How to formulate your social media marketing strategy in 8 steps?

Posted by sara on June 23rd, 2022

Every day more than three billion users are on social media marketing Gold Coast. How to create an effective strategy to capitalize on this huge opportunity?

Often SMBs and marketers jump into social media without planning. This approach can be very expensive in money and time.

Social media marketing  requires a strategy to get results .

This effective strategy defines a marketing plan that gets results by:

strengthening the notoriety of your company,

growing your following on social media and ultimately

generating revenue.

Without a strategy, it's hard to achieve your business goals. And without a goal, it's hard to generate revenue.

In this blog post, we lay out an eight-step plan for creating an effective social media strategy.

Conduct a social media audit

If you want to develop or improve your social media marketing strategy, the first and best option is to carry out an audit of your presence on social networks.

This audit evaluates your profiles on social networks and analyzes your activities. It highlights the points to be optimized.

Consider the following during the social media audit:

Which networks are used by your target audience?

What type of content do you post and how often?

Which networks currently bring you the most value?

How is your social media performing compared to your competitors?

Finally, what are your strengths (good consistency between your targets and your community) and your weaknesses (little commitment to content)?

Once you've answered all of these questions, you've put all the pieces together to identify your company's high-performing social networks from the low-performing ones. These observations also determine the potential for improvement for each social channel. They define the main axes of your social media strategy; the one that gets the best results.

Define your social media marketing goals

To create this effective social media strategy, break down your company's business goals into measurable social media goals. Without these objectives, it is impossible to measure the success rate of the strategy.

Social media marketing helps achieve several business goals, such as:

Increase in website traffic

Generate new leads

Increase brand awareness

Create/reinforce brand identity

Strengthen customer engagement

Set relevant and measurable goals

Often companies set unattainable goals that bring no results. A relevant objective is specific, measurable, achievable and realistic. By setting relevant goals, your social media strategy will have a measurable impact on your business.

Analyze your audience on social media

According to Peter Drucker, “The goal of marketing is to know and understand the customer in such a way that the product or service adapts and sells itself”.

Understanding and knowing your target audience is essential to creating quality and relevant content. This quality content is appreciated, shared and commented on by your target audience.

Different types of social users use different social media platforms and in different ways. To achieve your goals, you must use the same social networks as your target audience.

A recent study showed that there would be nearly  2.27 billion  monthly active users on Facebook in 2019. If your business's target audience is in the 25-34 age bracket, they represent 29.7% of Facebook users. This segment is the most active. However, if your business targets a younger audience, you are more likely to reach them on Snapchat or Instagram.

The best way to define your target is to use the persona. The  persona  is a fictional representation of the target customers. By analyzing the behavior of our customers, we can understand the expectations of consumers for a product and/or a service and find solutions adapted to their problems.

Analyze your competitors on social networks

Remember, if you use social media, so do your competitors!

By analyzing the competition you identify the content strategy of companies that offer similar services. Observe their approach to your audiences. Don't duplicate their actions. Adopt the techniques that are successful with your common targets.
This competition analysis will allow you not only to identify the strengths of your competitors but also their weaknesses. Integrate this information into your social media strategy. They will be critical to the effectiveness of your strategy.

Choose relevant social networks

One of the most important steps in social media marketing is deciding which social channels to use. As we discussed above, before choosing your social media channels, you need to ask yourself two very important questions: “Where are my customers?” And “Where are my competitors?”

But these are not the only parameters for choosing the relevant social networks. Other factors, such as the staff resources you have at your disposal, the time you have to manage social media, and the type of business you run can also affect your choice of network. For example, if your company is active in B2B, create a presence on LinkedIn and target your content to an audience of professionals. If your company is active B2C, create a Facebook page instead.

Once you have chosen the social networks, decline your strategy with a clear goal for each social channel.

For example, Sephora, one of the biggest cosmetics brands in the world, uses  Snapchat and Instagram  to promote their products and particularly influence younger audiences. On the other hand, he uses  Twitter  to solve customer service issues.

Once you have chosen your social channels, create/improve your profiles to align them with your strategic plan.

Create a social media content calendar

The regularity and quality of your content is the key to the success of your social media strategy!

A social media editorial calendar contains specific posting dates (and times) for each type of content. Each publication has a goal to achieve.

Advantages of the editorial calendar:

guides all your social media activities

helps you post regularly, share photos, videos

increases the engagement of your audience

makes it possible to discover new socionauts

organizes the themes as well as its variations

Create and share this quality content

Assess your performance

Content is the fuel of social media. Write according to the interests of your target audiences on the various social channels.

Make your content engaging and compelling. Quality content improves the engagement of your audience and by rebound effect the notoriety of your mark.

Be careful if you bombard your social users with content, they will quickly get tired, then frustrated and finally will no longer follow you.

In order to optimize your social media marketing strategy, evaluate your social media performance.

Analyzing data such as the number of impressions, the number of likes and other engagement rates allows you to improve your actions. At each stage of this plan, re-evaluate your actions and ask yourself if you are achieving your goals.

An effective social media strategy is fluid. It evolves according to changes in algorithms and the interests of your social users. So get started, create a strategy and optimize it as you grow. Thus, you learn more about your customers, your products and your business will be more efficient.

What business goals do you want to achieve using social media?

Need to implement an effective social media strategy?

Specialist in digital marketing, from content marketing to SEO, WSIgabs is the partner you can count on.