How to Develop an Exceptional Social Media Strategy
digital marketing,
In all aspects of running a business, there must always be strategies kept in place. This of course also applies to your brand’s social media efforts. Leaving these in the hands of experts providing social media marketing service is often the best way to go, but you also need to have a better understanding of how it works. This will help your in-house team know more about the types of social media marketing campaigns that could contribute to the company’s greater business objectives.
Here’s how to create an effective social media strategy for your brand.
Enumerate the company’s overall goals
Rather than jumping ahead blindly into the constantly changing world of social media marketing, one must first list down the overall goals of the company. Once you’ve jotted them down it will be much easier to pinpoint which ones are more likely to be achieved through social media efforts. More importantly, it provides everyone in the team a clearer direction.
One of the most common company objectives that fall in line with social media marketing goals is driving traffic to your website to increase business. You might also consider launching campaigns to increase brand awareness, to generate leads, or even to learn more about your target market. Knowing which overall goals of your company can directly be improved through social media will increase the chances of your campaigns actually making an impact in your business.
Set measureable goals
The S.M.A.R.T. strategy applies to creating a social media strategy. Objectives must be specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-based. This keeps everyone in line with what exactly you want to accomplish within a specific time period, allowing you to track progress and better manage your time. As they say, putting a purpose to efforts begets better results.
Do a lot of research
Even experts do research on a daily basis to stay updated with new strategies and tools. For an initial social media strategy, it’s important to find which social media sites are relevant to your brand and your target market. Contrary to popular belief, brands don’t necessarily have to be present in all social media sites. There’s no point in engaging with people in a site when a significant amount of them are not potential customers. In addition, having a good understanding of the difference between each social media channel is essential to know which strategy will work best for it.
Identify where your customers spend their time online – finding out where your competition has online presence is a good place to start. While you’re stalking your competition, this is also a great time to learn from their successes and failures. Note which types of posts work and which don’t to avoid making the same mistakes.
Assign tasks and a point person
There’s a lot that goes on in maintaining social media accounts and launching strategies. The very basic essence of it includes creating images, planning and writing content, setting schedules, and replying to messages and comments. Engaging the audience can effectively be achieved through a mix of media, from articles to videos and infographics, and all these cannot realistically be shouldered by a single person. Distribute the tasks that can be disseminated so there is at least one person responsible for accomplishing each task.
In addition, there should also be a point person who oversees the strategy as a whole – their job is to monitor the quality of work being posted, make sure that schedules are being followed, check whether goals are being met, and analyse whether any adjustments should be made.
Track results
Remember the goals you set earlier? Everything and anything you do on social media should be done with reaching those goals in mind. This means that you need to track and measure the effectiveness of your brand’s social media activities.
There are two types of social media measurement: ongoing analytics and campaign-focused metrics. Ongoing analytics tracks activity over time, giving an overview of how your brand is perceived online. Campaign-focused metrics, as the name suggests, focuses more on the impact of specific marketing initiatives. These have a clear start and end, during which specific targets must be met.
Learn to adapt
It’s safe to assume that you won’t always get things right the first time. It’s simply human nature, but it’s not the end of the world. An extremely huge part of a campaign’s success depends on how well it is received, and there’s really no telling how the public will react to each one until it is launched. Seemingly brilliant marketing efforts might not be received well, while others may achieve far better results than expected; make adjustments to tactics as you see fit.
There’s a lot of trial and error involved in creating a social media strategy. However, putting a lot of thought into developing it will increase the chances of doing things right.
