How to develop an effective social media marketing strategy

Social media marketing is one of the growing fields these days, and it's not because of the trends we've set for ourselves, but the way people are perceiving brands. 

Social media marketers are charging millions of dollars per hour to bring the best results on the platform, and overhaul the brand, but do you know what's more exciting? 

The deciding process where you've to come up with some strategies and make it happen! In a landscape of more competition, content and networks, an amazing social media marketing strategy will help you stand out from the rest and bring more traffic. 

So, are you looking for ways to fine-tune your social media marketing strategy to overhaul the brand in 2022? 

Great, sounds like a plan! We are here to help you out with it…

We will put together all the amazing points to create a social media marketing strategy that will help you build your brand image from the scratch.

But remember, you have to set a priority checklist to decide where you stand, and what you want in the coming few years… 

Let's get started.

The Top 5 Remarkable Social Media Marketing Strategy Tricks & Tips

In this section we will learn about the ways through which you can develop an effective social media marketing strategy for escalating your brand. 

1. Set up goals that add value to your business

The first and most important step is to set up goals for your brand. Ask one question from you;

" What do you want as a result of your social media?"

There will be different answers to this question, and your job is to identify the goal so that you can align yourself with it. 

According to research conducted by Sprout Social Index in 2021,

"The most common goals for social activities are increasing brand awareness (58%) and increasing community engagement (41%). "

So, whether you plan to build a larger amount of community, or stick with the targeted niche, you will require some time to build a social media platform where everyone awaits for the next post. 

Your goal should define how you see your social media platforms, and how much effort you require as a way to pull that goal up! It requires teamwork, strategic planning, togetherness, and what else! 

• Increasing brand awareness

This means you have to make your audience aware of the brand. Create authentic and lasting brand awareness. Avoid  using messy things that might confuse the audience. Instead of wasting time on the placement, think more towards strategizing elements, and make people aware of the brand through a campaign.

• Generate leads and sales 

No matter if it's online, or in-store, you have to improve your social media marketing strategies to pull more audience, and get leads ultimately. 

Running campaigns on the platforms would be a great source of generating leads, and then the salesperson has to convert those into sales.

Set your goals, are you running a campaign for leads, or for likes. Once you get the answer, you are all set to get started with marketing.

• Growing the brand audience

And lastly, for your audience spectrum bring more people to the social media platforms. Find ways through which you get more likes, and shares from your target audience. 

• Boost community management

You don't have to hire someone else to do the social media marketing, or community marketing altogether. It's the job of the marketer to analyze and then decide which platform is best for managing the community. 

There are different platforms available right now, like Reddit, and Quora, where you can post questions and maintain engagement on the go. Infact, you can post questions with links to blogs in it, and it's naturally boosted among the people who will engage on that question.

• Drive traffic to the website organically

And lastly, you should know the trick to generate traffic to the website through social media posting. You can post pictures, and short videos with a website link in the caption that will help in bringing traffic to the website organically. 

However, if you don't succeed in getting organic traffic through websites, then you can choose paid campaigns and bring more leads plus traffic.

A solid combination of these few goal sets will support you in building a transparent social media marketing strategy which will be easy to tackle and implement. Even if you're in doubt, then go for A/B testing to check the viability of the campaign and analyze the results for better throughput.

2. Take some time to study your target audience

If you don't have relevant information regarding your target audience, and you've reached a point where the final decision has to be made then, you're missing out on something very important. 

No matter if you have done things based on assumptions, but while making social media marketing strategies, you need to analyze your target audience wisely.

You know, only 55% of the total marketers use social media data to understand the audience, and make use of this critical data for building more visible results. Most of you must think that it's not a tough task; however, it's important to know your audience first before you start with your marketing strategies.

Here are some of the essential points which you should know before building social media marketing strategies;

1. Facebook and YouTube are two of the most important and prime places from where you can grab information regarding the audience and generate leads. 
2. Youngsters are seen more on YouTube, and Instagram as compared to any other platform. So, it's important to use these platforms for better results.
3. You know, women are seen using Pinterest the most as compared to other platforms because of the trends available there. 
4. LinkedIn has a vast number of educated audiences, and you can run advertisements to analyze the audience and see how much you can filter them for a better output. 

Don't spend too much time on research; your audience is already active on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and other platforms. You only have to make some choices correctly and then see the results yourself.

3. Establish your brand KPI and Quality Metrics

In the past two points, we discussed the initial steps that lay the foundation of social media marketing. However, once you're done with the strategizing part, you've created your own KPIs and Quality Metrics because that's how you will measure where you stand and how much good your campaigns have performed overall. 

Confused about which social media marketing metrics we're talking about? No worries, we are here with a detailed discussion for you! 

1. Reach

With every post, you share on the social media platform, it's important to get maximum reach; otherwise there is no use of those posts. If the audience you're targeting reacts to the posts, then consider your strategy as a winning element; otherwise, it's a complete inverse. You've got to be very vigilant while planning the social media calendar. 

1. Likes

Suppose you posted three posts in a row, and when you check the likes there are none, or maybe 2 or 3. And those three are from the local market, which means your company mates, so is it worth it? Of course not! You have to work really hard to bring likes through organic means; otherwise there is no use of any creative posts or social copies.

1. Shares

On the third, we have another important metric for checking the credibility of any social media marketing strategy, that is, the number of shares you're getting on each post shared. If your post is bringing a high number of shares on the posts then you're doing good, otherwise restructure your strategies.

1. Clicks

You can see the number of clicks available on the post shared, and it's only visible to the admins. It's the tracking of the number of clicks your post has generated in a desired time.

1. Engagement

You can check the engagement of the post through different metrics, like whenever you share a social media post and the number of likes and shares you get on that shows how much engagement you've captured through it.

1. Hashtag performance

Hashtags also help a lot in bringing audience, likes, shares, altogether engagement to social media posts. If you use relevant hashtags with volume, then you can easily identify where you stand.

You know, an effective social media marketing strategy is rooted in numbers, not words. It's said, the more positive numbers you have in total , aligns you with your original goal.

4. Curate engaging content on social media platforms

Without any doubt, your social media marketing strategy depends on the content you put on the social media posts backed with creative social copies.

At this stage, you should have a pretty good idea of your goals, and what you want to publish on different social media marketing platforms. Try to maintain synchronization, and post-similar content on all the platforms.

Once you succeed in maintaining synchronization you will feel proud of your strategies and gradually you will get more engagements. 

But what about the content ideas? Here you go with a list;

• Stories and time-engaging posts

No one has enough time to spend on social media platforms, and check their posts. Stories are one of the easiest ways of connecting with people, and seeing what's happening in their lives. 

Creating stories content is also very easy as compared to any other platform, and it's one of the easiest ways possible to engage people and get a like over the stories. 

You can not post behind-the-scenes snippets in a separate post, but you can share a story out of it. It will definitely excite the audience, and they would love to spend time watching the stories of leading brands to see what's happening in their lives overall. 

• Short explanatory videos

54% of marketers state that video content is the most valuable content, and now people are moving towards content instead of choosing any other element. Social videos are playing a great role in bringing engagement to platforms like Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and a lot more!

5. Choose the right time to boost your social presence 

Timeliness is very important, and when marketers spend time on choosing the right time for posting then, they are connecting with the audience and that's the most amazing part of social media marketing.

Now that you're done with the initial and bottom steps, the last step is to decide at what time you will share the content on the social media platforms. 

Some people choose day time, while some go for night. However, it depends entirely on the audience you're targeting and the region they live in. 

But, again, you can't always expect your audience to rotate according to your time! 

Let's have a look at some of the time-related metrics you should know for posting at the most relevant time. 

1. You might see some people recommending you to post late in the evening. but if your team isn't there, to communicate against the queries posted by the audience, then what's the advantage of preferred time? Your team should be there on their toes to respond to queries posted by the people. 
2. Your customers want a steady response, if you're a minute late in responding to them then, there is a certainty that they might move towards someone else! In fact, according to research, 47% of companies believe that strong customer service defines a best-in-class brand on social platforms. 

Phew, and we're done for the day! 

Wrapping Up | Effective Social Media Marketing Strategy

This guide has highlighted almost most of the points you should consider while creating an effective social media marketing strategy for your brand.

It's important to put together all the elements, and then do your research; otherwise, you will miss out on something very important, which is again a big drawback! 

If you set all the actionable points in a bracket, and address each one of them together, then you will stay ahead of the curve regarding social media marketing strategy.

Like our blog? Don't worry, we'll be back with some other exciting topics next week for you!