Before you begin creating social media marketing campaigns, consider your business’s goals. Starting a social media marketing campaign without a social strategy in mind is like wandering around a forest without a map—you might have fun, but you'll probably get lost.
Your business type should inform and drive your social media marketing strategy.
Here are some questions to ask when defining your social media marketing goals:
What are you hoping to achieve through social media marketing?
Who is your target audience?
Where would your target audience hang out and how would they use social media?
What message do you want to send to your audience with social media marketing?
7 Step Social Media Marketing Strategy Checklist:
1. Create Social Media Marketing Goals That Solve Your Biggest Challenges:
The first step to any strategy is to understand what you want out of your efforts. Social media marketing isn't about flipping a switch and calling it a day. Instead, social media planning should be looked at like cooking your favorite dish!
This is the same reason why brands should never take on every social media channel possible in their current marketing strategy. Try to choose the channels that have the most importance based on your brand’s goals. Avoid over complicating a strategy with too many targets and objectives. Simplicity can take you a long way. And also, don't forget to document your social media goals.
For guidance, here are some common social media goals to consider:
-Increase brand awareness
-Higher quality of sales
-Improve ROI
-Create a loyal fan-base
2. Research Your Social Media Audience:
Highly percentage of adults use Facebook–but are your customers actively engaging with your brand there? Understanding your audience is necessary to learn things like who buys your products, what age group is the toughest to sell and what income level makes up the most of your returning customers?
3. Establish Your Most Important Metrics:
While your targeted social media metrics might be the most important step of a strategy, it’s often the spot most veer off the path.
We often get wrapped up in viewing followers and likes as the truth to a campaign, but it’s smart to take a step back and evaluate the social metrics associated with your overall goals.
Here are some metrics you need to look at:
- Reach
- Clicks
- Engagement
- Hashtag performance
4. Research Your Social Competitive Landscape:
Before you start creating content, it’s really smart to investigate your competitors. We put this before the content creation process because you often find new ways to look at content by analyzing what’s making your competitors successful. Try to learn and grow from their success and failures stories.
5. Build & Create Engaging Social Media Content:
Did someone say content? It's no lie–social media content is extremely important to your marketing strategy. However, it’s best to follow the previous steps before planning out content ,so you can start building more effective themes.
6. Engage With Your Audience & Don’t Ignore:
Social media channels are built as networks. This means their main purpose is to be a space to converse, discuss topics and share content.
Through social media, you gain respect as a brand by just being present and talking to your audience. That’s why social customer care is so important to brands wanting to increase audience awareness. It's all about engagement.
7. Track Your Efforts & Always Improve
Without continuously analyzing your efforts, you’ll never know how one campaign did over another. Having a bird’s-eye-view of your social media activity helps put things into perspective, you should always:
-Analyze,
-Report,
-Improve.
