of web 2.0 where the social media platforms are still evolving, or the audiences are still signing up. Social media has already proved its potential to help businesses with many things, like:

• Increase brand awareness
• Build an engaging community
• Sell/launch product and services
• Gather feedback from customers in real-time
• Consumer-centric marketing
• To know what your customers want and feel about your services
• Advertise your products and services

How to make a social media marketing strategy in simple steps

Understanding that social media marketing is crucial is not enough to crush your competitor’s profiles and make a place in the user’s feed. Creating a social media strategy is the place to start, and here are the steps to help you make a customized social media strategy.

1. Where are you now?

Getting the results on social media is a consequence of a well-executed plan. And to generate the results you want, it is required to know the current state of your business on social media. How to do this is to get an accurate picture, look at your profiles and some of your competitors.

• The first metrics to analyze are your strengths and weaknesses. No two businesses are completely alike, so yours has its specialties, opportunities, and threats even if the competitor also has a similar business.
• Performing a social media audit might be overwhelming to start with. To narrow down your focus, check the how, when, and where for the content you have been posting.
• Do a thorough analysis of competitors and the industry to figure out how your business can have a unique standpoint in the market.
• To dig a little deeper, see how your business is doing on the political, economical, social, environmental, and technological front.

2. Lock the audience

No matter how much content you create on the social media platforms if the audience doesn’t connect with it, what’s the point?

So the next step is to identify your audience for a successful social media marketing strategy. After all, you need to create content or reinvent the old content that works on your target audience. An active engagement rate in terms of likes, comments, and shares is important for your social media growth.

There are a few ways you can identify your audience.

• See which group of the audience likes your content and whether this group of people are your ideal brand customers or not. Identifying the right audience will help you convert leads into customers quickly.
• Be updated with the latest surveys, trends, reports, and stats about your target audience to understand them better.
• Create a few personas that represent your ideal audience with details of what they desire, wants, and expectations from your business.

3. Define your goals

Posting content on social media without fixing the goals is like moving into a dark room with an eye mask. You must have detailed goals to create well-structured campaigns with high ROI, positive stats, and big profits.

Think about where you want to take your business in the next five years? What are your business expansion plans? Do you want the blue tick on your business profile on social media?

Just saying that I want to increase my followers on Instagram isn’t going to cut it.

Be more specific and action-oriented.

A well-articulated and clear goal is much more effective and easily achievable. On the flip side, a vague goal with no daily action will take you nowhere on social media.

Also Read: Instagram Hacks: Get More Views On Reels To Boost Your Engagement

For instance, your goal should be specific to get your profile to reach 10,000 new viewers on Instagram. And you will post two reels and one post every day to hit the target.

This is a far better way of setting and achieving goals compared to the older methods of just posting content without thinking about the audience’s likes, dislikes, and target numbers.

Be mindful of the following points to make your social media marketing campaign successful on the first go.

• Make specific goals for a campaign. What do you want to achieve with a social media marketing plan? There can be multiple goals, but be clear about your priority for the social media profiles.
• Social media marketing is not all the marketing for businesses. It should be a part of your overall brand marketing strategy.
• Track relevant KPIs for your social media marketing plan to stay on track all the time.

4. Pick the right platform/s

Are you a startup looking to sell quickly or a Series C company looking to build a brand? It would be best if you had different social media strategies.

If you are in the B2B market, LinkedIn and Twitter are the best places to go. If you are in the B2C zone, then Facebook is your best bet.

There are so many social media platforms now; it’s not just about Facebook anymore. To pick the right channels, see which platform has your target audience and compliment your brand image. Once you pick the social media platforms, make social media strategies for all the platforms included.

While searching for the best social media platforms, consider all the channels available, not just the big guns like Facebook and Instagram. Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Snapchat, YouTube, Quora, and others also have many active users.

Once you have identified the right channels, create your profiles on all of them and get started with your marketing plan.

Also Read: Here Is The Secret To Secure Huge Funding For Your App

5. Create engaging content

Content creation is on a different level now, and it’s going to take more than posting pictures of your dishes on all social networks.

There are many forms of content – audio, video, written, GIF, images, NFTs, and more. Diversify your content from the competitors with unique perspectives to impress the audience. User-generated content is the most effective to make new customers trust your product and services, so you must include consumers’ stories, videos, and posts in your social media content strategy.

The number of content pieces can be infinite, but while generating the content, don’t forget to aim a part of it for business goals. The ratio of the sales content depends on your social media marketing strategy and the targets you want to crush.

• Don’t just post salesy content. Entertain, educate and communicate with your audience. Think about which content your audience will engage with the most.

• Make a posting schedule, decide a frequency and stick to it.

• Use brand attributes like logos, signatures, hashtags, or certain audio sections on all your social media posts.

6. Automate with tools

Handling all the social media profiles together is a full-time task. You don’t just post but have to reply to the audiences and engage actively. To reduce the workload, use tools for different tasks throughout the process.

Audience identification – Facebook analytics, Instagram insights, Twitter analytics, etc.

Understanding trends – google trends, buzz sumo, brand24, make my persona, etc.

Content creation – Canva, oodles, easel, etc

Team coordination – asana, kontentino, etc.

Ready to build a social media strategy for your business?

Now you know the key elements of making a social media strategy for your brand. Even though it might seem a little hard to create a social media strategy for your business at first, but it’s simple. A social media strategy can be a big boost to improve your social media presence.

Have you tried multiple strategies and content creation methods but are not satisfied with the results?

Contact our social media marketing agency. Our team of creative wizards will bring the target audience to your social media profiles in no time.