Many companies spend a lot of time and resources creating social media posts multiple times a day. They post a lot of employee profiles, award announcements, and even memes or GIFs that are unrelated. But because there’s no real rhyme or reason to their strategy, their social media presence doesn’t have a lot of impact. They aren’t seeing results because they don’t know what they’re doing.
We should focus on finding the most sustainable strategy instead of the “best” one.
Today, we’ll go over how to make a social media strategy that lasts, follows a customer’s journey, and helps you plan your content stockpile strategically.
What Is Social Media Marketing?
Social media marketing is when companies use platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to advertise their product or service.
Social media marketing helps businesses:
- Increase brand awareness
- Build engaged communities
- Sell products and services
- Measure brand sentiment
- Provide social customer service
- Advertise products and services to target audiences
- Track performance and adjust larger marketing strategies accordingly
What Is a Social Media Marketing Strategy?
Your social media strategy should outline your goals, the tactics you will use to achieve them, and the metrics you will track to measure your progress.
Your social media marketing strategy should include: -A list of all your existing and planned social media accounts -Goals specific to each platform you’re active on The goals you set for your website should be in line with your business’s overarching digital marketing strategy.
It is important to have a social media plan that defines the roles and responsibilities of your team and how often you will receive reports.
The Components of a Good Social Media Strategy
There are three basic components to a good social media strategy.
Curated content
Content that is carefully selected by experts to support your overall content goals. When you cite other thought leaders in your industry, it strengthens your argument and makes it more credible to readers. It also shows readers that you do your research. The Quuu-HubSpot integration is a great way to easily manage your content curation. Quuu delivers curated articles to your drafts folder in HubSpot, so you can easily find the content you need.
Educational content
Your educational content can help readers solve a problem or teach them something new. The information is usually delivered in the form of a blog post or article.
If your company were to close its doors, your industry would be less rich because of the unique perspective your company brings. Find your niche and play to your strengths. You’ll be able to educate your readers in a way that nobody else can.
Promotional content
Promotional content is content that is designed to generate leads or sales through form submissions. This could include a landing page, an ebook, or a webinar. It can consist of conversion paths you’ve built around getting people to read whitepapers, look at infographics, bottom-of-the-funnel offers (i.e. a free assessment), and more.
Order of Operations
Now that we understand the components of a good social media strategy, we need to develop a plan of action. A social media strategy that is sustainable uses many of the concepts in the buyer’s journey.
First: Curated content
If you want people to listen to what you have to say, you need to first build trust with them. Many readers are skeptical of articles that are written by companies to promote their products. Although it may seem like I am biased because I sell a security product, security is actually very important.
This is where curated content comes into play. You need to back up your claims by showing that others view your topic as important.
Second: Educational content
Now that your readers are ready to receive content they’re interested in, you can begin to educate them. Educating, not promoting, is the next step. Before you can ask your prospects for their information, you must make it clear to them why your offer is worth downloading.
Third: Promotional content
The trust you’ve earned from your readers allows you to educate them in a way that nobody else can. Now you can give them the next most useful resource, which is a gated offer. You’re saying that the next resource is more valuable than what was read before. We’re asking for your email address because we’ve put a lot of work into developing our website.
Structure Your Week Around Your Buyers’ Journey
The order of operations in the above text can be stretched out over the course of a five-day work week, provided you are aware of when your readers are most active on social media.
Your content should be structured in a way that aligns with the way your readers learn best. The most helpful route for buyers is the one that makes the most logical sense.
When you are creating your plan, start by figuring out what topic you want to teach about. When trying to find a supporting article, it is easier to work backward. Similarly, when trying to find the appropriate promotion, it is easier to search for it when you know what downloadable content is the next most logical offer.
If we want to promote Inbound Marketing, we should plan around creating reports that show its effectiveness.
Start by planning your educational content.
Let’s take a closer look at this plan by breaking it down into the two halves of the week.
Monday – Wednesday
We start by pointing out that cold calling is no longer an effective sales technique through a reliable source. After that, we introduce a blog post that explains inbound marketing in detail. We’re confident that inbound marketing is better than outbound, so we know that our blog post is positioned as well as it can be given our Monday post. After we have taught our readers that outbound marketing is not enough, and they have learned about inbound marketing, we can then suggest they download a guide that will help them create their first inbound marketing campaign.
Wednesday – Friday
In the second half of this week, we will be informing our readers about what other reliable sources believe to be marketing data points that are important for teams. We tell them that the marketing data they have just read about is becoming increasingly important for the employment and growth of marketing teams. At the end of the week, we would like you to download a trial of our software that can help you keep track of that data in one place.
If you are thinking that this is more work than you wanted it to be, you will be happy to know that the hardest part is only the first two weeks. The reason for this is that content can and should be re-promoted every two weeks. This allows you to keep your content fresh, and also allows you to reach new people who may have missed your original post.
If you want to reach the most people possible, you should share your content more than once. This way, you have a better chance of reaching the right person at the right time. This also allows you to gauge how successful your content is. If a post doesn’t perform well, you want to know if it was just poor timing or if it didn’t anticipate your readers’ interest. You’ll need to do several rounds of promotion to analyze these trends.
This means that you will need to create original content for the first two weeks. This may take some effort.
How to Create a Social Media Marketing Strategy
Choose goals that align with business objectives
Set S.M.A.R.T. goals.
The first thing you need to do to have a successful social media strategy is to know what your goals and objectives are. If you do not have specific goals, you will not be able to gauge how successful you have been or what your return on investment (ROI) is.
Your social media marketing goals should be specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound.
If you need help coming up with social media goals, we can give you some examples.
Track meaningful metrics
It’s easy to track how many followers and likes you have, but it’s hard to show how much those numbers are actually worth. What you should focus on instead are things like engagement, click-through, and conversion rates.
If you are looking for some inspiration, here are 19 essential social media metrics.
You may want to track different goals for different social media networks, or even different uses for each social media network.
A click-through is when someone clicks on a link from one website to another. If you’re using LinkedIn to drive traffic to your website, you’ll want to measure how many people are clicking through from LinkedIn to your site. You can measure the success of your Instagram Story by tracking the number of views it gets. If you advertise on Facebook, cost-per-click is a metric that is often used to measure success.
The goals you set for your social media presence should be in line with your larger marketing goals. It is easier to demonstrate the value of your work and gain your boss’s approval when you do this.
The first step in creating a successful social media marketing plan is to write down at least three goals for social media.
Amanda Wood, Hootsuite’s Senior Manager of Social Marketing, stated that it is easy to become overwhelmed when trying to decide what to post and which metrics to track, but you need to focus on what you want to gain from social media. Don’t just start posting aimlessly: make sure your goals for posting match up with your business goals, and that the metrics you track align with those goals.
Learn everything you can about your audience
If you want to be successful on social media, you need to treat your fans, followers, and customers as real people with real wants and needs. By doing this, you’ll be able to better target and engage them.
When it comes to your ideal customer, you should know things like:
- Age
- Location
- Average income
- Typical job title or industry
- Interests
You can learn a lot about your followers by analyzing your social media data. This includes information about where they live, how they interact with your brand, and other valuable insights. You can improve your strategy and more accurately target your audience by understanding these things.
Get to know your competition
Most likely, your competitors are already using social media, so you can take note of what strategies they are using.
Conduct a competitive analysis
A competitive analysis allows you to understand your competition and what they are doing well and not so well. You’ll be able to see what is expected from you in your industry by looking at what others in your field are doing on social media. This will help you to set goals for your own social media use.
It will also help you spot opportunities.
One of your competitors may be very successful on Facebook, but may not have put much effort into Twitter or Instagram. If you want to engage your audience through social media, you should focus on the platforms where they are not being adequately served instead of trying to compete with a more dominant player.
Use social media listening
Social listening is a way to monitor your competition.
Perform social media searches for your competitor’s company name, relevant account handles, and keywords. Discover what information they are posting and what other individuals are writing in response to them. How successful are influencer marketing campaigns in terms of engagement?
You may notice changes in how your competitors and industry leaders are using social media as you track their activity. You may come across new, exciting trends. You might find a social media campaign or piece of content that is extremely successful or one that fails miserably.
This type of information can be used to improve and provide guidance for your social media marketing strategy.
Amanda advices against going overboard with spy tactics. Instead, stay focused on yourself and your goals.” It’s important to not only compare yourself to the competition, but to also focus on your goals. If you ONLY compare yourself to the competition, it can be a distraction. I think that it is healthy to check in on yourself once a month. Otherwise, focus on your strategy and results.”
Do a social media audit
If you are using social media, look at what you have done so far. Ask yourself the following questions:
- What’s working, and what’s not?
- Who is engaging with you?
- What are your most valuable partnerships?
- Which networks does your target audience use?
- How does your social media presence compare to the competition?
Get information first, then start thinking about how to improve.
Your audit should help you understand what each of your social media accounts are used for. If you don’t know what the purpose of an account is, you should question whether or not it’s worth having.
To help you decide, ask yourself the following questions:
- Is my audience here?
- If so, how are they using this platform?
- Can I use this account to help achieve my goals?
Asking difficult questions will help to keep your social media strategy on track.
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