How To Start Up Your Social Media Marketing Strategy

A social media marketing strategy is a synopsis of all of the actions that you plan to take and hope to accomplish on social media. It guides your actions and also lets you know if you’re succeeding or failing. The more specific your social media marketing strategy is, the more effective it will be. Keep it brief. Don’t make it so lofty as well as broad that it’s unachievable or impractical to measure.

Without a social media marketing strategy, you may be posting on social media platforms just for the sake of posting. Without having a clear picture of what your goals are, who your target audience is as well as what they want, it’ll be difficult to get the results that you want on social media. Whether you want to broaden your brand’s reach through social media or to level up as a social media marketer, developing a social media marketing strategy is essential.

Social media isn’t as simple as it once was. Not by a long shot. From selecting the right channels to thinking about your content strategy, analysis paralysis is a serious problem for marketers today. A concise social media marketing strategy will help your brand tackle its goals with a sense of purpose.

Set Your Social Media Marketing Goals

Firstly you have to decide what it is that you want out of social media as a whole. This is because coming up with a social media marketing plan means having an end-game in mind. If that means more rands and cents from your current social presence or amping up your reach with new followers is completely up to you. What matters most is that you set realistic social media goals. Tackle smaller objectives which allow you to scale your social efforts in a way that’s both reasonable and affordable.

Who Is Your Target Audience?

Having a fantastic understanding of your target audience will assist you with more easily answering the following questions about what, where as well as when you will share. As an example, if a travel and lifestyle brand knows that its target audience likes to read about exciting new places and travel tips, it could share content such as this on its social media platforms.

A phenomenal exercise to try here is to create marketing personas. There are a lot of different ways of doing this but our favourite approach is to use the 5Ws and 1H approach:

• Who are they? (i.e. job title, age, gender, salary and location)
• What are they interested in which you can provide? (i.e. entertainment, educational content, case studies and information on new products)
• Where do they regularly hang out online? (i.e. Facebook, Instagram or niche platforms)
• When do they look for the kind of content which you can provide? (i.e. weekends or during their daily commute)
• Why do they consume the content? (i.e. to get better at their job, to become healthy or to stay up to date with something)
• How do they consume the content? (i.e. reading social media posts or watching videos)

Track Meaningful Metrics

Vanity metrics – such as number of followers and likes – are easy to track. However, it’s difficult to prove their real value. Instead, focus on things like engagement, click-through as well as conversion rates. You may want to track a number of different goals for different networks, or even different applications for each network.

For instance:

• If you make use of LinkedIn in order to drive traffic to your website, you would measure click-throughs.
• If Instagram is for brand awareness, you may track the number of Instagram Story views.
• If you make use of Facebook advertising, cost-per-click (CPC) is an often-used metric of success.

Social media goals must be aligned with your overall marketing objectives. This makes it easier to demonstrate the value of your work and secure buy-in from management. Begin developing your social media marketing plan by writing down at least three goals for social media.

Get in touch with the Digital School of Marketing

Social media is the best way for you to market your business. If you would like to learn how to harness this power then you need to do our Social Media Marketing Course. Read more here.