Social Media Marketing Strategy 2021​ –

[6 Essential Steps to Follow]

Social Media Marketing is an essential part of the Digital Marketing domain which requires special attention and effort for the growth of any business.

Social Media Marketing Strategy is an outline or guide for everything you plan to do and desire to achieve using social media platforms. It guides what to do, when to do, where to do and helps you to measure whether you’re succeeding or failing in achieving your goals? And once you develop your Social Media Marketing Strategy, it’ll become easy for you to use Social Media for your business growth with a meaningful aim and you won’t be just posting randomly wondering why it isn’t working for you?

Whether you are a social media marketer or an entrepreneur, this article will help you to learn step by step how to develop your Social Media Marketing Plan?

1. Set Smart Social Media Marketing Goals:

First things first: Make sure that you know why you want to use social media for your business? What is your end goal? Asking these questions will help you to set the right goals.

Set SMART goals, which means your goals should be specific, measurable, attainable, relevant to your business, and time-bound.

Some of the main common goals used by different businesses are:

Increase Traffic and Sales: One of the most important goals for any business or brand is to increase sales and many businesses use Online Marketing to gain more traffic to their websites to generate more leads.

Additionally, brands also use social media to inform the customers about new products and sales, so that they can make purchases online or in-store.

Brand Awareness: It’s another important goal in which you want to introduce your brand to the public in order to let them know that your brand exists and also to turn them into potential customers. You can share your brand story, values, and also you can educate them about your products or services in order to make your audience know you better and as a result, gain their trust.

From texts to images to video posts, you can use any form of content to communicate with your audience.

Greater Audience Reach: Social Media offers businesses to reach a greater audience through efficient use of the targeting tool. You can select to show your product to your desired audience in order to turn them into potential customers or to tempt them to make a purchase right there.

Increase Engagement: Furthermore, brands use social media to stay connected to their clients or customers. You can use Facebook Groups as a tool to reach and engage with a broader audience or you can also use the Stories feature on Instagram to keep your audience up-to-date about your brand or business. As a result, you’ll get more engagements and trust from your customers.

2. Recognize Your Audience:

Remember that the success of your business depends largely on your customers. And, it’s very crucial to know your customers, to know their pain and goals so that you can effectively tell them how you can help them to ease their life?

Knowing your online customers will effectively impact your Social Media Marketing Plan.

The first step towards the research of your audience is to create a Buyer Persona. The buyer persona is a semi-fictional character of your potential customers. And you need to know the following data about your buyer persona:

• Age Group
• Location
• Income
• Job Title
• Language
• Interest
• etc.

You can gather all this data by observing the details of your current customers. Just have an overview of your current customer’s database and you’ll easily get the details.

And, you can also use the Social Media Analytics tool to gather all the relevant data related to your buyer persona and to understand your customer demographics on social media.

Gathering the above information will help you in better targeting. You can post and run campaigns keeping in mind your different types of customers or audiences.

3. Study Your Competitors:

You can find your competitors by a simple search on Google. Search by most common terms and keywords related to that particular industry, and then have a look at what results in Google is showing both organically or through ads.

For example, if your niche is HealthCare then search by different keywords such as “Online HealthCare Service” or “Virtual HealthCare” and then check out the available related links and trace the ones which are active on Social Media.

The purpose of all this research is not to copy your competitor’s ideas and work, rather the purpose is to see what type of content they are posting, how they are engaging with their audience, how they are managing their social media pages, what type of hashtags and keywords they are using?

All this information will help you to build your own brand strategy effectively.

4. Work on Content Marketing Strategy:

You might have heard the term “Content is King”, and they say this for a valid reason because to remain social on social media you have to engage with your audience, and sharing content is the only way of engagement.

So, that’s why you have to give extra effort to this crucial part of Online Marketing. And make sure that your content strategy should be aligned with the context of your business.

Story Story And More Stories: Remember that in order to earn your customer’s trust and support, you have to tell them your story in order to engage them emotionally with your brand. Don’t just tell about your product’s features all the time or brag about how awesome your services are, rather make a storyline to give them a reason why they should invest in your product or services? How what you are offering is providing value to them and solving their life’s issues? And don’t forget to do it in a creative way.

Try the 80/20 Rule: In order to produce valued content for your Social Media, don’t just post about your products or services but also share beneficial and relevant information on your feed. Follow the 80/20 rule which means that 80% of your posts should be in order to educate, inform and entertain your audience and 20% of content should be for promotion and generating leads.

For Example, if you have an Online Make-up Store, then alongside your product’s promotion post, also share content in the form of images, videos, or blogs that give your audience tips for creating different make-up looks, plus share tutorials on how to use the products you are selling in order to educate them? Your audience will stick to your Social Media Page if you provide valued content.

5. Timing is Important: 

Now you’ve to plan how often you should post on different social media platforms. For that decide a posting schedule for every platform.

Decide a Posting Schedule: Another important part of content sharing is to know when to share your content on different Social Media Platforms for better engagement. For example, you can schedule 1 post per day for Facebook, 1 post for Linked In, 2-3 posts for Instagram, 6-7 tweets for Twitter, 10-11 Pins for Pinterest.

Remember that you’ll not just choose randomly the timing and number of posts per day, rather you have do a little research and find out when to post and how often you should post for better reach and engagement. Know when and at what time your audience is most active on different social media platforms and try to utilize that time.

Also, keep this in mind while planning and scheduling a time that, will you or your team be available at that particular time to respond to the queries of your clients? Remember that customers want immediate response to their queries and they don’t like the delays.

Create a Content Calendar: Now, if it’s clear to you that “What you should post?” and “When you should post?” Then the next step to make your work easy is to Create a Social Media Content Calendar for better content management.

You can use excel or many other tools for creating a content calendar. With the help of Content Calendar, you can organize your data for different platforms and can also set the specified date and time for posting your content. And you don’t have to think daily about what to post today? The content is set, the timing is set and you just have to post it, that’s it.

6. Assess And Improve:

Finally, after understanding all the above steps and implementing your Social Media Marketing Strategy, now the final and most crucial step is to analyze and evaluate what is working for your business and what is not?

Social Media Marketing is all about experimenting in different ways to know what actually works for you and what not? Experiment with different posts, campaigns, and strategies, and measure the results against each.

With the help of Social Media Analytics tools, you can see the insights and measure the metrics behind your different campaigns and post content. Assess and see what is working for you best and improve your strategy with time.

With the ever-changing algorithm of Social Media and with the changes in your business, you have to keep changing your Social Media Marketing Strategy. It’s not just a one-time task, you have to keep it updated for better results.

Conclusion:

We hope that by reading the above-mentioned points, now you are clear about What is Social Media Marketing Strategy and How to develop your Social Media Marketing Strategy?

But if you still have any queries then just get in touch with us through email, phone, or text, and let us help you to create a Digital Marketing Strategy for your business.

At Operations Pro, we not just create Digital Marketing Strategy for our client’s business but also manage and give their business a thriving presence on different Digital Media platforms.