Using social media marketing strategy in your business will undoubtedly help with your brand as a whole. Today, not only can it be used to increase brand awareness or drive more traffic to your website, but also as a social listening tool where you can observe the things your customers are saying about your brand as well as a way to engage with your audience.
Here are the 5 key elements of a social media marketing strategy:
- Strategy
- Planning and Publishing
- Listening and Engagement
- Analytics and Reporting
- Advertising
Once you have read through all 5 of these key tools, you will be able to fully apply and leverage social media in your business.
1. Crafting a Social Media Marketing Strategy
“Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.” ⎼⎼Sun Tzu
Before diving right into the action, it is important to plan out the bigger picture to help guide your marketing.
What’s your goal?
How will using social media help you achieve your objectives? You can increase your brand awareness, drive traffic and sales, drive engagement, create a community, and have it as your customer support channel.
Which social media platforms should you focus on?
There are so many channels that you can leverage for your brand. Some major ones are Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube, and TikTok. When starting out on social media, it is best to pick out just a few channels.
What type of content should you share?
Think of who your audiences are. What would they want out of your content? Do they prefer images, videos, or link posts? Create a marketing persona to help you answer the previous questions. Keep in mind that your type of content does not have to stay fixed because the market constantly changes in our digital era. You can experiment with your posts and be flexible with your strategy when some posts perform better than others.
2. Planning and Publishing AKA Getting Ready and Taking Action
Being consistent when posting your content is extremely important. There are many pages and profiles on social media that has never been updated in months or years. By posting consistently, your audience will see that your business is still active.
Publishing consistently will require a content calendar to help you know exactly what will be published. You should plan and create these posts ahead of time and schedule them using tools to save time. Some tools you can use are Buffer and Hootsuite, for example.
Some tips: Once you create evergreen content, repurpose them in different formats and post it a few times on different channels over the next few months. This could be in the form of a new caption, a new graphic, or a link to the post.
3. Listening and Engagement: Interacting With Your Audience
Once your social media following starts to grow, more people will be discussing about your brand online. There will be more direct and indirect interactions with your business.
What you should do at this stage is to observe the comments about your brand. This can be from direct feedback or brand mentions. You can use social listening tools to help you learn about people who have mentioned about your brand online and learn of their opinions, whether they are positive or negative.
From here, you can adapt your business to answer customer needs. For example, you can use those feedbacks as content ideas, or to learn about the business’ weaknesses to improve certain aspects of your brand.
Some more tips: Don’t forget to interact with your customers who commented on your posts! Not only will this help them feel appreciated with this interaction, but it will also encourage more engagement from more of your audiences.
4. Analytics and Reporting
Unlike traditional marketing, most forms of online marketing are quantifiable.
With the help of analytics tools, you will be able to learn how well your social media marketing is performing.
In social media platforms, basic tools for analytics are usually provided. However, to obtain more in-depth data or to be able to compare data across all your social media platforms, external tools should be used to help with this such as Sprout Social, Buffer, and Hoot Suite.
5. Paid Advertising
After building some social proof from growing your followers or if you have the funds, it is important to consider using paid advertisements in your strategy.
The power of social media advertisements is in its ability to create very specific target audiences based on many different kinds of demographics, interests, behaviors, and more.
At first, you may think that the advertisement pages may be intimidating to look at. However, these social media platforms encourage us to use these tools because it is where they profit from which is exactly why there are various tutorials as well as tips while using the advertisement features to make it easier to get used to.
Once you learn the different features it has, you will be able to advertise and optimize your ad campaigns and budget as you need. Of course, analytics play a huge role in online advertising so be sure to take a look at your key metrics such as clickthrough rate (CTR), cost per 1000 impressions (CPM), bounce rate, and more.
The Bottom Line
So what can a social media marketing strategy do for you? According to Sprout Social, 53% of consumers have said that they are likely to purchase from brands that are transparent on social media, and brand transparency is heightened by a company’s presence of social media. This finding provides an opportunity for businesses to create more personal interactions with their customers and grow their revenue.
It is important to note that any social media marketing strategy can take time and expertise to execute, especially when using paid advertisements which may sometimes be a hit or miss. If you are looking to add a social media marketing strategy to your business or want to level up your SMM game, Marketing Guru can help you save both time and energy with our service. We also give free consultations for your digital marketing plan! Contact us here.
