How to create a social media marketing strategy in 7 easy steps? If that’s your question, I’ve got the answer.
Even with 0 prior experience or skills, by the end of this piece, you’ll have a pretty solid social media marketing strategy that should get you more exposure and/or sales.
The best part? Most of these strategies do not cost a penny and only need the smallest of tweaks.
Let’s get started then.
1. Know all your targets
Before you begin your social media marketing strategy, it’s important you know your targets. This information needs to be known on multiple fronts. Meaning:
- Your campaign’s goal: You need to know exactly what you wish to achieve through the campaign. Do you need more likes? Followers? Brand exposure? Sales? Something else? This end goal needs to be crystal clear.
- Your target audience: You need to have a definite idea of who exactly your campaign is being displayed to. Your target audience decides which content you can or can’t use hence the clarity is of utmost importance.
- Your target social media platforms: Not all contents or campaigns suit all platforms. You must decide which platforms you’re targeting. If you’re targeting multiple platforms, that needs to be finalized in advance as well.
Of course, we will discuss how to pick the right social media channels and other factors in the next few sections.
2. Competition Research
Even without having your targets clear, the best way to start is competition research. If you know which brands compete against you, look at their content and targets.
Which audience are they targeting? What does their content look like? Where do the ads lead to and what’s their hook?
Follow competitors’ content around by clicking on them and going through their landing pages/sales pitches.
This massively helps you understand who and where your content should be aimed.
3. Craft content “around” your targets
Once you have your targets, you need to start working on the actual content.
- Audience: Understand the age, gender, and location interests of your target audience. A content that suits a 16 year old female teen may not suit a 60 year old consumer. Craft multiple content-copies if you have to but make sure each content-copy has been crafted to serve a specific group of audience.Include GenZ humor in one and maybe vintage nostalgia in the other, point is, make it relevant to each group.
- Platform: Each platform has its own size and other requirements for contents. More importantly, each platform has a different kind of audience. So, just because you selected Facebook doesn’t mean you can use whatever content you’ve created on it. Facebook generally has an older audience as compared to Instagram while Linkedin has a more professional user-base. Keeping these things in mind your content must be platform-specific. Click here to get expert help crafting content for Facebook and other social media platforms.
- Interests: Pay attention to what your audience likes and create similar content-copies.
4. Create brand identity
When you look at content from KFC or Starbucks, you almost instantly know which brand it is. Even without looking at the full contents. This is because they’ve crafted a very specific brand identity.
Regardless of which or how many platforms/contents you’re using, your identity needs to be clear across them all.
There are a number of ways you can do this:
- Consistent colors: Whatever your brand colors are, be sure to use them consistently for all contents.
- Logos and fonts: Of course stick that logo wherever you can and make sure you use the same or similar fonts for all contents.
- Tone or content style: Your content is either funny, smart, just informative or maybe even bland. The point is, Please make sure all your contents have this consistency on all platforms and content copies.
I would recommend you to check this article on Brand Indentiy by Canva.
5. Schedule your posts
I’m not asking you to schedule your post because you’re lazy or you’ll forget. Scheduling your post actually has several other benefits:
- Posts at the same time: Your page will always post your content at the exact same time (unless you choose otherwise). This is a proven strategy to boost your social media activity as your followers, after a few posts almost know subconsciously when your new post will be up.
- Consistency: You’ll never miss to post even if you’re at the beach sipping mai tai.
- Experiment: You can set posts to be published multiple times and see which get the maximum engagement.
6. Analyse and monitor
This is pretty important! Imagine you’ve 10 campaigns running for 3 different platforms. You must analyze the posts and extract what’s working, while eliminating what doesn’t seem to work.
- Timings: If you used the above tip of scheduling your posts, you’ll know which time works best for your audience. Eliminate those timeframes that don’t work.
- Post type: Out of all your content types, a few will always work better than the rest. This depends on multiple factors. Instead of studying the factors, you can simply post more of what works.
- Best platform: You may also look at the best-performing platform. You needn’t necessarily cut off the other platforms unless you’re short on the budget.
7. Respond and be active
One benefit of social media content over other types of campaigns is that you get to respond to your viewers. Use that opportunity to the maximum possible extent.
Always check the comments or questions below your content. Also, it’s not smart to employ some automated response system or copy-paste the same answers.
Be human and answer each question with as much “personalization” as possible. Each person who comments is a viewer you can convert into a customer with the right approach.
Conclusion
That’s it folks. I’ll sign off by saying there’s no proven or ultimate method to craft your social media strategy.
It largely depends on your exact product/service, audience type, platform, competition, budget, and end goal.
Of course, following the above tips will generally help you anyway and if you keep analyzing and monitoring your campaigns, you’ll end up with the best possible strategies over time.