Creating engaging and fresh content and publishing this on the right platforms is essential for any business and is a great way to get your brand name out there. But before this takes place, you need to have a solid social media strategy in place which outlines your goals, target audience, platforms and key metrics you are going to monitor in order to measure success from your campaigns.
Within this strategy, there should be an element of research taken place to identify your competition and what you can do to make you stand out from the crowd and differentiate yourself from the others. So where do you begin? This blog highlights the key stages you need to follow in order to create the ultimate social media marketing plan.
Set Your Goals/Objectives
The very first step (and the most important) is to define your goals and objectives and identify what it is that you want to achieve from social media marketing. Without a set goal, it is hard for you as a business to channel your marketing efforts to reach it when there is no desired end goal.
For that reason alone, we define goals which are SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Timely). So what is it that you’re looking to achieve? Here are just a few examples:
● Increase your reach
● Increase brand awareness
● Drive more traffic to your website
● Increase the number of leads
● Increase your audience size
You can set one goal, or you can set multiple goals which work in conjunction with each other.
Define Your Target Audience
So we now know what you are looking to achieve from your social media marketing efforts but who are you targeting? If you don’t know who you target audience is, you won’t know what to advertise to them and what to display. Your target audience can be defined based on various factors including demographics, location, interests, consumer behaviour, previous purchase history etc.
So you could be looking to target new users who haven’t purchased from you before or you could be retargeting visitors who have been on your website in the last 3 months but didn’t convert. The opportunities that come with targeting are endless – you just need to define your target audience in order to display the correct ads to them, at the right time.
Choose Your Social Media Platforms
So the next stage to creating an effective social media strategy, is to choose the social media platforms to use in order to reach your audience. In order to use the most effective platforms, we need to determine which platforms is used by your audience the most. For example, if you’re targeting 18-25 year olds with clothing and fashion items, Instagram and Facebook would be the best channels to use.
We recommend finding 1-2 platforms which you should use and create your content based around these platforms ensuring that they fit with the theme of the channel and naturally fit in their feed. This will help you develop and grow your online presence.
Monitor Your Success
Once you’ve started publishing regular
platforms, you need to begin monitoring and analysing the performance of your marketing efforts in order to determine how well your content is performing. Within this process, you will be able to identify what is working and what doesn’t work so well in order to help you plan your content for the upcoming weeks.
Whilst analysing this data, it’s important to distinguish the time when your audience is the most active on social media and when they engage with you the most online. You can use this data to your advantage by posting content at these times during the day in order to maximise reach and engagement levels.
Within any marketing strategy, you should never forget your competitors. It’s beneficial to always review your competitors performance and compare your performance against theres to pinpoint any new opportunities for you and your business. Compare their audience size, engagement levels, reach etc.
Using The Right Type Of Content
So at this stage, your social media marketing efforts have been underway for some time and you have had the opportunity to review and measure your KPI’s and performance. So now it’s time to determine which type of content you should be using moving forward.
Key areas to consider when creating content are:
● Are you using the correct tone of voice and terminology?
● Create polls so you can learn what it is that your audience want from you
● Focus your efforts on creating content that you know your audience wants to see
● Test different call-to-actions and headlines to see if these affect performance
● Use a combination of images and video
By following the above key stages, you will have successfully created a solid social media marketing strategy which will help you take your online presence on social media to the next level and grow relationships with your customers. A strong social media campaign is crucial for any brand to succeed. Need our assistance with your social media marketing? Contact our specialist team today to get started.
