Why is Having an Effective Social Media Marketing Strategy Important?
Through your daily online [and offline!] interactions, it’s apparent that almost all businesses are now implementing social media marketing strategies into their overall marketing strategy. After all, Americans spend more time on social media daily than they do on email or even Google! Unfortunately, not all of these individual marketing initiatives are considered effective social media marketing strategies. While a business might spend a lot of time on its social marketing approach, it doesn’t always result in an effective social media marketing strategy that will help attain their business goals. Well, what are the best strategies for social media marketing?
What is a social media marketing strategy?
Let’s take a step back and define what a social media marketing strategy is. It is basically your game plan to build brand awareness for your business through growth of your followers. The first step will be defining your social media marketing goals. These specific goals should help you attain your overall marketing and business goals. Setting your goals is one of the most important differentiators to having an effective social media strategy plan. Once you’ve defined your goals, determine which social media platforms you should use (i.e. Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, etc.) by researching your target audience(s), and then execute your strategy and measure your results against your goals.
Why do you need a social media strategy?
The first step to an effective social media marketing strategy is defining your goals, because without it you could spend a lot of time simply writing content and publishing it to your social media marketing platforms without any growth. Your social media strategy should include initiatives that will help you attain your goals as well as key performing indicators that you can measure periodically. These KPIs are extremely important because these are the data points that you will measure on a regular basis to indicate the success of your social marketing strategy. Creating a social media strategy does not need to be difficult.
How do you create a social media strategy?
While we can talk about creating a social media strategy all day long, creating an effective social media marketing strategy is the key here. We’ve already talked about defining your social media marketing goals, which will align with your overall marketing and business goals, and establishing your KPIs, which will be the data points that you measure along the way. But, how do you get there? In the beginning, you should start creating content calendars – or monthly social media marketing calendars – to help you plan what, when and where you publish content. This will help you get organized and give you the time you’ll need to also measure results and make smart changes.
You should start with testing and tracking your results to see what is and what is not working: which social media platforms perform well (i.e. high engagement, growing followers?), which types of posts are creating high engagement (i.e. videos, photos, links, etc.), what type of content does your audience seem most interested in (i.e. which links are getting clicked the most; highest engagement?), and what day of the week or time of day are your followers viewing, clicking or engaging with your posts?
Testing and measuring results will help you determine how to turn your social media marketing strategy into an effective social media marketing strategy. By planning, testing, measuring your KPIs, and adjusting your campaigns, you will start to attain your social media marketing goals and, in turn, your marketing and business goals.
Consult with a Social Media Agency
An effective social media marketing strategy takes trial and error and time. If you have questions about creating your social media marketing strategy, or would like to find out more about Paradigm’s social media marketing consulting services, feel free to contact us for a consultation today.