The goal of every social media marketing campaign should be to expand your audience while also keeping your loyal customers. If you make sure that you implement the right strategy, it can do wonders for your business. This article will go over both the main steps to creating a great social media marketing strategy and the benefits you will get from implementing the right approach. 

How To Create A Social Media Marketing Strategy

1. Set Realistic Goals

Planning your social media strategy starts with your goals. It’s essential to ensure that whatever goals you set are achievable and affordable. If you go overboard and try to accomplish too much at once, it will likely lead to disappointment. 

Below are some common goals that businesses of all shapes and sizes can achieve.

Increase brand awareness: This goal is all about getting your name out there. To create authentic and credible brand awareness, it’s good to avoid only publishing promotional posts or updates. Instead, you should focus on content that first emphasizes your company’s personality and values.

Generate leads and sales: Whether it’s online, in-store, or through a link on your social media, followers don’t make purchases accidentally. While you don’t want to overwhelm your audience with promotional content, posting about sales and specials isn’t a bad idea every once in a while. Also, having a link to your website on all of your social accounts can go a long way.

Grow your brand’s audience: Gaining new followers means finding ways to introduce your brand to people who haven’t heard about you before. Increasing your audience is one of the most surefire ways of increasing your conversion rates as well.

2. Research/Know Your Target Audience

Most of what you need to know about your audience to improve your social media marketing strategy is readily available. You just have to know how to find it. With the right tool, any marketer can easily research their audience. No formal market research is needed. And once you know your audience, you’ll know which platforms to focus on.

Here are some vital things to remember when choosing where you want to advertise and post. 

• Facebook and YouTube are both excellent places for ads due to their high-earning user bases.
• The top social networks when it comes to Millennials and Gen Z are Instagram and YouTube.
• Women largely outnumber men on Pinterest, which also boasts the highest average order value for social shoppers.
• LinkedIn’s user base is well-educated and career-focused for the most part, making it a great place for detailed, industry-specific content that might be more specific than what you see on Facebook or Twitter.

3. Establish Metrics and KPIs

No matter what your goals are, your social media strategy should be data-driven. The best way to ensure this is to focus on the metrics that have the most helpful information. Some of these metrics include:

• Reach: Post reach is based on the number of unique users who see your post. Do you know how much of your content actually reaches your audience’s feeds?
• Clicks: This refers to the number of times someone clicks on a post or your page. Tracking clicks per campaign are vital if you want to understand what drives curiosity or encourages your audience to buy what you’re selling.
• Engagement: This refers to the number of social interactions divided by the number of impressions. Engagement will show you how well your audience perceives you and their willingness to interact with your content or posts.
• Hashtag performance: What were your most-used hashtags? Which hashtags are most often associated with your company? Knowing the answers to these questions can help shape the focus of your content going forward.

4. Create Engaging Social Content

Your social media marketing strategy relies on your content.

At this point, you should know what kind of content and topics you should focus on based on your goals, audience, and brand. Hopefully, you feel confident in which networks to cover, too. But what about your content strategy? Try out a few of the examples below.

Stick To A Theme

Making sure that your content all has the same feel and tone will go a long way in making your brand more recognizable and consistent. 

Utilize Stories

Stories aren’t leaving social media anytime soon. Stories might seem silly to certain companies or age ranges, but they’re actually a great way to use FOMO (fear of missing out) style content. If you make your audience feel like they have to click on your story for some promotion or important information, they’re much more likely to click.

Try Short Videos

Did you know that 54% of marketers say that video content is the most useful content type when it comes to achieving social goals? Video content is arguably the most popular right now, especially with the rise of TikTok and Instagram Reels. 

5. Be Responsive And Accessible

Being responsive and accessible to your customers is arguably more important than ever for marketers.

As a brand, you’re expected to put out fresh content regularly and always be attentive to your audience. But you can’t expect customers to operate on your clock when it comes to social media. This level of responsiveness is a tall order if you’re low on resources or are part of a small team.

So, let’s look at some ideas to maximize your schedule and your time spent on social media.

Post When Engagement Is High

Typically when posting on social media, it will show you “preferred times” to post. Those are the times when your audience is the most active. These are the best times to post, but only if you have someone working. It’s important to always have a social media manager or community manager available during those times to be able to respond to customers as needed.

Respond ASAP

Your customers will always want and expect a speedy response. You absolutely cannot ignore your customers, especially if they tag you. You gain respect and trust as a brand when you’re present and responsive to your customers. 

Benefits Of Social Media Marketing

The importance of Social Media Marketing is clear. Over 97% of marketers utilize social media in their marketing strategies.

It’s shocking, then, that some businesses seem to downplay the benefits of social media marketing. In fact, surveys show that 50% of small businesses aren’t using social media to promote their brand at all.

Below are a few of the most important benefits, so you can decide on your own if you think social media marketing is worth it.

1. Improves Brand Awareness

For a lot of businesses, gaining brand recognition is one of the most important goals. Social media gives businesses the opportunity to present their brand to a large number of people.

So, sharing and posting content relevant to your products or services on social media platforms is vital to increase brand awareness. And it’s a simple fact that consumers typically prefer to buy products from brands they recognize.

What’s more, this gets your audience engaged and talking about your brand. Likes, shares, and re-posts play a big role in your recognition and reputation. 

2. Drives More Organic Traffic

If your business isn’t marketing on social media at all, then your traffic is probably mainly limited to your existing customers. Implementing a social media strategy provides the opportunity to gain new customers much more quickly since you can reach anyone outside your existing customers.

3. Higher Rank On Search Engines

There has been a debate going on for years about the SEO impact of social media. While social media doesn’t directly improve search engine rankings, Google “acknowledges” shares, retweets, and click-throughs as positive search signals.

Not to mention that pieces of “popular” content in terms of likes and shares can bring some decent referral traffic to your website. Additionally, social media posts could potentially grab the attention of an industry influencer who might write about your company and provide links so people can find you.

4. Boosts Leads And Conversions

Promoting your products or services on social media is also an easy way to increase leads and conversion rates. This is because you are advertising to people that have either chosen to follow your page or have recommended your content based on what they like.

More importantly, when a brand interacts with its audience by posting or commenting, it personifies its brand. This makes it easier for people to buy from you since it makes them feel like they are dealing with someone authentic.

People also tend to trust companies with an active social presence much more.

5. Cost-Effective

Creating a social media account and sharing engaging content is free. For most people, that’s more than enough. But if you decide to go above and beyond and invest in paid ads, your ROI will skyrocket.

This is because social platforms direct your ads toward people who are interested in what you’re offering. And most important of all, the cost for Paid Ads (PPC) like these will be relatively lower compared to other marketing strategies.

Now that you know the main steps to take to create a solid social media marketing strategy and the benefits of investing in social media marketing, it’s time to get started! 

Shift Refresh is a US-based digital marketing agency that helps businesses smash their competition and emerge as a leader in their respective industries. We are ready to help your business not only grow but thrive.

To learn more, call us at 1-888-467-3249 or visit our website https://www.shiftrefresh.com/.