2016 made one thing clear: social media is an inevitable marketing channel for all different types of businesses. A few years ago, people were wondering why on Earth would they use social media for their business. Now, they are searching for different ways they can use social media marketing to make their business grow.
Many business owners believe that you can market on social media without a documented strategy. But, you can’t. Once you write your plans and ideas down, you are more likely to focus all your attention on them in comparison to when you have them in your head. Keep reading to learn the necessary steps you must take to create an effective social media marketing strategy.
How To Create An Effective Social Media Marketing Strategy
1. Set Measurable & Reasonable Goals
The first step in creating an effective social media marketing strategy is to map out a few measurable and reasonable goals. These goals will help you understand whether your campaign is working or not. Creating a strategy without having an end result in mind is very likely to result in wasted time and effort. What do we mean when we say measurable and reasonable goals?
Well, a measurable social media goal is the kind of goal you can track. For example, it may be the number of fans or followers, number of likes, number of Twitter retweets, website conversions from social media visitors, etc. It is also important that these goals are reasonable. For example, you can’t expect to get a million followers in five days. Or, can you?
2. Analyze Your Current Social Media Presence
Now that you have an idea what you would like to achieve with your social media marketing campaign, take a look at your current social media presence. Analyze all current strengths and weaknesses. To do this, take a look at the following things.
If you have a Facebook fan page check how many people have liked it recently. If the stats are not that good, consider doing something that will make your page more attractive and engage new visitors. If you have a Twitter account, then you may consider making a custom background and take a look at your followers. Do you give them enough to make them come back every day? When it comes to other social media channels, check how often do you post on them, do you connect with others and does your target audience find your posts interesting. Speaking of target audience…
3. Understand Your Target Audience
Before taking any action, you should try to spend some time on getting to know the people you are reaching out to. Search for their favorite brands, where they spend time online, what type of content is interesting to them. This step is crucial because the trends you identify at this stage will determine the rest of you social media marketing campaign. For example, if you notice that your target audience does not spend a lot of time on YouTube, you will not spend money on video clips no one will even look at.
4. Predict Future Obstacles
This is not an easy step, but you should give some thought about the elements that might pop up in the future. For example, how will you handle that annoying person who won’t stop leaving negative feedback on your Facebook wall? To prepare for possible obstacles, try searching Google for examples of companies that have handled social media poorly. You will definitely learn plenty from their mistakes.
5. Be Active
In order to make sure your social media marketing campaign succeeds, you need to participate daily. Posting content at least once a day will bring you more visitors and help you build a relationship with them. It may seem silly, but social media marketing really is all about “the conversation.” This may be time-consuming, but posting status updates and responding to comments and messages every day will increase the odds of your campaign succeeding.
6. Track And Evaluate Your Performance
Now this is your last step, and it may be the most important one. Tracking your social media performance is an absolute must. Compare your current results with the goals you have set for your campaign in step #1. If you find that the results are worse than the expectations, go back to the beginning of this post and try out another approach. By tracking your social media campaign regularly, you will prevent wasting resources on things that are not working out well.
