#5 Inerrant Tips: How to Build your First Social Media Marketing Strategy

When you apply the best Social Media Marketing Strategy, you’ll not only gain a strong online presence for your company/business,  but you’ll also push your business website to the first page on search engines.

The digital forms of media are now taking over the world. With emerging new media and online platforms, social media has become the highest consumed platform of digital media. Today, because of the mass consumption of social media, almost every business (irrespective of the niche) has gone online; be it information sharing, news, entertainment, or even marketing and advertising.

In simple terms, Social Media Marketing is a plan laid out on social media to help improve your business online presence following some effective strategies. Building a successful strategy to take advantage of Social Media may sound difficult, but if you have a clear idea of what your goal is and what you want to bring out the platform, the process is going to be easy, simple and effective. 

Steps to build your social media marketing strategy

#1 Set Your Goals:

Setting the right goals for your social media strategy is one of the most crucial steps. Digital marketing goals are different from the other goals that you might want to achieve for your business. SMM goals need to be practical, implementable, achievable, time-oriented, specific, measurable, and relevant. Deciding your goals will help you know where you want to reach and how far you currently are from the goal. Your goals define your company; keeping that in mind, you need to prioritize what is more realistic, relevant, and necessary. 

#2 Selecting Your Target Audience:

Target audience is the segment of people you want your business to reach out to. Selecting the right audience for social media can be challenging on different platforms; each social platform runs/publishes quite different contents; however, there are quite a lot of similarities between all the platforms. 

You need to choose the best platform that has the most suitable audience that suits the nature of your business. Also, you have to carefully filter the age of the people who will see your business adverts so as to engage more with potential clients. For example, a media company would grab more audience on platforms such as Instagram and Snapchat. While a career, startup, or top business can grab more audience via LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter.

The process doesn’t end after selecting your Target Audience. Also, you need to maintain relations with both new and existing clients. Effective communication and feedback mechanism can also turn out to be of great help. 

#3 Competition Check: 

Jumping straight away into creating contents for your social media page is not the best thing to do. Before you start developing contents, you need to know how much competition exists in your field. You need to list down your competitors and analyze what are doing, so as to come out with a different approach, as well as better contents that are more explanatory than what your competitors have. Analyzing your competitors helps you to discover what is needed in the market and things that are not working out well. 

#4 Quality Content Creation: 

The quality of your content decides how well your strategy is going to work out. In the end, it is the content that matters the most. Plus, your contents are what the audience will engage with; thus, it needs to be high-quality and professional.

When creating SMM contents, keep in mind that your content is what will define your company, how it is and what it does. Without the right contents, all the other moves are likely not going to be effective. However, your contents must be unique; never copy from your competitor or an already published content on the internet. Unique contents promote your brand identity and assure of better engagement with the right target audience. 

#5 Testing And Evaluating Your Strategy: 

What people usually tend to miss out is the follow up that needs to be done after the implementation of a foolproof SMM strategy. The SMM process doesn’t end after the content is delivered to the audience. You also need to follow up the after effect/impact of your strategy; evaluating the difference between the aim and real-time results.

The evaluation process also helps in understanding what the audience wants, what strategies might not work out, and what type of content has the best outcome. Not only will this follow up move give you a better understanding of your SMM campaign success but it also helps to dig out better tactics you could apply in the future. To know how well your strategy is running, you can analyze statistics like reach, engagement, likes, traffic, etc.

After the analysis, you can restart the ideation process and work on the campaigns changes that can be retested before implementation. 

What more

The more specific and concise your strategy is, the better results it will gain when implemented. Coming out with complex, hefty strategies can hurdle your process and may lead to strategy failure. On the other hand, setting up extremely long term, unrealistic, unattainable goals is not the right thing to do. Make sure that every kind of content you deliver to your audience serves a purpose! 

Author Bio:

Sara Jacob is a community manager at Zithas Technology; a web/mobile app development, and Digital Marketing company with over 12 years of experience in this field.

Originally posted on October 22, 2019 @ 12:25 pm