Are you curious to find out the best social media marketing strategy online?
The Hootsuite studies found that 321 million new people joined social media in 2019, which brought from approximately 3.48 billion to 3.8 billion social media users in 2020. It increased by 9%.
That’s why, the right social media marketing strategy like selecting suitable channels, identifying your social media goals, content strategy, engaging your target audience, and optimizing your result is essential to boost your brand awareness. At first glance, marketers find it difficult to develop a social media marketing strategy.
Here, we demonstrate a complete guide to create a social media marketing plan from scratch. We have included 20 social marketing strategies to enhance your online business.
So, let’s dive in!
1. Set Accurate Social Media Marketing Goals
The biggest problem faced by many businessmen is that they never spend proper time to set accurate and effective social media marketing goals. Generally, they know the importance of social media but they do not know how to start?
Generally, social media marketing goals should be to increase your brand awareness on the social media platform. Moreover, you have to set a goal that best fits you and helps you to progress your business online.
2. Check Out Your Most Relevant Metrics
The most significant metrics of your business are related to the goals that you set. You should refer to the marketing goals you set above, and check out which metrics will be fulfilling that goal. For instance, if you have a goal to enhance your brand awareness, then social media “Reach” is a proper metric. It will demonstrate how well your content is growing across social channels.
On the other hand, if your primary goal is to get more sales, or drive more followers, then you should check the number of “Clicks” metrics. Tracking clicks will give you a great indication of what drives people to buy your products.
3. Research Your Target Audience
Making guesses is hazardous for marketers when it comes to the target audience.
You can use Google Analytics tools to quickly understand your actual customers. Most importantly, it is worth zero pence to use this particular tool. You can also find your audience’s approximate age as well as gender in the “demographics” tab of the tool.
4. Choose the Appropriate Social Media Networks For Your Audience
You have to search for the correct social networks for your business. Find the social networks in which your targeted audience spends more time. This will not be tough when you know your customers. If you do not know, then you can survey them and ask them for their favorite social media platforms.
You can begin with your audience’s most chosen network. But, don’t go with more than 3 to 5 social media platforms.
Without a doubt, you can add eminent social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram into concern. You could also consider video platforms such as YouTube if your target audience uses it frequently.
5. Analyze Your Competitors
You need to know about your competitors before you develop your content. You can conduct a competitor analysis that helps you to understand their strengths and weaknesses. This may provide you a great judgment of what potential consumers want from businesses in your industry.
You can also use a competitor analysis tool like SpyFu that helps you to research and download the most helpful keywords of your competitors.
6. Make Timeliness a Top Priority
You can not always expect your consumers to operate on your time, right! It is important to reach and respond to your followers promptly. Customers not only expect a quick reply from online companies but also purposeful conversations daily.
One research demonstrates that a brand’s average response time is approximately 10 hours.
Using proper social media monitoring tools, you can get instances across all your social media channels to communicate, reply, and evaluate customers 24/7.
7. Embed Social Media Feed Using Social Stream Designer Plugin
One of the essential things for you is that embedded your social media feed on your website. No doubt, there are various WordPress plugins available in the market. But, we suggest you use the Social Stream Designer WordPress Plugin. It helps you to integrate your social media feed on your WordPress website from various platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and many more.
The plugin provides a stunning and responsive wall on your website in just a few minutes. It has 40+ customization options for styling and designing a layout.
8. Arrange Your Social Media Accounts Accurately Before Promoting Content
You need to set your social media accounts perfectly before starting to promote your content. Use appropriate logos, color, and similar graphics on every social media network. Take some time to fill up in your bio as well as the profile. You have to make sure that uploaded images on your bio and profile have a great resolution and are eye-catching for the social network.
On social media, your post will grab the attention of your target audience that is crucial to increase your followers.
Useful Read: Tips To Increase Your Social Media Engagement
9. Select Perfect Times to Post and Set a Proper Content Calendar
Generally, sharing all posts manually is feeble because it may not drive the best results. Nowadays, almost all social networks use algorithms to filter the results they provide to their users. It simply means that if you post at a time when your target audience is offline, then they may not look at your content.
You can use the sproutsocial social media scheduling tool to set up and control multiple posts at the perfect time.
10. Develop Eye-Catching Content
Content plays the biggest role to engage your social media followers. It is essential to have an idea of what to publish based on your goal and brand value. In addition to this, you have to be sure of the social media networks you cover.
Other than that, do not forget the importance of images and videos. Because visual content is 40 times more likely to be shared on social media compared to just text content.
11. Build Social Media Budget
Assigning a proper budget to your social media endeavors is important to get a favorable outcome. Set a proper budget with the best strategy may be a cost-effective way for you to lead your targeted people.
The most proper reason is that social media is used on a more personal level. And, it is a great place where you can make much stronger connections with your consumers.
12. Promote Your Social Media Channels
Generally, people have to find your channels before they can choose to follow you. That is the reason, you can promote your social media channels.
Moreover, there are several ways to promote your channel like embed buttons for all your accounts at various places on your website. You can also add a reference to your social channels in any emails and newsletters you send to your visitors.
Additionally, you can run ads on your social channels to develop brand recognition and boost your social followers.
13. Lead cross-channel campaigns
Run cross-channel campaigns across all social media channels to engage more followers. These types of campaigns are run by every company, that’s why you will require to give yourself an outline to help you stand out from the crowd.
You can add emotional content to your social media campaigns so your audience can easily relate to it. Furthermore, link back to a particular web page that will give your audience more information related to your campaign. For instance, cross-channel campaigns use different channels like social media, email, mobile, promotional events, direct mail, and many more.
14. Use chatbots
In these busy times, individuals do not like to wait for a long time when it comes to responding to a message. There is no surprise that one digital tool which can communicate and resolve trouble for your consumers without needing any human interruption. And that is a chatbot! It is integrated with the platforms that customers feel most interact using social media.
You can use platforms like MobileMonkey that help you to stay connected with your customers instantly.
Most importantly, you can take orders directly from Facebook Messenger and comments as well. And, it is linked with mostly all the payment systems.
15. Establish a personalized experience For Consumers
The chatbot is not just a great way to automate communicating tasks. But, if you develop it correctly, then your chatbot will permit you to build more personalized experiences for your consumers. For this reason, prevent linking your advertisements completely to your landing pages, and develop ads that redirect your visitors to a Messenger window with your chatbot.
That will make your customer’s experience more personal and hike your sales.
16. Engage with Your Social Media Followers
Generally, users go online on social media to interact with other people and to be social. However, they don’t just go onto social networks to look at or read the content.
To get success in your business, do not just share simple posts, but make it engaging as well. With the content also focusing on visual data and graphics as well.
Custom hashtags are also useful to encourage and share your posts. Apart from that, it is also beneficial for users to search for business posts easily.
17. Look at Paid Promotion to Boost Your Followers
The social media networks permit you to purchase some paid ads. Nearly all platforms will empower you to target your ads and make them visible to your target audience. The paid promotions permit you to reach relevant audiences with whom you are not connected.
You can use advertisements to build brand awareness, promote posts or videos, and sell your products on social media.
18. Analyze Your Results and Optimize
If you do not track your results then, you will never know about the success of your social campaigns. You have to start the process by setting appropriate goals and then persistent your most approachable metrics. After that, keep track of how these metrics are improving.
You can also use appropriate tools to track your outcomes. If the tool shows that you are developing eye-catching, well-shared content, then build more that type of content.
On the other hand, if your content does not do so well, then take note of where you are lacking, and modify your social sharing to focus on the type of data your followers choose. Most importantly, do not hesitate to alter any process to enhance your social success in forthcoming years.
19. Tell a story on live Streaming
Facebook, Instagram, and several other platforms have their own live streaming features that you can use to tell you a wonderful story and promote your brand. Sharing your story with your audience in real-time makes a bigger impact than just sharing in a simple post.
In addition to this, showcase your audience as more than a money-making machine. Also, engage and inspire your consumers on your live streaming. Create shareable and memorable content.
You can also offer some discounts and coupons to the users who join you on your live streaming.
20. Working With Influencers To Increase Visitors
Last but not least, you can gain various benefits of working with influencers and engaging in influencer marketing. Influencers have already mastered the art of social media marketing. They have built their eminent reputation online, and have a plethora of followers on social media.
If you choose the correct influencers then, you have the highest possibility to reach new followers.
Final Verdict!
Now, online businesses are gently becoming more engrossed with enhancing customers on their social media platforms compared to their business websites. With the help of the above-explained 20 social strategies, you can set your well-established brand on several social media platforms.
Good luck and enjoy planning!
Important Reading: How To Make Money With Social Media? (Step-By-Step Guide)