Social media is key to marketing in this digital age, helping companies drive growth, engage with customers and clients, exude trust, and tell their brand stories.
But seeing results requires being strategic and intentional about what, how, and when your business posts. A social media marketing strategy can help you more than you realize.
What is social media marketing?
The number of users on social media platforms has grown exponentially in recent years. Facebook reported that it had 196 million monthly active users in Canada and the US in the third quarter of 2022. With numbers like these, it's easy to see why social media platforms are great for marketing. But it would be a mistake to see them as sales-boosting tools.
Developing a social media marketing strategy can help you produce targeted content and interact with your audience in a way that resonates.
How to create a social media strategy?
To help develop an effective social media strategy, it is recommended that you follow the following six steps down to the smallest detail.
Step 1: Define your goals
Social media can serve many purposes. Common goals for a social media strategy are:
- increasing brand awareness
- generating traffic to the website
- lead generation
- increasing customer engagement
- improving customer satisfaction
- increase in sales and income
- conducting market research
Your goals and reasons for being on social media should be clear, measurable, and aligned with your overall business strategy. Once clearly defined, your goals can guide you in creating a social media marketing strategy that achieves the results you are looking for.
Step 2: Know your audience
For content to be effective, it needs to be targeted. You need to understand your audience, their interests, and their problems in order to create posts that they will want to engage with and can relate to.
Once you know your audience, choose the social media platforms that will be most effective in reaching them.
Step 3: Develop a content strategy
Determine what you want to achieve with your content strategy. Is it increasing brand awareness, driving engagement, or generating leads?
When it comes to social media platforms, focus on a few initially to ensure you can maintain quality content and engagement. Evaluate existing content to identify what worked well and what needs improvement.
You will also need to decide on the types of content you will create, such as articles, videos, and infographics, as well as categories such as promotional, educational, inspirational, and user-generated.
Step 4: Create a content calendar
A content calendar can help you plan your posts and be more consistent in your messaging. To keep your feeds fresh and your audience engaged, go through the different categories you've identified as part of your content strategy.
To help you keep track of your posts and allow you to plan future publications.
Step 5: Interact with your community
Be active and responsive to your customers on your social media channels and participate in conversations. Ask questions and encourage discussion, be personal and authentic, and respond to direct messages in a timely manner. You may also want to run contests and give away giveaways.
Step 6: Track and measure
Look critically at your posts. Are your followers interacting with your content? Are they commenting, sharing, or clicking on your links? Are you generating sales or leads?
Tracking and measuring the performance of your posts is the first step to improving your content and understanding what resonates with your audience. Use tools like Google Analytics to track traffic and measure your return on investment and conversions. Measure reach and impressions, and analyze click-through rates. Use UTM parameters (Urchin Tracking Module) to track traffic from social networks to your website.
