5 Social Media Marketing Strategies: The Ultimate Guide
Ways to create an effective social media marketing for the business/startup
Social media marketing is the process of using social media platforms to promote your brand/generate sales for your goods and services. Social media outlook can be very complicated and confusing due to its huge demand. With millions of active social media users, it becomes essential for a business to maintain an active social media presence and be consistent in the approach.
Social media marketing is a well-curated plan/tactic used to outline your social media objectives. Such objectives should position themselves in your company’s digital marketing strategies. A strong social media marketing strategy boosts your brand awareness, generates leads, and drives traffic to your website. So the question is, how to make a successful and effective social media marketing strategy?
First of all, you have to outline your basic objectives and find ways to achieve them. A more specific and concise plan will be effective. Also, try to avoid unachievable goals.
In this article, I will guide you through 5 steps to create effective social media marketing strategies.
1. Set SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, Time-bound) goals -
Your social media marketing goals should align with your company’s digital marketing goals like increasing brand awareness, driving traffic to your website, generating leads, etc. Documenting your goals in detail will help you have measurable and achievable goals. Analyze your data with the help of key metrics which will help you understand your followers.
2. Audit your present position -
A thorough assessment of where you are right now will guide you toward the path you want to be in. To understand your present social position, you may consider answering the following:
- What is working for you and what is not?
- How do you compare your social presence with that of your competitor?
- Whether or not your networks are optimized with images, bio. URL, etc.
- Which are your active networks and how active are you?
- Who is your target audience?
- What is your target audience’s opinion about your content?
By collecting answers to the above questions, you can create a list of things to improve your social presence.
3. Share appealing content -
You need to create content that would be relevant for your network as well as would meet the goals for such a network. You may create engaging content like images, videos, blogs, company news, eBooks, interviews, etc. You can also maintain a content diary to record your posts, the topics of the posts, and when and where to share/post them.
4. Measure your success -
As you start implementing your plan, you will find out which of the steps work for you and which do not. Track your social media visitors to find out which posts drive more traffic to your website. According to the data, re-evaluating your strategies to refine your marketing strategies in real-time can help to create an effective social media marketing strategy. Many tools can help you to track your site’s growth performance. You can even collect feedback about your posts from your followers and website visitors.
5. Identify where and when to post for the best results -
You can research to know which networks your target audiences are more active in and engaged with your brand. This way you can enroute your resources into. Your marketing strategies should be different for different social media platforms. The next thing to focus on is deciding the right time to post. Keep a record of times when your target audience is more active. For higher engagement, post during the optimal time.
Summing up:
On execution of the above steps, you can execute your social media strategy in the right direction to achieve your final goal of establishing brand awareness, boosting the engagement of followers, and boosting sales of your brand.