6 Steps To Social Media Strategy Glory

Social media marketing is inarguably one of the most effective ways to segment and target specific audiences, build brand awareness, and connect with consumers and clients. Hence, this week we write on social media marketing in our ‘Social Media Success (SMS) series. The 1st part tells you the way to build a goal-oriented social media strategy.

Here are 6 steps to ride the lightning in your social media objectives:

Step 1: Audit Your Current Social Presence

Before you strategize about where you are headed, take a quick look at where you are. A few areas to consider when auditing your business’s social media presence are:

• Which networks are you currently active on
• Are your networks optimized (photo and cover images, bio, URL, etc.)
• Which networks are currently bringing you the most value
• How do your profiles compare to your competitors’ profiles

Step 2: Target Audience

This frames who you want to reach via social networks. For this you need to understand your core audience (personas, profiles, demographics etc.) and identify any new customer types that you want to attract based on your products/services. It can help to split this into three types of social follower:

• Loyal

Regular customers who are already connected to you via social media. You want to retain them and increase their purchases and engagement with your social profiles.

• Existing

Customer who have shopped with you before but aren’t regular shoppers and haven’t connected on social media. You want to nurture them, bringing them closer to you online and therefore increasing purchase rates.

• Potential

People who have never visited the website or purchased from you but who are regular online shoppers, and users of social media. You want to use social media to bring them into contact with the brand, and ultimately move them to purchase.

(Source: bufferapp.com)

Step 3: Create A Social Media Mission Statement

“What makes you weird, makes you unique and therefore makes you stand out.” – Dan Schawbel

These one-sentence declarations will help you focus on a very specific goal for Instagram, Facebook, or any other social network. They will guide your actions and help steer you back on track if your efforts begin to lag.

Take the time you need to determine the purpose of every social profile you have. If you can’t figure out its purpose, you should probably delete that profile.

Mission statement example:

“We will use Snapchat to share the lighter side of our company and connect with younger prospect customers.”

Step 4: Measurement

Start by defining the KPIs for your social strategy, which should break down into macro KPIs (for the whole strategy e.g. increase traffic from social media) and micro KPIs (channel specific e.g. increase RT rate on Twitter).

You should align your KPI expectations with the metrics that you can track for each social network, so that they can easily measure. Then sense check that your web analytics tools are configured correctly to capture all relevant data.

A few metrics to consider measuring are:

• Conversion Rate
• Time Spent on Website
• Reach
• Brand Mentions
• Sentiment
• Total Shares

Step 5: Produce content that addresses Buyer Persona pain points

“Content is where I expect much of the real money will be made on the Internet.” – Bill Gates

You know who your ideal customer is and you used that information to create your social media mission statement. Armed with this information it should be easy for you to begin creating and curating content. Here are a few examples of content you could create:

• Images
• Videos
• Blog Posts
• Company News
• Infographics
• eBooks
• Interviews

Your content marketing plan should answer the following questions:

• What types of content you intend to post and promote on social media
• How often you will post content
• Target audience for each type of content
• How you will promote the content

It is recommended to create an editorial calendar that lists the dates and times you intend to publish for your social media campaigns.

Step 6: Test, evaluate and adjust your social media marketing plan

To find out what adjustments need to be made to your social media marketing strategy, you should constantly be testing. Build testing capabilities into every action you take on social networks. For example, you could:

• Track the number of clicks your links get on a particular platform using URL shorteners and UTM codes
• Use social media analytics to track the success and reach of social campaigns
• Track page visits driven by social media with Google Analytics
• Record and analyze your successes and failures, and then adjust your social media marketing plan in response.
• Surveys are also a great way to gauge success—online and offline.

Rewrite your social media strategy to reflect your latest insights, and make sure your team is aware of what has been updated.

(References: hootsuite.com, bufferapp.com, smartinsights.com, ducttapemarketing.com)