Effective Social Media Marketing Strategy

Social media marketing is an important part of a comprehensive marketing strategy. Having a good understanding of how it works will help a business create more engagement with their brand and hopefully produce more sales. Unfortunately, a large number of business owners aren’t sure how to create a strategy that allows them to tackle this area of digital marketing.  

Creating Goals For Social Media Marketing
The first step is to set some objectives and goals. Is a campaign going to be for purchases, leads, followers or retweets? For example, a pet grooming company might create a strategy like this: “For our Instagram account, we’ll share images that showcase the groomed dogs that our clients bring in. We’ll post five images each week. Our goal is to get at least 30 likes and 10 comments on each image.”

Conducting An Audit
If a business is already active on a few social media platforms, they should conduct an audit of the current activity. Is each network complete with a bio, images and URL? Is the presence of the business keeping up with competitors? Is activity sparse or updated on a regular basis? It’s best to maximize a presence on one channel and not try to show up on multiple networks if there isn’t time to keep them updated. An audit will indicate which accounts need to be kept and updated or deleted.

Narrowing Down Demographics
To be successful, demographics should be narrowed down to create an ideal customer, which would include, age, gender, location, interests, income, and pain points. A business should work to solve the pain points that are aggravating their target market and ideal customer.

Creating A Mission Statement
In the next step, a social media mission statement should be created. For example, a dog grooming company could write, “we’ll use Facebook to focus on connecting with other dog owners who would like to have their dogs pampered.”

Creating Engaging Content
Content marketing should be used to create a fantastic online social presence and build a brand. This may include images, videos, blog posts, and company updates. A posting schedule should be created and decisions made regarding the types of content that will be published. It helps to have a good mix of content that doesn’t just try to create sales. Adding educational material and how-tos will help build engagement.

Track And Optimize Each Account
The last step is to analyze progress by tracking each account and seeing what works and what doesn’t. Most social media platforms have their own analytical tools, but a business can also get a more comprehensive look at their analytics by using a paid tool like Hootsuite.