If you’re struggling to achieve your social media business goals, you’re in the right place.
What is a Social Media Marketing Strategy?
A social media marketing strategy is a plan that outlines the content you will post and on which social media channels, your goals, and the tactics you will use to achieve them.
Brands continue to utilize social media marketing, with 33% of marketers stating that they are confident their efforts are yielding a positive return on investment for their businesses.
Social media enables brands to access cost-effective marketing. A social media marketing strategy can serve various marketing functions such as increasing traffic and sales, leveraging influencer networks, building brand awareness, attracting a shared audience, engaging with customers and prospects, and providing customer support.
You have a wide range of channels to integrate, each with its strengths and weaknesses that need to be considered.
Having a clear social media strategy will help you build a community around your brand and ultimately assist you in achieving more sales.
How to Create a Social Media Strategy
1. Define Your Goals
Clearly define what you want to achieve through your social media strategy. These goals will depend on your business, your audience, and your overall marketing strategy. Examples of social media marketing goals include increasing brand awareness, driving traffic to your website, generating leads, growing your audience, and enhancing engagement.
It’s crucial that your goals are not generic but instead focus on increasing percentages or boosting revenues. For instance, instead of setting a goal to increase traffic to your website, aim for a 5% increase in traffic each month, or reaching 10,000 site visits in a month by December.
It’s helpful to ensure that the goals you set are SMART: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound.
Your social media goals should follow the SMART framework, meaning you can easily track your goals, they’re within reach, relevant to your overall business objectives, and importantly, time-limited. This will increase the likelihood of achieving your goals.
2. Know Your Target Audience
An effective social media strategy starts with understanding your ideal customers. Building rich context around your target audience takes time, but there are steps you can take immediately that will provide lasting value.
Start by researching your target audience or examining demographic and psychographic data or visual patterns that help you shape the picture of who will buy from you. These exercises will not only influence your initial strategy but will also help you develop a voice and tone for your brand that resonates.
Here are some activities you can undertake to learn about your target audience:
- Conduct a survey: Gather quantitative data about your audience, such as age, location, job title, and key interests.
- Conduct interviews: Ask some of your best customers to share insights for qualitative data, such as values, challenges, goals, and pain points.
- Research the competition: Look at who follows your larger competitors. Identify the traits they share, the other content they follow and engage with, and any other information you can glean from their social media profiles.
- Examine support tickets: Your customer service team has valuable insights about your customers through support tickets. Often you can uncover pain points and challenges here.
- Explore your analytics: Most social media platforms have built-in analytics that provide information such as the age, location, and gender of your followers.
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Once you finish this research, you can create customer personas that match each segment of your audience. This should include demographic information such as age and location, as well as psychographic data like interests, purchasing concerns, and purchasing motivations.
You can use this information to create a picture of your audience and tailor your content to engage with them.
Conduct a Social Media Audit
Running an audit of your current social media content strategy will help you see what works and what doesn’t. It will give you a better understanding of the types of content and messaging patterns that your audience prefers, but it will also provide insight into when your audience is online and the best times to post.
Here’s how to conduct a social media audit:
- Analyze engagement: Check the analytics of each social media channel you use to identify the top-performing posts based on the number of likes, comments, and shares.
- Identify patterns: See if there are any patterns showing up in your analytics. For example, you may find that people prefer to engage with videos on your Instagram account, or that your followers are most active on weekends.
- Run audits on each channel: Each social media platform is different – what works on Facebook may not work on Instagram, and vice versa. So, conduct an audit on each channel you use.
When conducting your audit, assess the effectiveness of each piece of content that performs well in meeting your goals. For example, if followers are highly engaging with meme-style videos that aren’t related to your product, you may not be achieving the sales goals you hoped for.
Choosing the Right Platforms
A social media content audit will provide insight into the platforms that perform best according to your goals, and this will help you determine which platforms to focus your efforts on. It may be tempting to spread across many new channels that emerge, but it’s better to excel in two or three channels than to be inconsistent across six different ones.
When choosing the best social media platforms for your brand, consider:
- Where your target audience is most active?
- Your business goals and objectives.
- Which platforms are easiest to promote your products on?
- Which platforms does your content perform best on?
Once you’ve chosen the best platforms for your business, you can create a strategy for each that takes your overall goals into account. Alex McIntosh, CEO and co-founder of Thrive Natural Care, finds the channel selection easy, as the company focuses on a cohesive experience across channels.
Thrive Natural Care posts on TikTok, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, and YouTube to reach a wide audience.
Developing a Content Strategy
Design a plan for the type of content you will create and share on each social media platform you’ve chosen. The content may vary depending on the platform and the audience you’re trying to reach, so it’s important to create a strategy that encompasses all your customer personas and all your social media channels.
Defining your content mix – recurring content formats and types of posts – makes it easier to produce social content while adding rhythm to your posting schedule. This provides your audience with both variety and consistency. Otherwise, you’ll find yourself scrambling for something to post every day.
Within your content mix, you want to have ideas that you can plan ahead for, reproduce, and schedule for regular posting. For example, you might feature a customer testimonial every Tuesday and share a quote image every Wednesday and Friday.
Easy-to-create pieces can keep your social media schedule filled while you build more complex assets, like a promotional video or a blog article.
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Alex: “We are trying to focus our content plan on the right timing and value for our customers and followers. A core value of our work is “leave it better”, and this is the guiding principle for our team. This means we want our content on social media to be something that people feel comfortable with. Whether it’s a post about our efforts in regenerative agriculture in Costa Rica or a showcase of a new skincare product, we want our content on social media to be valuable to anyone who sees it.”
The content mix you develop can include: news, inspiration, education, product/promotional posts, contests and giveaways, customer/influencer features, community events, Q&A, tips and tricks, behind-the-scenes, reusing blog posts.
Your goal is to arrive at five to seven different content types to start with. Balance your content mix between post formats that you can create quickly and those that require more effort, as well as posts aimed at selling and posts that are just meant to entertain and grow your audience.
The brand Oh Snap! Pickling Co. finds the right mix of engaging content by posting a mixture of product photos, trending videos, interaction posts, and even a tarot card series on Instagram to keep customers entertained and engaged.
Developing a variety of content types will ensure you have a social media customer generation strategy that provides customers at every stage of the buying channel with the information they need.
Creating a Content Calendar
Set a schedule for when and how often you will post on each social media platform. This will help you maintain consistency and ensure a steady flow of content.
Start slow and then increase the frequency to reach a higher frequency once you develop your routine and understand what works.
You don’t want to over-post or overwhelm your audience’s feed. If you have time to post once every few days at the beginning, that’s fine. You can aim for posting once a day and then test if a higher frequency gives you better results on specific platforms.
Ultimately, you want to focus your attention where it will have the most impact and when your audience is browsing social media.
Each social media platform has a different ideal posting time depending on when their audience is most active. You’ll find that the best time to post on TikTok will be different from the best time to post on Instagram. If you’re not sure where to start, think about when people browse social media: in the morning, during lunch, while commuting, or before bed.
You’ll discover the best posting times for your specific audience through trial and error. Popular posting times will also vary depending on seasons and other variables.
What’s most important is to schedule your posts in advance, at least for a week. Do this in one sitting, dedicating a few hours at a time so that you can focus on other things while your social media posting schedule works in the background. You can use an automated scheduling tool to upload social media posts for the week.
Maria from Truly Free says: “I love to start by setting a list of goals for each platform. What do I want my audience to think after reading this post? Do I need them to take action? How can I make that happen? Then, once I have some ideas in mind and know what my goal is for each platform, I’ll know how to execute those goals on each platform.”
Engaging with Your Audience
Develop strategies to actively engage with your audience, respond to comments and messages, and foster a sense of community. No one wants to feel like they’re shouting into the void, so make an effort to start discussions and encourage interaction around your content. Alex McIntosh from Thrive Natural Care says that engaging with their audience is a higher priority for the brand.
Here’s
Some ways you can interact with your audience:
- Reposting content: Share customer photos and reviews on your own accounts (remember to credit the original creator).
- Asking questions: Invite discussion by posing a question.
- Conducting polls: All platforms like Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook have polling features you can use to encourage interaction and learn more about your customers at the same time.
- Joining trends: Participate in the latest TikTok trends or trending hashtags on other platforms – just make sure they are relevant to your brand and audience.
- Responding to comments: Engage with your audience by replying to the comments they leave on your content.
The brand Bubble Skincare does a great job of engaging with its followers. They regularly respond to fans and show appreciation for purchases and comments.
Leveraging Influencer Marketing
You might consider collaborating with influencers relevant to your industry or niche. They can help you expand your reach, increase brand awareness, and boost engagement.
Here’s how to get started with influencer marketing:
- Finding relevant influencers: Use apps like Shopify Collabs to find influencers who have an audience in your niche. Look at the platform they are popular on and how that affects your brand.
- Thinking about content: Work together to come up with content ideas that will resonate with their audience. Make sure it’s relevant to your brand and products as well.
- Tracking and adjusting: Measure what works and what doesn’t to understand the content you can collaborate on in the future.
You don’t need to hire influencers with millions of followers to expand your brand. The skincare brand Plenaire works with niche and micro-influencers to reach a shared engaged audience. This not only helps widen your audience but builds trust in your brand and encourages sales at a relatively low cost.
Monitoring and Analyzing Performance
Use social media analytics tools to track the performance of your content and campaigns and monitor their effectiveness.
Here are some metrics to keep an eye on:
- Reach: The number of people who see your posts on social media.
- Engagement: The number of people who like, comment, and share your posts.
- Click-through rate: The number of people who click from your social media content to your website or product pages.
- Conversions: The number of people who make a purchase after seeing a social media post.
The metrics you track will depend on your goals. For example, if your goal is to increase website traffic, you should closely monitor click-through rates, but if you want to boost sales, then conversions are the metric you should focus on.
Monitoring your metrics allows you to make small changes to your strategy instead of making drastic changes. You can be active in the short term and use that information to guide future campaigns.
Iterate and Improve
Evaluate and refine your social media marketing strategy based on the insights and data you gather. Adapt your approach based on what works best for your audience and aligns with your goals.
Your goal now is to get a positive return on the time, money, and effort you invest in marketing your business on social media. This requires taking thoughtful actions.
A social media strategy is your attack plan. But in an area like social media that changes day by day – with algorithm updates and an audience always ready for something new – you need to stay flexible and keep in touch with it.
It’s important to have goals to track and check regularly to see what works. Use that information to develop content ideas, build your content schedule, and grow your audience.
Maria says: “We believe in putting our members first and providing them with the content they want and need. To do this, we conducted a survey to gather feedback on the types of content our members were interested in seeing from us. Based on the responses we received, we created a social media marketing campaign focused on how to clean homes using Truly Free products. This campaign provided our members with valuable tips and ideas, showcasing the benefits of our products in an engaging and helpful way.”
Template
Social Media Strategy
Are you ready to start your social media strategy? These free customizable templates provide you with tools to plan and execute a strategy that connects you with your target audience while keeping your content schedule organized.
Download them now and start seeing results.
Get a Better Return on Investment with Social Media
Developing a social media marketing strategy will help you reach your audience with the intent to engage on platforms like Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and TikTok. It will help you identify the type of content your audience loves to see and what they share the most. Ultimately, this strategy will help you grow your audience, sell more products, and increase revenue.
Illustration by Elena Xausa
Frequently Asked Questions About Social Media Marketing Strategy
What is a social media marketing strategy?
A social media marketing strategy is a plan for the content you will post on social media, the platforms you will post on, and how often you will post. Your social media marketing tactics should align with your overall business goals.
How can I create a social media marketing strategy?
Define your goals, understand your target audience, conduct an audit of your current social media content, choose the right platforms, set your content strategy, create a content calendar, engage with your audience, and leverage social
Source: https://www.shopify.com/ca/blog/social-media-marketing-strategy
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