How to develop a successful social media marketing strategy
- Set a budget and goals
- Identify your target audience
- Research your competitors
- Please select a social media site
- Define your social media brand
- Develop a content strategy
effective content marketing It starts with a plan. Here's how to create a social media marketing strategy in six steps.
1. Set a budget and goals
Creating a social media marketing plan should start with a review of your digital marketing budget. Determine how much time and money you can allocate to social media marketing and what goals you can achieve. There may be costs associated with promoting social posts, hiring agencies or freelancers, or assigning employees to handle internal social media campaigns. Set social media goals that support your broader business goals but are achievable given your budget.
For example, if one of your business goals is to get 10% more leads in the next calendar year, you might set a social media goal of increasing traffic to your gated landing page by 25% over the same time period. People who visit your website fill out a form and become leads (with the understanding that not everyone will do that). If you have a larger budget, you may want to increase your social media goal to 35% to reflect the increased marketing resources available for your campaign. If you're not seeing results from organic content, we recommend investing in paid LinkedIn posts, Facebook ads, or influencer marketing strategies to help you reach your goals.
2. Identify your target audience
Conduct audience research to determine the demographics of active users on each of the most popular social media platforms. Next, identify the target audience for your social media activity. Knowing who you are targeting and who is active on each platform will help you identify which platforms your business should have a presence on. For example, if your target audience consists of men between the ages of 45 and 65, you can focus your social media marketing strategy on Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram since these channels are the most popular.
3. Research your competitors
In some cases, conducting a competitive analysis can speed up the audience research process. For example, let's say your target user is a 25-45 year old housewife who is environmentally conscious and has some disposable income. You can identify competitors who are successful in your space by searching for similar brands online, researching your customers, and evaluating their social media mentions and follower counts. Next, see what social media platforms your competitors are using and whether they're receiving likes and comments on those platforms. If you see trends across multiple competitors on a particular platform, you can conclude that your target audience is particularly active on that platform.
Competitive analysis can also help you identify the type of content, brand characteristics, and pace of publication that are successful. You don't have to copy another company entirely, but researching your competitors can help you identify strategies that work for companies like yours. When creating content, you and your creative team can draw inspiration from the positive work your competitors are doing to create assets that are unique to your business.
4. Select your social media site
To choose the right platform for your social media marketing strategy, start with your audience and eliminate platforms that don't serve the target audience you've identified. Next, consider functionality, presentation, and how specific content types work on individual social media networks. For example, if you plan to sell your products, consider platforms with in-app shopping features like Facebook or Instagram. If you plan to post links to your blog posts or articles, consider platforms like Twitter and LinkedIn where you can get featured images from external links. A social media marketing strategy may also include a different combination of tactics for each individual social media platform.
5. Define your social media brand
Social media content reflects your main brand identity, but can also have slight variations in visuals, tone, and voice depending on the social channel. For example, Twitter allows for a light sarcastic tone, given that the platform is primarily for business networking, while LinkedIn's content can be more buttoned up.
Once you've established your social media brand, create brand guidelines, keeping in mind platform-specific variations. These help ensure that your social content looks consistent.
6. Develop a content strategy
Use your goals, audience research, and competitive analysis to identify key topics, post types, publishing frequency, and times of day to post on each social media platform. To create engaging content and keep your audience interested, be careful not to rely too heavily on promotional content. One general rule for an effective social media marketing strategy is that 80% of your content should entertain or inform, and 20% should directly promote your company .
For example, imagine your main goal is to increase sales of reusable water bottles. Your target audience is health and environmentally conscious, and your competitors believe they will engage more with wellness posts and video content. Your content strategy might include content about the negative environmental effects of bottled water, the health risks of single-use plastics, and positive health tips. This content may take the form of short videos, excerpts from longer blog articles, or branded infographics.
social media marketing metrics
Marketing teams can use social media metrics to evaluate campaign results and identify successful tactics so they can adjust their strategies to optimize results. Here is a list of metrics that provide valuable insights:
- arrival. The number of unique users who viewed your social media posts.
- thoughts. Number of times the post was displayed to users.
- engagement. The number of likes, comments, clicks, shares, or direct messages you receive on individual posts or on your entire account.
- Engagement rate. Percentage of reach users who engaged with a post out of all users who viewed the post. The formula to calculate this is Engagement Rate = After Engagement / After Reach.
- Amplification factor. Percentage of followers who share the post out of all followers. The formula for this calculation is: Amplification rate = post shares / total followers of the account.
- click-through rate. The percentage of people who clicked on a link within a post out of the total time the post was viewed. The formula for this calculation is: Click-through rate = number of post link clicks / number of post impressions.
- Account view. The number of people viewing your company's social media profiles.
- Viewer growth rate. A percentage measure of how fast your audience is growing. The formula is: Viewer growth rate = (net new followers over time / total followers) x 100.
- Cost per click (CPC). A measure of cost-effectiveness expressed in the amount you pay each time a post is clicked. The formula is: CPC = Ad Cost / Number of Clicks.
- Conversion speed. The percentage of people who took a desired action, such as purchasing a product or filling out a contact form. The formula is: Conversion Rate = Number of Impressions / Number of People Taking the Desired Action.
- Return on Investment (ROI). A measure of the profitability of social media marketing campaigns. The formula for this calculation is: ROI = profit attributable to the campaign / total cost of the campaign.
- Mention. The number of times users mention your company on social platforms.
- Share Social Voices (SoSV). Expresses how often your company is mentioned compared to your competitors, expressed as a percentage. The formula for this calculation is: SoSV = (number of mentions of own brand / number of mentions of competitor brand) x 100.
- Social emotions. Distribution of neutral, positive and negative sentiment towards your company. The formula is: Social Sentiment = (Total number of positive mentions – Total number of negative mentions) / Total number of mentions.
