Do you want to engage your audience and increase your social media visibility? Our social media strategy will outline how to make your business or brand more visible, increase traffic, and find new customers. This marketing plan includes clear goals, tactics, and a dedicated timeline. Produced by a top web marketing company!
The best way to promote your business is to do it yourself. Using social media helps build a corporate identity and brand recognition, but with all the different platforms available, finding the time and resources to manage them all can be tricky. Our social media strategy plan will help you manage your brand across multiple platforms more efficiently than ever before.
Smart Social Media Marketing Strategies
If you do any or all of the following, it will be nearly impossible for you to miss the mark on social media. Here are 10 strategies that will help you grow your following, drum up engagement, and rake in more sales.
1. Educate Your Audience
Regardless of what your goals are, educating your audience is always a smart route to take. If you provide valuable information and/or practical advice, people will look to you as an authority and, in time, may become loyal customers.
You can either educate your followers directly on social media or by using your accounts to direct them to educational resources such as blog posts, white papers, and webinars.
2. Choose Stories > Promotion
Taking the educational approach means doing more teaching than selling. Storytelling isn’t much different and, often, it can double as an educational tool.
However, the power of storytelling doesn’t always lie in teaching people things they didn’t know. Instead, it’s often about bringing to life relatable characters and situations (or at least characters and situations that evoke emotional responses).
Since much of our decision-making is feeling-based, stories that push emotional triggers tend to do a better job of promoting action than constant self-promotion.
3. Produce Diversified Content Types
It can be easy to find yourself only posting pictures on Instagram, only posting short tweets to Twitter, and so on. Yet, on most popular social media platforms, you can post other forms of content including blog posts, infographics, threads, and videos. Why diversify the kinds of content you share, though?
For one thing, producing the same content type endlessly can bore your audience. For another, your target audience (or subsets of it) may not respond as enthusiastically to one type of content as they do to another.
So break up the monotony by creating and sharing various kinds of content. You’ll learn a ton about what your audience wants from you and be able to keep them engaged long-term.
How to create a social media marketing strategy in 9 steps
Step 1. Choose social media marketing goals that align to business objectives
Set S.M.A.R.T. goals
The first step to creating a winning strategy is to establish your objectives and goals. Without goals, you have no way to measure success and return on investment (ROI).
Each of your goals should be:
- Specific
- Measurable
- Attainable
- Relevant
- Time-bound
This is the S.M.A.R.T. goal framework. It will guide your actions and ensure they lead to real business results.
Here’s an example of a S.M.A.R.T. goal:
“We will use Twitter for customer support and lower our average response rate to under two hours by the end of the quarter.”
Track meaningful metrics
Vanity metrics like number of followers and likes are easy to track, but it’s hard to prove their real value. Instead, focus on things like engagement, click-through, and conversion rates.
You may want to track different goals for different social media networks, or even different uses for each network.
For example, if you use LinkedIn to drive traffic to your website, you would measure click-throughs. If Instagram is for brand awareness, you might track the number of Instagram Story views. And if you advertise on Facebook, cost-per-click (CPC) is a common success metric.
Social media goals should align with your overall marketing objectives. This makes it easier to show the value of your work and secure buy-in from your boss.
Start developing a successful social media marketing plan by writing down at least three goals for social media.
Step 2. Learn everything you can about your audience
Create audience personas
Knowing who your audience is and what they want to see on social media is key. That way you can create content that they will like, comment on, and share. It’s also critical if you want to turn social media followers into customers for your business.
When it comes to your target customer, you should know things like:
- Age
- Location
- average income
- Typical job title or industry
- Interests
- etc.
Get to know your fans, followers, and customers as real people with real wants and needs, and you will know how to target and engage them on social media.
Gather data
Don’t make assumptions. Think Facebook is a better network for reaching Baby Boomers than Millennials? Well, the numbers show that Facebook’s largest age demographic is actually 30-49.
Social media analytics can also provide a ton of valuable information about who your followers are, where they live, and how they interact with your brand on social media. These insights allow you to refine your strategy and better target your audience.
Jugnoo, an Uber-like service for auto-rickshaws in India, used Facebook Analytics to learn that 90% of their users who referred other customers were between 18- and 34-years-old, and 65% of that group was using Android. They used that information to target their ads, resulting in a 40% lower cost per referral.
Step 3. Get to know your competition
Odds are your competitors are already using social media, and that means you can learn from what they’re doing.
Conduct a competitive analysis
A competitive analysis allows you to understand who the competition is and what they’re doing well (and not so well). You’ll get a good sense of what’s expected in your industry, which will help you set social media targets of your own.
It will also help you spot opportunities.
Maybe one of your competitors is dominant on Facebook, for example, but has put little effort into Twitter or Instagram. You might want to focus on the networks where your audience is underserved, rather than trying to win fans away from a dominant player.
Use social media listening
Social listening is another way to keep an eye on your competitors.
Do searches of the competition’s company name, account handles, and other relevant keywords on social media. Find out what they’re sharing and what other people are saying about them.
Pro tip: Use a social media management tool like Hootsuite to set up listening streams to monitor relevant keywords and accounts in real-time.
As you track, you may notice shifts in the way channels are used. Or, you might spot a specific post or campaign that really hits the mark—or totally bombs.
Use this kind of intel to inform your own social media marketing strategy.
Building your social media marketing strategy for 2022
Set goals that make sense for your business
Let’s kick things off with a quick question:
“What do you want from social media, anyway?”
Social media strategy planning starts with your goals.
According to the 2021 Sprout Social Index™, the most common goals for social are increasing brand awareness (58%) and increasing community engagement (41%). Whether you want to build a larger following or a more active community, taking the time to define your social goals is the first step to reaching them.
Either way, your goals will define your social media marketing strategy and how much time and energy you’ll need to dedicate to your campaigns.
Sample social media goals for 2022 and beyond
What really matters is that you set realistic social media goals.
Emphasis on “realistic,” by the way. We recommend tackling smaller objectives that allow you to scale your social efforts in a way that’s both reasonable and affordable.
Below are some sample goals that businesses of all shapes and sizes can pursue.
Increase brand awareness. This means getting your name out there. To create authentic and lasting brand awareness, avoid solely publishing promotional messages. Instead, focus on content that emphasizes your personality and values first.
Generate leads and sales. Whether online, in-store or directly through your social profiles, followers don’t make purchases by accident. For example, are you about alerting customers about new products and promos? Are you integrating your product catalog into your social profiles? Are you running exclusive deals for followers?
Grow your brand’s audience. Bringing new followers into the fold means finding ways to introduce your brand to folks who haven’t heard of you before.
Growing your audience also means discovering conversations around your business and industry that matter the most. Digging through your social channels is nearly impossible without monitoring or listening for specific keywords, phrases or hashtags. Having a pulse on these conversations helps you expand your core audience (and reach adjacent audiences) much faster.
Boost community engagement. Index data shows that 46% of consumers think brands that engage their audience are best in class on social, so it pays to explore new ways to grab the attention of your current followers. This means experimenting with messaging and content. For example, does your brand promote user-generated content and hashtags?
Even something as simple as asking a question can increase your engagement rate. Your customers can be your best cheerleaders, but only if you’re giving them something to do.
Drive traffic to your site. Simple enough. If you’re laser-focused on generating leads or traffic to your website, social media can make it happen. Whether through promotional posts or social ads, keeping an eye on conversions and URL clicks can help you better determine your ROI from social media.
Any combination of these goals is fair game and can help you better understand which networks to tackle, too. When in doubt, keep your social media marketing strategy simple rather than complicating it with too many objectives that might distract you. Pick one or two and rally your team around them.
Take time to research your target audience
Making assumptions is bad news for marketers.
Only 55% of marketers use social data to better understand their target audience, making it a huge opportunity for both leaders and practitioners. Much of what you need to know about your audience to influence your social media marketing strategy is already available. You just have to know where to look.
With the right tool, marketers can quickly research their audience. No formal market research or data science chops necessary.
Remember: different platforms attract different audiences
Take today’s social media demographics, for example. These numbers speak directly to which networks your brand should approach and what types of content to publish. Here are some key takeaways for your 2022 social media marketing strategy:
- Facebook and YouTube are both prime places for ads due in part to their high-earning user bases.
- The top social networks among Millennials and Gen Z are Instagram and YouTube, signaling the strength of bold, eye-popping content that oozes with personality.
- Women vastly outnumber men on Pinterest, which is noted to boast the highest average order value for social shoppers.
- LinkedIn’s user base is well-educated, making it a hub for in-depth, industry-specific content that might be more niche than what you see on Facebook or Twitter.
Don’t spread yourself too thin. Instead, focus on networks where your core audience is already active.
Do your homework on your existing social media audience
Although the demographic data above gives you insight into each channel, what about your own customers? Further analysis needs to be done before you can determine what your real-world social customers actually look like.
That’s why many brands use a social media dashboard that provides an overview of who’s following you and how they interact with you on each channel.
Sprout’s analytics dashboard puts your audience demographics front and center. It also highlights which social networks are seeing the most activity, helping you ensure you spend your time on the right networks.
With Sprout’s Group Report, you can view Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and Pinterest data side-by-side in a customizable format that’s exportable by date range and profile.
There’s plenty of other sources of valuable audience data to supplement your social media insights. This includes your Google and email analytics, your CRM, your customer service platform or even your best-selling products.
All of the above will ultimately influence everything from your marketing messaging to how you’ll approach customer service or social commerce.
Conclusion
When it comes to social media strategy, a lot can be said about “buy and sell” techniques on both Facebook and Twitter. Tracking likes, viewers and fans are great for measuring a social media strategy’s progress. However, there is so much more that goes into creating a successful Facebook marketing campaign. Download this free report to learn more about the key to driving traffic using social media strategy