Social media marketing is believed to be only successful amongst business to consumer (B2C) companies. This is simply false. Using the correct channels, understanding your audience, and using content-specific information for all channels is important when looking into any marketing strategy. Social media marketing isn’t always for lead generation but more so for brand awareness. The goal of social media is for customers to understand your company as a whole, not just your products and services. Customers are humans. They enjoy personable experience, authenticity, and culture. Let’s take a look at how we can create a successful social media marketing strategy that you can cater to your companies current and future clients.
Step 1: Coordinate your Social Media Goals with your Business Objectives
Goals are necessary to measure success. Understanding your social media goals right off the bat is crucial to creating your social media strategy. Manufacturing goals that are within your companies objectives is important. Relevancy and specificity are the two main components when creating a social media goal. Let’s say, for instance, that you have a business objective of customer retention. You then need to consider what social media goal will be set in place to complete that objective. You will then need to figure out what metrics will be used to measure customer retention success. You can have many social media goals within one specific business objective. Concise goals will give you a clear vision for your strategy.
Step 2: Defining Measurement Tactics
Measuring your goals allows you to determine if your social media campaigns are effective. Figuring out what works well for your company, your audience, and your different channels will help you strengthen your social media marketing strategy. There are two different types of tracking; ongoing analytics and campaign metrics. Ongoing analytics watches the activity over time, whereas campaign metrics watches specific initiatives within a specific timeframe. Many social media channels have their own form of analytics. For instance, Facebook has its own analytics and Instagram has many free apps that will help you track user activity. Everything that needs to be tracked has some way to track it whether that be done through analytics or campaign management.
Step 3: Establishing an Audience
There is likely a difference between your current customers and your ideal customers. Of course, we want to appeal to our current audience, but also broaden our horizons and reach out to new audiences. Creating what we like to call “buyer personas” allows your business to decipher what type of people they want to engage with. Understanding those people's wants and needs can create potential customers and or followers. Here is a blog written by an ECW digital marketing strategies about buyer personas and how they can help you understand your current and potential audience.
Step 4: Understanding your Competition
If your competition isn’t already using social media, great. If they are, it’s time for you to catch up. Pay attention to what they are doing and if it seems to be working for them. Do a competitive analysis to see where their social presence is and if you can do it better. Understanding where your competition stands allows you to find areas of opportunity for social presence. Finding relevant campaigns and strategies within your industry can be a big help for you to understand what works well and what doesn’t.
Step 5: Perform a Social Media Audit
Before enacting a social media marketing agenda, it is necessary to know where you are currently standing and where you have the opportunity for growth. Asking the following questions can help you know everything you need to know about your current social marketing situation and direct your future goals and objectives. How is my audience reacting to this channel? Does spending money on this campaign really benefit me? Why is this working for my competitors but not me? Having this understanding of your social presence will only help your business grow within a social strategy.
Step 6: Find Inspiration
This step will lean more towards the overall design, vibe, theme, or look of your social media presence. It isn’t necessary to keep your look identical across the board of channels, but it is good for branding that you keep them similar. Look into other industries or markets. See what you like or don’t like about their current social marketing theme. Put together a list of ideas and look for each channel. It is principal that you maintain uniqueness throughout this strategy. Your brand is what makes you, you.
Step 7: Produce Specific Content for each Social Channel
Make sure that all content that is created is aimed towards your channel-specific goals. Also, make sure that you have a posting calendar that will allow you to be organized for each channel. 80% of your content should be informative, educational and or entertaining. The remaining 20% should promote your brand. There are many ways to organize your content for all of your channels; whether that be images, videos, infographics, copy, or posts. Make sure they align with a goal and objective within your strategy. This step is subject to change in accordance to how each channel and their posting schedule works.
Step 8: Analyze and Measure your Strategy
This step allows you to figure out whether or not what you are doing is working for your business. Are all objectives and goals being met? If not, how can we make sure they work? If they are working, how can we make them work better? Analyzing different channels and post strategies can help you understand if your strategy is doing well or if it needs to be adjusted. These 8 steps may take a while to complete, but they are key to understanding what your social media strategy is and what you want it to be. Understanding who your current audience is and who you want them to be.
Create a Social Media Marketing Strategy Today!
Social media marketing is a strategy that will benefit your companies’ brand and create awareness to those who are potential customers. Having a strategy like this will only help you reach that potential. Contact ECW today to see how we can help you towards your social media marketing strategy today! Written by: Kelly Bergeron, Digital Marketing Specialist at Ecreative
