A solid social media strategy has become increasingly vital with around 4.8 billion social media users worldwide - representing almost 60% of the global population.
Social media is highly cost-effective and offers a broad reach, when compared to traditional platforms.
Contrary to popular belief, you don't need a large budget to build a significant audience on social media, which is why it has become such a popular marketing tool.
Social media marketing refers to using social media platforms to promote your brand and sell your products or services. These platforms include popular sites like LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, and X (Twitter).
A well-defined social media strategy is a crucial component of modern digital marketing, as it can help increase brand awareness, drive website traffic, and generate leads.
Overview of an Effective Social Media Strategy
An effective social media strategy or plan should consider several key components and objectives. These include identifying your target audience, selecting the right social media platforms to focus on, creating engaging content, and measuring your success through analytics.
Identifying your target audience is crucial because it helps you tailor your content to their interests and needs, increasing the likelihood that they will engage with it. Choosing the right social media platforms to focus on is also essential, as each platform has its unique strengths and weaknesses. For example, LinkedIn is great for B2B marketing, while Instagram is ideal for visual content.
Creating engaging content is critical to capturing your audience's attention and keeping them interested. This can include a variety of content formats, such as images, videos, blog posts, and more. Finally, measuring your success through analytics is crucial to understanding what's working and not, so you can make adjustments as needed.
Overall, a well-thought-out social media strategy can be a powerful tool for growing your business and reaching new customers. A solid social media strategy can help businesses of any size establish their brand identity, connect with their target audience, and achieve their marketing goals. While some may believe that having a large marketing budget is necessary to build an audience and see results on social media, a successful social media strategy is not necessarily dependent on budget.
Instead, businesses can focus on developing a strategy that suits their unique needs and goals. This may include creating engaging content, utilising targeted advertising, and maintaining an active social media presence. Overall, a well-planned and executed social media strategy can help businesses to establish and grow their online presence, increase engagement with their audience, and drive measurable results.
Defining Social Media Strategy
A social media strategy is a written plan outlining your objectives on social media platforms. It includes your actions to achieve these goals and the measurements you will use to track your progress. Your social media marketing strategy should outline specific goals for all current and future accounts that align with your overarching digital marketing strategy. This involves strategically planning and executing social media activities to enhance brand presence and engagement.
Key benefits of having a social media strategy include:
- Increased brand awareness
- Enhance targeting across audiences
- Direct and increase web traffic
- Personalise content
- Generating higher quality leads
- Data you can analyse and measure
Creating a strategy will help you achieve your business goals and drive customer engagement. Another critical element of successfully selling on social media is establishing brand trust so users feel comfortable purchasing your products or services. Emphasising the sharing of customer reviews, testimonials, user-generated content, and product data is important, as is focusing on channels with the highest return on investment.
Components of a Social Media Strategy
A well-defined social media strategy is crucial for success in this field. With clear goals and a roadmap, starting well and achieving meaningful goals is easier. A comprehensive social media strategy should include several essential components.
Goals
Goal setting and research are highly foundational to a robust strategy. They start with establishing the goals you will work towards. SMART goals are usually important here (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound).
Competitor Research
Competitor research is also essential. Researching the competition can teach you what works and what doesn’t or inspire you when you run into creative blocks. Try to get into your competitor’s mindset. Creating a well-defined content strategy is a fundamental step in any successful social media campaign. It involves a deep understanding of your target audience, and an informed content strategy lays a robust foundation for delivering valuable content.
Key Metrics
Once you have an idea of your average traffic and post-performance, it's good to set goals for key metrics and keep a scorecard to measure your progress. It's essential to track your impressions, representing the number of times your content is displayed on a user's screen. Additionally, it's crucial to monitor the social sentiment surrounding your content.
Social Media Listening
A crucial aspect of a successful social media strategy is social media listening and engaging with your audience. Failing to do so means creating a business strategy with limited information and missing out on valuable insights you can utilise. It's best to start by creating audience personas, collecting real-world data, and researching your competition. The critical steps to building a thriving social media strategy include:
- Establish clear goals for your business.
- Conduct thorough research on your target audience.
- Analyse your competitors.
- Select the appropriate social media platforms.
- Plan your content accordingly.
A social media strategy is a roadmap outlining how to make the most of the social media platforms you opt to use to achieve specific goals and it should also:
- Identify your target audience
- Specify the types of content you will create
- Focus on specific platforms rather than all of them
- Detail how often you’ll post
- Include guidance about engaging with your community
A social media strategy helps you build a solid online presence whilst ensuring social media efforts align with business goals.
Developing a Social Media Plan
Define Objectives
Before starting social media marketing, clearly defining the objectives or goals is essential. These objectives should be in line with overall business goals. Typical objectives include increasing brand awareness, driving website traffic, generating leads or sales, enhancing customer engagement, and showcasing expertise.
Identify Target Audience
Gain a deeper understanding of your target audience's demographics, interests, behaviours, and preferences to guide your content creation and platform selection. Use in-app or third-party analysis tools to analyse your audience and post-performance.
Select Platforms
It’s crucial to choose the social media platforms most relevant to your:
- Organisation
- Industry
- Objectives
- Target audience
Create a Content Strategy
Explore relevant themes and develop an appropriate strategy that strongly resonates with the audience and aligns with the brand which determines the type of content (and develop a content calendar).
Establish Success Metrics
Define success metrics (or KPIs) to measure the success of your social media efforts, such as engagement rate, reach or sentiment analysis.
Monitor and Optimise
Monitoring and analysing social media against established KPIs is crucial to track performance accurately.
Implementing Social Media Campaigns
Messaging and tone of voice guidelines are essential to building your brand identity and maintaining consistency across social media. It’s important to deeply understand your brand’s values/mission/personality, and target audience.
It's essential to identify key messages needed to convey through social channels, with paid and organic approaches equally crucial to implementing social media campaigns. Tailoring the message to fit the chosen platform while promoting it across multiple platforms is necessary. By consistently sharing the same message across your campaign, your followers will hear the same information repeatedly allowing for clear retention of your brand message. It's also crucial to create content for the audience you want - not just the one you already have. Of course, algorithms display content to people who already follow you. However, the algorithms show content to people who do not follow you (yet).
Organic vs Paid
Examples of organic social media activities include:
- Posting content regularly without boosting or sponsoring posts.
- Encouraging employees to share company content with personal networks (this is also known as employee advocacy).
- Responding to comments and direct messages from followers in a timely and genuine manner.
- Sharing user-generated content and fostering community engagement and involvement.
Organic social establishes brand personality and voice, builds relationships through sharing informative, entertaining, and inspiring content, engages customers at every stage of the buying journey, and supports customers with customer service. In summary, an organic social media strategy nurtures relationships with customers/audiences. It helps you establish and grow your brand’s presence where people are already, support and retain customers you already have, and convert new customers by showing them what you’re about.
Working with Influencers
Social media campaigns have become an essential part of marketing strategies. With their significant reach, ability to directly engage with followers and customers, ease of content sharing and budget-friendliness, campaigns appeal to businesses and consumers and are going nowhere soon.
When used as a part of a hybrid social strategy, influencer marketing can be powerful and can greatly amplify a brand's messaging and reach. However, it's crucial to find an influencer that aligns with your brand values and resonates with your audience. There are two types of influencers, macro and micro, each suitable for different social needs.
Micro-influencers generally have a smaller follower count, usually ranging from 10k-100k.
To maximise your brand advocates, encourage employees to share company updates and customers to share User-Generated Content (UGC) and testimonials. This helps showcase real-life experiences with your brand.
Measuring and Analysing Results
Although it can be difficult to only focus on a single KPI as the most important, engagement KPIs are the most critical metric for understanding how content is performing and being received by followers.
‘Engagement’ based KPIs include
- Likes
- Comments
- Shares
- Retweets
- Repins
- Collaborative Posts
- Mentions
In comparison, conversion-based KPIs include:
- Click-through rate (CTR) - a percentage of people who clicked a link in your post compared to total number of people who viewed the post. It identifies which content is most effective in driving traffic to your content, landing pages, other important destinations. High CTR means a compelling message to your audience.
- Conversion rate - this is percentage of users performing desired action after interacting with social media post or ad. It’s calculated by dividing the conversions (from signing up for a newsletter to purchasing). A high conversion rate points to effectiveness in driving users to take action and helps you measure the impact of your social media efforts, in relation to achieving business goals such as generating leads or making sales.
- Cost Per Click - this is a fee paid to an ad platform every time someone clicks on your ad, this metric is valuable if you are running paid social ads as there is no advertising cost for organic posts.
- Sales Revenue - the total revenue attributed to social media marketing efforts. It's determined by tracking sales from social media channels and demonstrating social media effort's financial impact.
Tracking social media KPIs can be completed through either built-in or third-party analytics tools. Built-in equates to the native analytics platforms provided by each social media platform, offering data about your profile, posts, and audience.
Challenges and Solutions
There are several common challenges faced when creating and executing social media strategies. Having a social media presence without a strategy can lead to disorganised content. Making an impact requires more than having a social presence. However, when you have a well thought-out strategy, every aspect of your social media can align with your business (and) marketing goals. This allows for a cohesive, practical approach - where everything works together towards a common goal.
Adapting to Platform Dynamics
In today's digitally driven world, social media platforms are constantly evolving. As a result, it is essential to keep up with the latest trends and updates to ensure that your social media efforts are practical. To do this, one must understand the behaviour of social media users and how they interact with these platforms.
This includes being aware of the latest algorithm trends, as they can significantly impact the visibility of your content. Additionally, keeping track of platform trends and new features is critical to staying ahead of the game. By adapting to social media's evolving dynamics, you can effectively align your social media efforts with the latest trends, ensuring that you reach your audience in the most effective way possible.
The Takeaway
A robust social media strategy, a strong brand, and a well-oiled customer experience are invaluable to marketing and organisational success and are key components of a successful marketing plan. A social media strategy can help:
- Build brand reputation and loyalty
- Inform better competitive positioning
- Create a more customer-centric business strategy
- Support improved public relations outcomes
- Play a role in crisis management
- Introduce you to products and services to customers looking to buy
- Help you grow awareness, boost traffic and win customers.
It also allows businesses to engage an audience, generate leads, gain marketplace insights, improve SEO, and increase traffic. If you’re a business looking to begin your strategic social media planning journey, consider investing time and resources in it. You may be surprised how it will lead to sustainable growth and audience engagement.
If you're navigating the complexities of creating a social media strategy and seeking expert guidance in Perth, talk to the professionals at Dapth. We specialise in crafting a unique social media strategy that aligns with your business needs. Whether you're just creating or looking to refine your existing social media strategies, our team of experts can help you harness social media's full potential.
Contact us today to set up a free consultation.
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