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For any company to succeed, it is vital to have a strategy based on its success, irrespective of the marketing methods. So whether the company does physical marketing or social media marketing, having a good and well-planned strategy for both of the two is essential.
To have a unique and attractive social media marketing strategy, business brands need to understand their audience's needs and interests to perform or produce better something in line with their clients' needs.
Why Social Media Marketing?
Social media marketing refers to social media platforms exercising to bond with clients to put your product, boost sales, and increase website traffic. Social media marketing involves posting relevant content like live videos, texts, prerecorded videos, images, GIFs, and animations on all your social media engagement platforms, talking to your audience, giving an ear to their complaints, and addressing their concerns.
The social media platforms used are Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Reddit, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Youtube, Snapchat, and WhatsApp. Different business brands use social media for various purposes:
to get traffic to their websites
to generate sales
to get people’s views about a product and its performance
to get to a target audience and engage with them
to engage with potential consumers of the product or service.
Social Media Marketing Strategy
According to a CoSchedule post by Brady Dukart, 97% of marketers are using social media. In comparison, 78% of salespeople outsell their peers by using social media for their business. He further says that the benefits of using social media to market go further beyond increasing sales and making more purchases.
A social media marketing strategy guides the following:
what you have planned to do
how it has to be done
where to do it from
when to get it done
whom to do it for
why do you intend to do it
how it will come to accomplishment.
A social media marketing strategy guides your procedures, what is being achieved, and what is not being achieved and helps you measure and monitor your performance.
When you have a direct social media marketing strategy, it becomes easy to implement it and ensure the efficiency issue is corrected since it is easy to monitor a concise plan compared to a big one.
Creating a social media marketing strategy seems relatively straightforward. However, it may not be as you think, especially with starter firms. Creating an organized and well-planned strategy is a process from choosing the proper channels to knowing where to find your audience and what content you should post for your audience.
Related: Social Media Customer Service
Having a social media marketing strategy is key to your brand since you are guided on what you are doing; otherwise, simply posting on your social media platforms without aiming for what you are up to would be a waste of time.
Let us look at how to craft a social media marketing strategy.
Construct effective and quality content;
Be sure of the content you post on your social media pages, and before you update any posts, ask yourself the following questions;
Is the content relevant?
Is the content of interest to my audience?
Will this content help to address their needs and concerns?
Am I posting this content at the right time?
Is it necessary anyway?
When you are sure the above concerns are all addressed, you will have the right audience. Posting the right and quality relevant content for the right people will bring you permanent traffic to your page, and those could be potential customers in the future or now.
Marketing content is what draws customers and potential buyers. It acts as the first point of contact long before a salesperson steps in. But, it is not only used by the marketing department. Salespeople utilize the marketing content as they go about their business. Therefore, marketing content should first be evaluated before it is put out, and these are some of the areas that should be given a core focus.
Today, 60-70% of the content in B2B organizations is not being used. So this is an excellent opportunity to get sales and marketing teams aligned.
Define your social media marketing goals
Having a goal you are set to achieve is tremendous for your brand and gives you a proper direction upon which you are set to follow your goal. The goals differ as below:
increasing brand awareness
generating sales
increasing profits
driving crazy traffic to your website.
A strategic business goal moves the brand forward depending on what you want to achieve, and these goals have to be SMART so that it’s easy to catch up with implementation.
This means that your goals have to be specific to what you want to achieve. Otherwise, there would be inconsistencies in attaining them. Specificity helps you to know
what you want
how you should achieve it
what are the necessities for you to reach that goal
Your goal should be measurable. You should be able to evaluate how much you have achieved so far. Do you have promising progress, or are you being slow?
Furthermore, is your goal attainable? Your goal should not be too easy to attain; otherwise, it will become boring. On the other hand, it shouldn’t be hard to achieve because the entire process might become complex. Therefore, your goal should be realistic and achievable. Finally, your goal should be time-sensitive. It should have a specific ending date; this motivates you to do it in the shortest time possible.
Discover what your audience wants.
Knowing your audience is vital for your brand. You ought to understand:
who they are
what they want
their interests and needs
where do they find it
how they earn
where they work
which age group they are
When you have gathered this information about your audience, it will help you know what to share at a specific time. In addition, having data relevant to your audience will get more likes, comments, and shares, thus driving more traffic and engagement to your website.
Find out about what your competitors are doing.
Having competition is good because it emphasizes the fact of creativity and innovativeness. However, if you are a beginner in a specific field, don’t get comfortable. Instead, bear in mind that you have competition outside here, and if you don’t do your best, your business will be knocked out in a blink of an eye. Knowing what your competitors are doing helps to lobby into the market with new knowledge, improved products, quick delivery, and constant engagement with your clients. This is key to your business's success. If you don’t have competitors in your physical location to learn from, you can try to find those online. It is just a matter of Google searching for keywords that align with the kind of business you are running. After getting some of those competitors, you can visit and subscribe to their social media pages to see what they are doing so you can pick a leaf from them.
Make use of brand influencers.
This is a promotional tactic whereby you employ experts to drive traffic to your website. Remember, the more traffic you get, the more new website visitors subscribe to your channel and more likes, comments, and shares.
Influencers usually have a big following, so taking advantage of them could help you grow your business. For small businesses and start-ups, use micro-influencers to grow your business since influencers might charge highly and thus could affect your budget as a growing business. Micro-influencers usually have over 5000 followers. Collaborating could be an easier way of selling your business to your followers than paying vast sums of money that your business may not afford.
To figure out micro-influencers in your lane, look at the posts you are tagged to see how many have posted about your business, check out the most recommended accounts and search for familiar hashtags within your niche. Then, you can contact your influencers by using direct messages so that they can be attracted to check out if your brand matches theirs quickly. This makes advertising and marketing for your brand easier for them.
Collaborating with micro-influencers works well in cases where you also market the influencer’s content on your account to advance their brand. Additionally, you can use your products by sharing them with micro-influencers to help you post about your brand on their account. This helps create more awareness about your brand and gets more followers, especially where you are tagged in a post.
Also, you can use current devoted customers to promote your product and find new customers. You can also use company workers as brand influencers by tracking data and pinning on those crucial areas for more investment.
Find out about the best times to post
For a brand to know what is the best time to post, you have to first find out about the time when most of your audience is online. This can be done manually by cross-checking your audience to see when most of them are engaged with their social media platforms. Though, it’s said that this method is inefficient. Therefore, you can use social media analytics to find out when your most preferred audience is online.
Having found the maximum level of engagement by your audience with their social media platforms, then you can always post at that exact, assuming that most of your audience will be able to see your post at that time and engage with you. However, if you post at a different time, your post will likely disappear without being noticed by your clients. More so, be careful about the kind of content you post at certain times.
Define your audience's preferred social media channels
This is basically about knowing where to find your audience and what social media platforms they primarily engage with. According to a report on social media usage released by Statista:
In 2020, over 3.6 billion people were using social media worldwide(a global rate of 49 percent.), projected to increase to almost 4.41 billion in 2025.
On average, internet users spend 144 minutes per day on social media.
Facebook was the first social network to surpass one billion registered accounts and currently boasts approximately 2.5 billion monthly active users, making it the most popular social network worldwide.
In June 2020, the top social media apps in the Apple App Store included mobile messaging apps WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger and the ever-popular app version of Facebook.
In 2021, Social networking sites were estimated to reach 3.78 billion users. These figures are still expected to grow as mobile device usage, and social networks increasingly gain traction in previously underserved markets.
Related: 5 Digital Marketing Trends To Watch
The above statistics communicate how important it is to tap into the numbers on social media and adopt social media marketing.
Talk to your audience across all your social channels.
Don’t just post your business videos and images and then end there. Instead, please find time to reply to your audience's comments; this makes them feel valued and counted on. Most audiences don’t just go online to look but to network with others. Please don't ignore them. It could be dangerous for your business. A recent survey found that 68% of consumers would react by telling family and friends about a bad experience by posting it on a social network. And as each Facebook profile has an average of 155 friends, one negative experience can quickly reach thousands!
Related: 10 Hacks To Fast Track The Growth Of Your Business Using Instagram Therefore, if you are looking to have a successful business strategy, you have to engage with your audience on all your social media platforms. With each media platform, you are talking to totally different people. This is why it is advised to run a few social media accounts unless you are sure that you have a variety of time to do this or that there is an officer in charge of all your social media platforms.
It is in the name "social media." There is supposed to be some conversation that is expected to happen. Customer service is the direct one-on-one interaction between a consumer and a representative making a sale. Customer Service departments might not have anticipated the channels used, but these social media networks have come in handy. Taking care of customers' needs on social media is a great way to show your company cares about its customers. customers
In fact, 67% of consumers have engaged a brand’s social media for customer service needs.
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