The world is progressing at an unprecedented speed. A few years ago, social media was just an online space with no relevance and connection to business. Today, if you dare ignore social media marketing in your marketing plans, you will sit there and watch your competitors flourish and steal your customers with a smirk on their face.
There are over 4 billion Internet users today. Out of the 4 Billion, over 3 Billion of them are active social media users across platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest users, LinkedIn, WeChat, SnapChat and many more in other platforms. It is important to have a concrete plan on how to reach out to potential customers through social media.
Note, traditionally, just having some presence on social media would suffice as marketing. Today, you need to do more. You need to be more.
Your Social Media Marketing Strategy needs to ensure that it gets your followers’ Attention, Interest, Desire to interact with you and your brand and eventually take an Action.
Here are Three Simple Steps for Your Social Media Strategy
1. Set Goals
Like any other marketing endeavor you do for your business, you need to have SMART goals laid down for your SMM strategy. Additionally, you need to write down these goals to ensure that they are stable.
Some of the goals that you should ensure to write down are:
I. Increasing brand awareness
Ii. Increasing engagement across platforms
Iii. Increasing the social media conversion rate
Iv. Creating loyal customers
2. Research the Social media Landscape
Next, just like you conduct market research before you launch a new product or service, you need to perform a social media landscape research.
It will help you answer the following questions:
● Which social media platforms are more populated with my target clients?
● Which platforms are congruent with my marketing efforts?
● How are my competitors doing across their social media platforms?
● Is there something that my competitors are doing that I can implement or improve on?
The last two questions about the competition are significant. Do an in-depth analysis of what your competitors are doing. Alternatively, you can study the big brands like Amazon and Uber and see how they handle their social media platforms.
As you might have already noticed, taking on Social Media Marketing is not just a part-time gig. It should be something that you do actively. It involves daily research and analysis of the metrics, developing content, posting, interacting with followers and so much more. It is therefore advisable to have an individual who deals explicitly with your social media platforms. Even if you are limited on funds or have bad credit, there are options out there. Check out this post to look over options: https://www.crediful.com/credit-cards-for-bad-credit/. Regardless, you can still get relatively affordable social media assistants on sites like Fiverr and Upwork and Facebook groups for Social media managers.
3. Valuable content
And finally, we talk about content. Content will always be king. Al the previous efforts were targeted to help you curate the best content for your followers.
It is important to note that content is also evolving. Traditionally, there were very few videos online. In 2018, videos are taking over. YouTube is becoming the go-to platform for most users as they seek to interact with video content.
All the other platforms are also evolving to include videos as part of their content. Facebook now has Facebook live where you can record your live videos and let your followers into your day to day life. Instagram also has Instagram stories and Instagram TV.
Therefore, as you decide on how to use content, it is essential to make sure that your social media team strategies on how to incorporate video as part of your content.
High-quality pictures and blogs are also still very relevant. Blogs are a big part of your online content. Therefore, it would help if you had your team come up with a marketing strategy that leverages on blogs that are valuable to your readers. Content that will educate and entertain your readers.
You can leverage on the social media platforms to share your blogs and encourage your followers to share the content across their social media platforms. This increases your visibility.
Finally, hopefully, you found out when your followers are most active on social media when doing the research. If you did, then this is the time to ensure that you capitalize on those time to get the maximum engagement.
4. Track and Improve
Marketing is trying out a strategy, finding out what works and repeating it for better results while eliminating what doesn’t work.
Likewise, always track how your social media efforts are working. Track metrics such as reach, engagement, and so on. These will inform you of how your efforts are doing. If you find that doing a particular strategy doesn’t work, for example, if you find that Gif doesn’t elicit as much interaction with your followers, do not insist on doing it.
Only do what works and leave the rest.
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