Social Media Marketing is using social media in an attempt to promote a brand, product, or service. It is done with the help of media created to meet the type of each platform with an aim to reach the viewers and increase customer engagement. The contents work differently on each type of platform, and it is thus, essential to adjust your marketing strategy to achieve the best results.
Establish your objectives
The first step of all successful strategies is setting up goals. Goals need to be clear and specific at the granular level. Without proper goals, it becomes difficult to target the objectives and plan the campaign accordingly.
The goals need to be S.M.A.R.T. They need to be Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bound. Setting up achievable goals will let you improve your business. Some SMART goals commonly set by businesses utilizing social media marketing are,
Improve brand awareness.
Increase site/profile traffic.
More sales.
Stronger customer support.
Create a user community for your brand or product.
Most campaigns are designed around one or two types of media and hence are limited to one or some of the social media applications. It is not required to run the campaign on all platforms for success. Only the best platform works effectively as well.
Understand the audience
Find out what the audience watches and connects to and differentiate your target audience. Deciphering this can be done in many ways. The most common ones are as below.
Age
Location
Social Platform
Interests
Pain Points
Gender
Language
Average Income
Preferred content type
Industry
These classifications will allow you to target viewer needs and interest zones accurately. Also, progressively turn viewers into customers. Using social media analytics will provide you with lots of information about the viewers.
Selection of the correct social media platform
You need to determine what channel you will use to share content on. All platforms are good and equally effective if the strategy and content support it media type wise. The needs of the target audience should also be kept in mind while deciding as the target zone is ultimately reaching out to consumers.
Once the goals are realized and the consumer base research is completed you should already have a good understanding of what media or platform type they prefer and select accordingly. For beginners, it is advisable to use one media platform to make things easier. Once an understanding of the process is under grasp then expand to different platforms and media types.
Get your social media accounts campaign ready
Once you have chosen the type of platform you will need to get your account on that social media platform campaign ready or create an account on that platform, to begin with. Try to keep a consistent approach towards setting up all your social accounts. Brand logo, color schemes, and graphics need to be similar across all platforms to ensure consistency.
The content needs to be of high quality to instantly woo the audience and context needs to be in line with the viewer’s needs to get them to connect beyond that instant delight.
Analyze the competition
You will need to see and understand your competition’s approach to social media content. Understanding and reviewing your competitors’ approach and social media presence can get you a lot of information on their social media strategy and help you in devising your own.
Some questions to which you might need answers to are,
What do they focus on?
Whom do they target?
What key phrases are they using?
How do their audiences interact with them?
What are their hashtags?
However, you must understand that these are some examples and the research will be product or service type based. There is no need to copy what they are doing, but understanding what they do and how they do it to adapt and improvise your social media marketing campaign from the conclusions.
Create engaging and original content
Once the above flowchart has been followed you will now need to create content. Your content needs to engage the viewers and clearly demarcate a difference between you and your competition. Try focusing on the content theme along with the type.
You can also focus your campaign around user-generated content using specific hashtags. Videos are most effective in content types as they engage senses of seeing and hearing at the same time and increase information retention by viewers.
Content is king. Create content that viewers will find refreshing and feel a connection with. Engaging content will effectively transition viewers to consumers.
Create a content calendar
The content is ready but the time may not be right to publish the content. You need to give importance to the planning of the correct time to launch the campaign. There is no universal time, and you must chart your own timing for publishing. The market data will tell you when to launch the campaign.
This will let you create timelines for the campaign in stages or full throttle depending upon the projected timelines from data analysis.
Evaluate and optimize
To make sure everything is on track and progressing as per the plan, you will need to measure and calculate the success rate of your campaign and optimize wherever necessary. Find out the top-performing content and use similar tactics on the other ones as optimization. Most social media apps will have their own analytical tools that will give you the required data.
Adjust the strategy along the way to achieve optimal results.
If you are yet to discover social media marketing, let this be your guiding light and experience it to believe it. Many businesses initiate social media marketing campaigns without proper knowledge of what needs to be done.
Most simply start posting for the sake of posting without any plan and result in zero value. Thus, it is very essential to create a social media marketing strategy before undertaking the campaign.