What Is A Social Media Strategy?

Social media strategy refers to the actions that you plan to do to sell your business or brand products and services using social media platforms. A social media strategy, in essence, acts as a guide for all your activities. It should consist of an audit about two things – one, where your social media accounts are today, and two, the future goals you wish to achieve.

Moreover, make sure your social media strategy includes all the tools that you intend to use to achieve your set goals. Your social media strategy should not be broad and lofty as it makes it unattainable. This strategy will act as a measure by which you determine your success or failures so make sure you’re not setting yourself up for a letdown.

Let’s walk through this amazing seven-step plan to create a social media strategy and marketing plan for 2023!

1. Setting Your Objectives

Make sure your social media strategy is narrow for more effective execution. To set yourself up for success, set specific goals and track the right metrics against those goals. Keep in mind to set specific trackable goals. Start with setting your goals and objectives. To measure your success on your social media return on investment you need to have goals. Make sure each of your objectives is SMART:

• Specific,

• Measurable,

• Attainable,

• Relevant,

• Time-bound.

Your goals will lead to real business results with SMART goals. Thus, making this the key to set a successful social media strategy.

2. Measuring Meaningful Metrics

Some metrics such as likes, comments, and retweets are easy to track. But do they prove their value for your business? Well, you should rather put your focus on creating a social media strategy instead run on taregts such as website visits, leads generated, referrals, and conversion rates. As a business, you might want to track different goals for different channels and it is vital to differentiate channels. For instance, to measure engagement focus on social posts and use paid campaigns to increase your brand awareness. Ultimately, to easily show the value of your work, align your objectives with your overall social media marketing strategy. Then, start focusing on developing your social media marketing plan. Here are four main goals to focus on to keep your social media strategy simple:

• Awareness: Make sure your objective is based on your current and potential audience.

• Engagement: Your focus should be on audiences and their interaction with your content.

• Conversion: Present the effectiveness of your social media engagement.

• Consumer: Finally, as a business reflect on how your active customers think and feel about your business/brand.

3. Identifying Your Audience

Once you’ve set your goals in your social media strategy plan, you need to outline your target audience. There’s no point in creating your strategy if you’re not engaged in social listening. Once you break down your audience, it helps you understand which social media platforms you’re active on, the type of content to publish, your posting schedule, and your brand voice. The key to content generation strategy is knowing your audience and what they want to see on social media. This will result in likes, comments, and shares. It is crucial to understand your audience to develop your social media followers and convert them into potential customers. Strive to create audience personas that are based on your social media marketing strategy because this approach will sharpen your marketing tactics.

Lastly, don’t make assumptions. Analytics provides you with relevant info about your followers, their language, location, what content they like, and how they interact with your brand on social media. Now you can refine your strategy, curate your content, and better target your ads. Remember social listening strategy will give you valuable insights.

4. Conducting Social Media Competitive Analysis

Your competitors are already using social media. So, you need to understand them because you can learn from what they’re already doing. A competitive analysis in your social media strategy plan allows you to benchmark your metrics against your competitors. It lets you see how you stack up.

Begin by identifying your social media competition, which includes the platform they use. Then, with the help of competitive analysis, understand what they’re doing well and not so well. Once you’ve done that, you’ll know what’s expected in your field. Now you can set some social media targets of your own. Social media competitive analysis helps you identify new opportunities. For instance, if your competitors have little involvement on Twitter but dominate on Instagram, you can find new opportunities to focus on networks where the audience is underserved. Lastly, keep track of your competitors accounts and their content to evaluate your objectives and social media marketing strategy. Also, remember to use relevant industry keywords.

5. Set Up And Update Your Social Media Accounts

Assure you set appropriate social media accounts and optimize them regularly, once you’ve decided on the networks that you’ll focus on. Based on your initial assessment analysis, you might implement a different strategy for each social media platform.

For instance, you might use Instagram for customer service, Twitter for branding, and Facebook for customer acquisition. When you’re aware of the social media strategy for every platform, you can set strategies specific to the social media network and specific objectives for each network/account. Each account/ social network helps you in very specific goals like:

Facebook – Acquire new customers through paid advertisement.

Twitter – Build brand awareness and engage the press.

LinkedIn – Engage in attracting new talent.

Snapchat – Distribute brand awareness content specific to your consumers.

So, reconsider if having a channel is worth it if you don’t have a specific mission for each one. For a clear social media marketing strategy, each channel should have specific missions.

Finding Inspiration

You can always find inspiration from other businesses that have a great social presence but remember that it is important that your brand is unique. Research about some inspirational and successful social media case studies. They offer you valuable insights that you can apply to your own goals for each network.

6. Consistency And Content Calendar

Your posting frequency:

As a business, you need to post at least once a day. It is the bare minimum and makes sure that your audience is engaging with you. If you want to increase your engagement and chances for your post to go viral, we would recommend you to include posting 3 times a day and at relevant times in your social media strategy. Consider your social media handles as your storefront. If you close the store for a couple of days a week, it can lead to loss of clients and business. Well, the same logic can be applied to your social media network handles because if you don’t post for a day, it is like closing the store unexpectedly.

Caption:

When you post anything, try to add captions that are fun and informative. If you have a captivating caption, it can lead to more likes, comments, and followers. Additionally, adding CTA (call-to-action) captions can lead to more comments, likes and also brings in new followers.

Hashtags:

For good engagement on your posts, always remember to use hashtags. Also, change the hashtags based on your post. Tip: Save your hashtags on your phone’s notepad and simply copy/paste/edit them for each post.

Although sharing content is essential, it’s equally important to have a plan in place while doing so. Also, timing is the key to increase your followers. Keep an account in your calendar for all the time that you will spend responding to your audience as well.

Hence, everything you post should be working towards your goals. For every time you post on your channel, make sure that you will tie it back to your mission statement in your initial social media strategy. This means that 30 percent of content should drive back traffic to the blog, 20 percent of traffic should be related to lead generation, and 10 percent should be curated from other sources. Are you still not sure about what you should be posting? Simply put, at all times, keep the 80-20 rule in mind. In the 80-20 rule, 80 percent of the content that you’re posting should be educational, informing, and entertaining for your audience. Meanwhile, 20 percent should promote your brand or business.

In Conclusion

One of the best avenues to increase your website traffic and conversion rates is by using social media channels. Hence, take your time and come up with a suitable, comprehensive, and ample social media strategy. This way you can reap the maximum benefit out of social media marketing. As the needs and desires of your target audience keep on changing, you need to keep on tracking and analyzing them.

Keep in mind that a great social media strategy should never be anchored on a stone. It should be a work in progress that’ll keep on changing. As you continue to learn more about your audience and business, remember to create a strategy and start implementing it!

Seven Steps To Develop Your Social Media Marketing Strategy In 2023 FAQs

1. What are the 7 steps of marketing?

Here are the 7 Steps to create a marketing plan:
– Add a Situational Analysis.
– Create the Marketing Strategy.
– Define Your Target Audience.
– Do Your Research.
– List the Tactics and Implementation.
– Outline Marketing Objectives.
– Write a Brand Summary.

2. What are the steps you need to build a social media strategy?

Here’s how you can create a social media strategy:
– Social media marketing goals that align with your business’s objectives.
– Understand your audience.
– Know more about your competitors.
– Social media audit.
– Set up accounts and optimize your profiles.
– Get inspired.
– Social media content calendar.
– Constantly adjusting and evaluating your strategy.

3. What are the best strategies for social media marketing?

Some additional social-media marketing strategies for companies:
– Create an efficient content marketing strategy.
– Create a personalized experience for your customers.
– Create a community for your audience.
– Create profiles on the relevant channels.
– Establish a social media budget.
– Enhance your profiles with a diverse content strategy.
– Start using chatbots.
– Use brand advocates.

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