Strategies for Social Media Marketing.

A social media marketing strategy will help your brand tackle its objectives/goals with a sense of purpose. We’ve broken down our social media marketing guide into the key steps you need to identify your goals, engage audiences and optimize your results:

1. Set objectives that address your biggest challenges

First things first: you need to figure out what you want to accomplish out of social media at large. Brands should strive to set goals that are actually attainable. By tackling smaller, realistic goals, you can scale your social efforts in a way that’s both reasonable and affordable. And on a related note, your goals will influence everything from your budget to which social networks you’ll tackle.

Sample Social Media Objectives

·        Increase brand awareness. To create authentic and lasting brand awareness, avoid solely publishing promotional messages. Instead, focus on content that emphasizes your personality and puts your followers ahead of the hard sell.

·        Achieve a higher quality of sales. Digging through your social channels is nearly impossible without monitoring or listening to specific keywords, phrases or hashtags. Through more efficient social media targeting, you reach your core audience much faster.
·        Improve ROI. Positive social media ROI doesn’t happen by accident. Taking the time to audit your social channels can help keep the cost of  ads and creatives down. 

2. Gather insight into your target audience

So much of what you need to know about your audience to influence your social media marketing strategy is already out in the open. You must decide on the relevant demographic, psychographic and behavioural characteristics of your audience.

3. Establish your most important metrics

No matter what you’re selling, your social media strategy should be data-driven. That means focusing on the social media metrics that matter.

Engagement metrics are essential to building meaningful, lasting relationships with your followers. Large audiences and likable content is great.

Some of the metrics to look up for are:

• Reach. Post reach is the number of unique users who saw your post. How far is your content spreading across social? Is it actually reaching user’s feeds? In the face of ever-changing organic algorithms, tracking reach is arguably more important than ever.
• Clicks. This is the number of clicks on your content, company name or logo. Link clicks are critical toward understanding how users move through your marketing funnel. Tracking clicks per campaign is essential to understand what drives curiosity or encourages people to buy.
• Engagement. The total number of social interactions divided by the number of impressions. For engagement, it’s about seeing who interacted and if it was a good ratio out of your total reach. This sheds light on how well your audience perceives you and their willingness to interact.
• Hashtag performance. What were your most used hashtags on your own side? Which hashtags were most associated with your brand? Or what hashtags created the most engagement?
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• Sentiment. This is the measurement of how users reacted to your content, brand or hashtag. Did customers find your recent campaign offensive? What type of sentiment are people associating with your campaign hashtag? It’s always better to dig deeper and find what people are saying.

4. Dig into what your competitors are doing

Before you start creating content, you should have a good idea of what your competitors are up to.

Doing so involves might just require some surface-level analysis. Looking at your competition’s presence will directly inform your own social media strategy. The goal here is to determine what’s working for them and how you can adapt your own campaigns accordingly.

How to spot your social competitors

The simplest way to find competitors is through a simple Google search. Look up your most valuable keywords, phrases and industry terms to see who shows up.

5. Create and curate engaging social content

Your social media marketing strategy is obviously centred around content. You should have a pretty good idea of what to publish based on your goal and brand identity. Similarly, you probably feel confident in which networks to cover for example;

Video Content or Bust: it is among the most viewed and shared hands-down. Facebook and Instagram, in particular, are pushing video hard right now which is notable given how their respective algorithms will continue to evolve.

User-generated content: again, we can’t stress enough the importance of curating user-generated content from branded hashtags. Customers today absolutely love authentic content that doesn’t always have that sort of professional, polished touch. If nothing else, curating UGC means less work on your plate and less pressure to constantly be thinking of new ideas.

6. Make timeliness a top priority

Not only do customers expect speedier responses from brands, but also meaningful conversations on a regular basis. 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.

Through the right social media monitoring tools, you can find instances across all your channels to interact, respond and gauge customer service inquiries.

7. Assess what’s working, what isn’t and how you can improve by managing and measuring your outcomes.

Without continuously analysing 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. This means looking at your top-performing content and fine-tuning your campaigns accordingly.

There’s no denying that a lot of social media is a matter of trial-and-error. Monitoring the metrics behind your campaigns in real-time allows you to make small tweaks to your social media marketing strategy rather than sweeping, time-consuming changes. This dynamic approach to marketing makes perfect sense in a day and age where social media is constantly evolving.

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