How to Develop a Powerful Social Media Marketing Strategy in 7 Steps
Undoubtedly, social media has become an essential marketing funnel for companies of any size. A few years back, the popular question was "why should we use social media?" This has changed to "how can social media help us?"
As much as this excites us, we are noticing a mistake that businesses tend to make - failing to establish and document a strategy. This article will take you through the necessary steps for your business to develop a powerful social media marketing plan.
Step 1: Evaluate Your Social Presence
Before figuring out what direction to take, ask yourself these questions about where you stand right now:
- Which social channels are you currently using?
- Are your pages optimized (photos, cover images, biography, contact info, links, etc.)?
- Which networks are bringing the most value?
- How do you compare with your competitors' profiles?
Step 2: Know Your Ultimate Customer
You may recognize your target buyers as young adults. But if you pinpoint them as a young adult who lives in the United States, is 20 - 30 years old, earns about $30,000 a year, loves sports and mainly uses Twitter, you will be much more successful. Even the most experienced marketers will fail if they aim for the wrong prospects. In addition, you may be targeting multiple demographics, create different ads for each audience set. You wouldn’t talk to a teenager the same way you speak to your grandparents, so why market to them the same way! Social media allows for detailed targeting of real people, not just cookies. The following criteria will help you establish an accurate customer description:
- Age range
- Location
- Occupation
- Income range
- Primary social network used
- Purchase Behavior
- Interests
- Life events
Step 3: Document a Mission Statement
Think very well about your social media mission statement, as it will fuel your upcoming moves. It will also clarify your purpose of using social media and should represent your brand identity. Keep your ultimate customer in mind here.
An example statement may be "to inform existing and prospective customers about widgets with a strong focus on how it can increase productivity at work." Once you have written your statement it will become easy for you to determine what to do. Don't share anything that doesn't comply with your mission statement.
Step 4: Measure Your Achievements
How will you be certain if your social media marketing moves are making a strong impact? We're referring to making money, not just obtaining more followers. After all, there is no logic in spending time and money on something that isn't growing your bottom line. Most of your conversions will come from driving social traffic to high-quality landing page or website. Therefore, it is extremely important to monitor the analytics on both your social platform and landing pages/website. Here are some factors to measure:
- Link Clicks
- Time on your website after coming from social media (use UTM codes to track this per post)
- Cost per Unique Visitor
- Number of New Leads per month / Total Marketing Spend (cost per lead)
- Conversion Rate
- Shares
- Cost Per Acquisition
- Reach (this will dictate the volume of link clicks you get)
- Relevancy Score
- Frequency (higher frequency = lower click-thru-rate & higher cost-per-lead)
Step 5: Curate and S?hare Engaging Material
This is the most exciting part. Unfortunately, most businesses rush to it first. We hope we have highlighted the importance of taking other significant steps before you begin to curate and post engaging material.
Now that you've established who your ultimate customer is and developed your mission statement based on such knowledge, this task should run smoothly. Examples of content would be:
- Images
- Videos
- Blog posts / articles / notes
- Company news
- Holiday based material
- Info graphics
- eBooks
- Interviews
There are many more suggestions than this list, but it is imperative that you stick to your mission statement and expertise. Content is what drives social media and therefore engaging and goal oriented posts must be your priority.
Step 6: Use a Social Media Management Tool
Most marketers leverage their productivity with tools, otherwise they would constantly burn themselves out (which can even occur with tools). One of the key advantages of social media management tools is helping you organize tasks and schedule posts ahead of time. We highly recommend using a content calendar and automatic schedule tool so that you can plan what to share on each network, exactly when and how often.
Step 7: Quantify, Assess and Tweak
This is probably the most vital step for achieving optimal success. Even the best social media marketers depend on trial and error. It is very important to frequently track results, analyze the data, and tweak your future actions accordingly. Use split testing on images, headlines, and description text to see what works best. Start with a control and then duplicate the same ad with a different headline, then with the same headline but different text and so forth. This way you will have a benchmark and easily see what is working best.
Every prior step should be re-assessed after quantifying what your marketing efforts have yielded. As you proceed to learn more about your business, social media marketing will always be work in progress.
Hope you enjoyed this article, for more information or to request a quote on our lead generation services contact me via email! Visit our website: www.journeyadvertising.com