A well set up strategy is the key to a successful social media marketing. If you don’t have a good strategy, you might be posting on social media networks for the sake of only posting, nothing else. Not for leads nor return on investment(ROI). If you have no insight about what your goals are, who your target audience is, and what they want, it will be difficult to obtain returns on social media. Social media is a crucial marketing course for businesses of all levels. No matter what your goal is, devising a social media marketing strategy is vital. It does not matter if you want to improve your brand through social media or to upgrade as a social media marketer. All throughout this guide, we will help you discover what makes an effective social media marketing strategy.
The process is very exciting, but what made it troublesome for many online marketers last year, 2018, is when Facebook made algorithm changes and privacy concerns.
What you should be concerned about is building up a strategy that would keep your website out of the sidelines in the modern competition.
We have listed down the necessary steps to produce a social media marketing tactic to carry you through 2019 and beyond with a sense of direction.
How your business can get better with social media marketing
To really understand where your brand should be headed and you would get there, you need to answer the following four questions:
- Why do you want your brand to be on social media?
- Who is your target audience?
- What will you share?
- Where will you share it?
In this blog post, we will help you answer the four questions.
Why do you want your brand to be on social media?
This question connects to more: is your brand on social media to advertise your goods? To push traffic to your site? Or to give your customers a type of service?
Overall, there are nine social media intentions you can hold:
- Improve brand recognition
- Drive traffic to your site
- Generate fresh leads
- Build revenue by developing signups or sales
- Increase brand engagement
- Create a community around your business
- Implement social customer service
- Gain notices in the press
- Monitor conversations about your business
If you are competitive, you would likely have more than one of those goals.
However, you should consider this fact: concentrating on just a handful of goals is only good if you have a team with several members that will carry on specific goals.
Who is your target audience?
When you find out why you want your brand to be on social media, you will then need to get to know your target audience. Once you understand your audience, you will quickly answer the following questions on what, where, and when you are going to share.
For example, if a travel and lifestyle brand knows that its target audience prefers to read about new areas and touring tips, it could share related content on its social media pages.
What you need to practice now is to create marketing personas.
Below are some of our top approaches in creating marketing personas.
- Who are they? (E.g. job title, age, gender, salary, location)
- What are they involved in that you can give? (E.g. entertainment, educational content, case studies, notice on new products)
- Where do they normally hang out online? (E.g. Facebook, Instagram)
- When do they search for the type of content you can give? (E.g. weekends, during their daily travel)
- Why do they use the content? (E.g. to get better at their job, to become healthy, to stay up to date with something)
- How do they consume the content? (E.g. read social media posts, watch videos)
If you have a business that has been operating for a while, you most presumably already have a good understanding of your target audience. If you already have this, one thing you can do is to record it so that you can give it with your team or use it for your needs in the future.
What will you share?
Upon seeing the question, you might get the idea that of choosing between videos, texts, or images to share. But, that’s not it. We will discuss their themes. Holding some of the themes is absolutely fine as it provides you the space to share a variety of content to keep your audience interested without being apparently distracted. View your marketing personas, then consider the goals and challenges they have and how you can help.
Where will you share it?
To answer this, you need to know what social media channel is best.
Reminders: you don’t need to be on every social site because that would divide your attention and focus.
That is why we suggest you be only on the big four- Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn- because they are the ones that will most likely show up on the top of SERPs.
Done! You now have a plan with a purpose. This social media marketing strategy will help you be a success in the marketing world. The insight provided will be enough to guide you in your marketing journey.
