An effective social media strategy can be your key to unlocking brand success. From pinpointing the right metrics to identifying your target audience, the elements that shape a winning social media strategy are more important than ever. So, what makes for a top-notch social media marketing strategy?
Well, aside from being clear, concise, and measurable, it should serve as the compass for your brand's journey over a certain period – be it a year or any designated timeframe. This guide to masterful social media strategy planning unfolds five concrete steps that will help you sculpt an ambitious yet actionable social media marketing strategy for your brand.
Now, let's take a look into the heart of social media strategy and see why it's an indispensable element to position your brand.
Understanding the Essence of a Social Media Marketing Strategy
A social media marketing strategy is the orchestration of all the moves and initiatives you make while handling your social media platforms to promote and sell your brand, products, and services. This encompasses everything from curating and scheduling social posts, engaging with your audience, to analyzing the fruits of your labor. Social media marketing can be harnessed for myriad objectives – from raising brand awareness, offering products and services, to cultivating a community, reaching specific audiences, or providing top-notch customer service.
Depending on the size of your organization, social media marketing duties may fall under the responsibility of your social media team or a dedicated social media manager.
Before you plan out any new marketing or brand campaigns, you should start with a strategy and social media marketing is no exception. A strategy is the foundation for smooth team workflow and sustained social media success. It help you to zero in on what truly matters, and will also substantiate your social ROI.
A good social media marketing strategy sets you and your team up for success and to achieve with your social media marketing goals, along with the methodologies that are needed to accomplish them. It should encompass information like your audience personas, which social platforms are best for specific campaigns, the type of content that works best on each platform, and even the best times to post. It may seem like a lot to juggle at first, but once in place, it can be easily updated to align with the evolving needs of your organization.
Here are some steps to use to kick off your social media marketing strategy.
Step 1: Analyze and Assess Your Past Social Media Performance
Before you can map out your social media marketing strategy, you want to have a comprehensive understanding of your brand's social performance over the previous year, or a specific time frame you choose.
Research the metrics from each social channel you currently use to identify where and how you generated any leads, what elements drove traffic to your website, increased your followers, or boosted conversions.
Here are some commonly tracked metrics:
Average engagement rate: This metric shows how deeply your audience engages with your content. It includes likes, comments, shares, and offers vital insights for crafting your social media marketing plan.
Social share of voice: This gauges how frequently your brand is mentioned online in relation to your competitors. It reveals your brand's standing in the market and highlights what lessons can be drawn from others are doing.
Conversion rate: Conversion rates vary across social media platforms. While engagements are fantastic, do they ultimately lead to leads or sales? One of the pivotal goals of social media marketing is driving sales, making it essential to track which social media actions contribute to your broader business objectives.
Reach and Impressions: Often confused for each other–both reveal how much your content is being seen. Reach is the total number of people who saw your content. Impressions identifies and measures the number times your content is displayed and viewed. They can mean different things on different platform.
Make sure these results align with the goals you set for the past year. While an impressive number of likes and shares for a campaign may seem encouraging, it's crucial to ensure that each campaign accomplishes its predefined objectives for your targeted goals.
Tracking social metrics can help you to determine if your social media performance provided a positive return on investment.
Following your assessment, you'll have a clear understanding of your what worked and any areas for improvement. You can leverage this data to build a more effective social media marketing strategy for the upcoming year.
Step 2: Defining Social Media Marketing Strategy and Goals
Your social media marketing objectives can be broadly categorized into two spheres: branding and revenue-related.
Branding Objectives
Metrics to Measure Progress
Boosting Awareness
Fostering Positive Sentiment
Cultivating Relationships
Building Loyalty
Revenue-Linked Objectives
Metrics to Measure Progress
Driving Traffic for Prospecting
Prompting Desired Behaviors (e.g., Sign-ups)
Gathering Leads
Elevating Sales Conversions
Social media marketing objectives should always align closely with your company's overarching business goals. These objectives can span a wide spectrum, based on your industry, company size, audience, competition, and myriad other factors. However, potential objectives could include:
Amplifying brand awareness: Here, the aim is to expand your brand's reach, and your social media posts serve as the conduit to engage new audiences, pinpoint new segments, and convey your brand's core values.
Uplifting website traffic: Your goal is to encourage your audience to take the next step by visiting your website to delve deeper into your brand, products, and services.
Nurturing a social community: The objective here is to grow your social media following and nurture it into a thriving community.
Lead generation stands as one of the most pivotal objectives for any marketing endeavor. Your social media strategy can pique the interest of potential customers in your products or services and steer them toward taking action.
Spurring sales: Your social media networks can be harnessed to upsurge sales through exclusive deals and discounts.
Your social media audit should dovetail with your goal-setting, providing you with a clear roadmap of what needs to be accomplished in the upcoming year.
SMART Goals: The Pillars of Success
When setting goals for your social media marketing campaign, employ the SMART criteria to define what success will look like and how to track the components contributing to this success. SMART is an acronym for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound.
For each goal, break it down to outline what you aim to achieve, rendering it quantifiable and attainable. Typically, focusing on up to three targets ensures that your strategy plan remains practical. Subsequently, decide on the key metrics that will be used to gauge your progress toward these goals.
For instance, if lead generation is your goal, contemplate the following:
Number of leads: Specify the number of leads you aspire to acquire and how this number will be distributed across various social media platforms.
Track analytics based on content type, format, visuals, ad campaigns, and more to determine which content performs the best.
Dive into comprehensive data to inspect the long-term impact of your social objectives on your business.
Examine which social platforms, marketing strategies, content types, and other factors are generating leads that ultimately convert into paying and returning customers. This data becomes instrumental in showcasing your return on investment (ROI).
As soon as you crystallize your goals and the metrics to gauge success, your social media marketing strategy transforms into a potent and effective document.
Chances are, you've made certain assumptions about your audience. However, to truly comprehend your social media fans and followers, evaluating your data is a must. Social analytics can uncover crucial insights:
Demographics such as age, gender, interests, education, and employment.
Discussion topics, comments, hashtags, and the posts that resonate with your audience.
Engagement figures across all platforms.
With a clearer understanding of your audience and their behavior on social media, you can proceed to the next step: crafting audience personas.
Step 3: Audience Personas for Targeted Engagement
Regardless of your business, your audience is an amalgamation of various groups. Analyzing data will help you identify these distinct audience segments, their preferred social media hangouts, content engagement patterns, and more.
For each audience segment, create a persona that vividly illustrates who your fans are. To gain profound insights into your audience, tap into the social analytics integrated into your chosen social platform or utilize advanced third-party applications. These insights can help you segment your audience into personas based on demographics, interests, and their interactions with your brand.
These audience persona insights should steer your social media marketing strategy and guide your content creation, marketing campaigns, ad targeting, and other activities. The personas ensure you reach all your target demographics effectively and hit your objectives.
Generate up to four buyer personas tailored to your social media and advertising endeavors. Scrutinize each major persona, grasp the challenges they face, and ponder how your products and services can assist them. Collaboration with other teams, such as product marketing colleagues, can enrich your persona creation process and help you prioritize the personas that matter most.
Step 4: Platforms, Purpose, and Posting Times
It's important to identify your primary distribution channels and develop a specific strategy for each. Research shows some of the leading social media platforms marketers can use to build their platform. While these stats provide valuable context, understanding how your brand and audience interact on social media is key. The popularity of social platforms, both new and established, can evolve rapidly, so staying informed is essential.
Your research will highlight which social media channels are most popular with your target audience and where they are most engaged. This information empowers you to allocate your efforts wisely so you aren't spinning your wheels on the wrong platform.
Tailor your marketing strategies for maximum impact. Each social media platform serves a distinct purpose. For instance:
Facebook: Continues to be one of the largest social networking sites. More than 200 million business, use Facebook tools and online community to promote their business and drive engagement. It's ideal for most content types including text, images, stories, with video content being a strong performer.
YouTube: Considered to be the second largest search engine after Google. Online video sharing platform that is easy to get started to promote your business. People come to YouTube for entertainment or education. You should aim for a balance of the two.
Twitter: A hub for news, encourages curation and retweeting, with attention to trending hashtags and themes.
LinkedIn: A professional business network where industry articles, statistics, and concise, to-the-point statements are popular. The platform ranks first when it comes to B2B lead generation.
Instagram: Perfect social platform for visual brands, showcasing products or services with photos or videos, call-out captions, hashtags, and short videos.
TikTok: A short-form video-sharing platform where you can showcase authentic and engaging content and music in a range of interests.
In addition to discerning the ideal platforms, pinpointing the best times to post is crucial. Extensive research has been conducted to identify the most opportune moments for brand posts.
Understanding when your audience is most active on social media ensures that your content reaches them when they're most receptive.
HubSpot's research offers insights into the most popular days and hours for social media posting. However, your unique audience's behavior should be factored in. Combining these data points will help you construct a precise and effective posting schedule as an integral part of your social media marketing strategy.
Step 5: The Competitive Advantage: Learning from Others
The final stage in shaping your social media strategy is researching your competitors. This process allows you to gain a deeper understanding of their social media marketing tactics and assess your own performance in comparison. Benchmarking against competitors reveals areas for improvement and offers inspiration for future campaigns.
Here's what you should research:
Who are your main competitors?
Which social media platforms do they utilize to engage with their audience?
What are their strengths and weaknesses in their social media efforts?
What type of content do they create, and how does it perform?
In what areas do they need to enhance their social media presence?
It's also essential to monitor the sentiment surrounding competitors' brands and within your industry. This aids in identifying trending industry terms, understanding which content and campaigns resonate with viewers, and observing how competitors adapt their strategies over time.
Understanding your competitors and their interactions with their audiences can provide a deeper understanding of your market. These insights can be harnessed to fortify your social media marketing approach.
Are you prepared to elevate your social media marketing game?
Once you've traversed through all these phases, you're primed to roll out your social media strategy. Remember, this serves as your bedrock for success in the realm of social media. Neglecting to formulate a strategy can result in chaos, inconsistent messaging, and challenges in linking your social media endeavors to tangible outcomes.
Leverage data from past social media audits to unearth pivotal information about your social media performance, audience behavior, and competitor strategies. This knowledge propels you towards formulating a precise, actionable, and results-driven social marketing strategy for the future.