Blog

Powerful Social Media Marketing Strategy in 10 Easy Steps

Social media is now an absolutely necessary marketing channel for businesses of all types and sizes, and without a social media marketing strategy in place, companies fail to completely leverage social media in their marketing plans.

I remember, a few years ago, business owners used to ask digital marketers, “why should our business have a presence on social media channels?” 

Now it’s being replaced with, “how could our business improve with the help of social media marketing?”

As an online marketer, I’m delighted that businesses have started to realize the importance of online marketing in improving their business.

What doesn’t make me very enthusiastic is that still, many businesses are trying to market on social media without a proper, well-planned social media marketing strategy.

In this post, you will learn the ten easy steps to a powerful social media marketing strategy.

But first,

I would like you to think of this social media marketing strategy as a road trip.

Where you begin by figuring out the right direction.

Next, you determine the right means to reach your destination.

Then you check your progress periodically and ensure you’re on the correct path and also enjoy the journey along the way.

STEP 1 – Know What You Want To Achieve.

Before you prepare a powerful social media marketing strategy, it is imperative to understand your current position and where you want to be. 

Here specification of your goals plays a big part. It’s been noticed that 89% of marketers who set their goals are more likely to accomplish them.

Begin by setting S.M.A.R.T. goals and define what do you call a success for each of these goals.

You must be wondering what S.M.A.R.T goals are? 

S.M.A.R.T means:

Specific – Be well-defined on what you want. Do you want more followers? Specify the number 5000, 10,000, or 1m. Being specific helps you track progress and measure your success.

Measurable – There should be a trackable metric for every goal. 

Achievable – The goal must be within your reach. It should be challenging yet attainable. 

Relevant – You must know how your goal will serve in your business

Time-bound – Give yourself a deadline. It keeps everyone on your team accountable and sincere in their efforts.

The Social media marketing strategy must always line up with the company’s broader goals.

These goals can vary considerably depending on various factors, such as the size of the business, likely audience, competition, Industry, and many other factors.

However, some common goals for every business include-

1. Building brand awareness of the company

2. Lead Generation

3. Boosting sales

4. Driving relevant transactions to your website

5. Creating a loyal online community

STEP 2 – Understand Who Your Ideal Customer Is.

All social media marketing campaigns must be intensely concentrated on his or her prospective customers.

The identification of ideal customers and satisfying their needs by selling products or services that are right for those customers should be the primary goal of all business activities.

The greater clarity you have concerning your ideal customer, the more focused and productive your social media marketing efforts will be.

Suppose you’re a business owner in India selling Golf equipment. You would identify your target market as adults. However, the idea here is to be more specific — so you would not only know who will buy your product but also a little something about them.

For example, your principal target might be adults:

1. Between 25 and 75 years of age

2. Living in Indian metropolitan cities where golf course exists (the location where the product is marketed)

3. Above monthly income of Rs. 1,00,000

4. High net-worth

5. Mostly male

6. Primarily use Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter (social media habits)

Doing this exercise will give you a highly-focused buyer persona for your company and guarantee more notable success in your social media marketing efforts.

STEP 3 – Research Your Competitors’ Social Networks

Your competitors are most likely using various social media channels to market their enterprise.

By doing the competitive analysis, you will learn a lot about the strategy your competitors are following. 

The fact that you and your competitor target the same audience on social media, you can replicate what seems to be working for them and avoid what’s not.

Choose 4-5 competitors and then review them on all the leading social networks like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube.

Conduct a competitive analysis to know and understand what kind of post they are posting on their social media. 

Now, note down your competitor’s number of followers and the average amount of likes their posts are getting on each network. 

By doing this, you’ll have a clear idea where your own audience may be most engaged, and where you should focus on the most.

After the process mentioned above, you’ll find that one of your competitors has a significant following on Instagram but haven’t focused much on other platforms like Facebook or YouTube. 

Focus on those networks that are neglected by your competitors and where the audience is underserved.

STEP 4 – Analyze Your Social Media Demographics on Each Channel

Recognizing the main social media demographics of each platform is a vital step in planning a perfect social media marketing strategy. 

It’s necessary to decide which channel you must focus on in order to get the results you wanted. 

As a marketer, you cannot be on social media; you have to choose which channel has the right audience for your business. 

You don’t want to waste your time and resources on the channels whos audience doesn’t care for your product or services.

Every social media network has its own audience persona. They all need their very own content strategy, so always remember the one-size-fits-all technique doesn’t work on social media marketing.

You must invest your precious time and money, creating and promoting the relevant content for each platform you’re focussing on individually.

For example, on Instagram, you’ll have to spend time creating graphics, images, and interesting videos to share, and so on.

Should you post the same content that you’ve created for Instagram on Linkedin.

This is not a very smart strategy; you have to understand that posts that work on Instagram won’t necessarily work on LinkedIn.

Check 10 Best Instagram Tools to Boost Your Followers

Adapting your content strategy according to your audience demographics for each social media platform is necessary.

Check the links below to analyze your social media demographics on each channel –

Facebook:  See demographic data about the people who like my page

Twitter:  Know about your Twitter followers

Instagram:  Instagram Insights

LinkedIn:  LinkedIn Website Demographics

Pinterest:  People You Reach

STEP 5 – Choose the Relevant Social Media

To choose the relevant and right social media platform for your company, one should define the objective of each social media platform.

Here’s a rough analysis of some of the major social media channels:

Facebook

Facebook being the largest social media channel, helps in getting a lot of transactions, higher than any other social media platform. 

The majority of the content that’s been posted on Facebook comprises news and entertainment; therefore, you must keep your content informing and exciting. Articles, Images, and video-based content perform the best here.

Twitter

It is kind of a news platform. Like and retweeting is thus done here to show appreciation.

 Keep an eye on trending hashtags and create content about the latest trends.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a professional network where industry articles, intriguing data, and reports are posted. 

On LinkedIn, to-the-point, easy to read kind of content goes a long way.

Instagram

Instagram is best for visual brands. Attractive photos and short, as well as long IGTV videos, do get a lot of attention on Instagram. 

One must also make use of Instagram Live to create buzz for the product or services.

Pinterest

Again, visual brands do well here as it’s entirely focused on representation. 

Most of the Pinterest users are there for inspiration and influence on fashion, food, gadgets, architecture, and fitness here.

---

Instead of marketing your product across multiple platforms, It is smart to choose the ones that would best suit your brand, services, or products and your aimed demographics.

The subsequent thing to do after choosing the right platform for you to focus on—is to create your profiles or improve your already created profiles, so they align with your strategic plan.

1. All profile fields must be filled completely – Profile pics, cover or banner, bio or description, and other profile information must be complete and latest.

2. Stuff keywords that people may type to search for your business

3. Use correctly sized images for each network

A completed social media profile gives a message to your visitors that you’re serious about connecting with them and satisfying their needs.

It shows your valiant professionalism as well as your cohesive branding.

STEP 6 – Allocate Your Time on Social Media

Let’s face it, social media marketing can be a time-taking process.

But when you have the right strategy, you could save you some precious time and employ it on things that would take your business marketing to higher levels.

You could divide your time as below:

Customer engagement – 30%

Creating content – 20%

Research – 15%

Planning – 15%

Collaboration – 10%

Measure performances- 10%

The analysis helps you understand whether the content that you are posting is getting you the desired outcomes or not.

It allows you to understand what suits your brand and audience the best.

It’s also very crucial to understand when your audience is most active.

By knowing this, you can post content at the time when you have a chance of getting the highest levels of engagement for your efforts. 

As you may know already, how essential it is to share great content for successful social media marketing. But it is even more important to have a system in place, the time and day you’ll share content to get the best result.

STEP 7 – Choose the Appropriate Content

Your social media marketing strategy is only as good as your content. 

All social media channels need content that engages your customers and keeps them coming back for more. Therefore, Its imperative has a solid social media content plan.

Check out the five steps to develop social media content

1: Paint a clear picture of who will you entertain, inform, or educate

2: Perform social keyword research by using hashtags

3: Try storytelling techniques 

4: Analyze what doesn’t work

5: Build a content calendar

The most searched content on social media news and entertainment.

To catch people’s attention on social media, you have to be compelling and keep up with the trends.

Next, choose the types of content you’ll be posting like – Articles, blog posts, images, videos, live chats, etc.

Questioning yourself what’s the main reasons that your business uses social media could help you focus on your goals.

Which can be: Brand Awareness, Community Engagement, Content Distribution, Sales/Lead Generation, Customer Support, or Others are.

STEP 8 – Measures Your Success Through KPIs

To know if your social media marketing strategy is working successfully, you should keep an eye on the responses you get on your posts.

According to experts, the ‘vanity metrics’ like the number of followers, page views and email subscribers, Click-through- rate, etc. are not the correct way to measure the impact of your social media efforts. Instead, the focus should be on engagement.

What comes under Engagement?

Engagement in simple words is getting your followers to do something in response to your post, such as like, share, comment, click to open a picture, click on a link, reach, Conversion rate, etc.

How to Increase Engagement?

1. Post engaging content.
2. Use relevant hashtags
3. Get more followers.
4. Interact and build trust with your followers.

Remember, social media strategy is a continuous exercise plan and not a quick fix. 

Success can only be seen through patience and perseverance. Thoughtful KPIs and realistic quantifiable goals stetting are necessary to measure the real success of your social media marketing efforts. 

STEP 9 – Build an Engaged Social Media Community

As we have discussed above, the significant factor in robust social media marketing is to make sure that you have great content, and you can generate substantial engagement through your content.

Instead of using social media channels solely as marketing platforms to advertise their products and services, businesses must use social media to build better customer experience and create an engaging audience.

Now with the help of social media, businesses can connect and communicate directly with a target audience. This allows brands to build a solid fan base and grow their community quickly.

Some tips to create an engaged community of followers that will support your brand-

1. Know your audience – An excellent communication is indispensable to develop an active social media community. And to communicate well, you need to know your social media family.

2. Your business must be easy to locate – Have a conversation with people using location tags and hashtags. Doing this will generate awareness about your presence in their geographical region. Also, put the URL of your website and social media handles on business cards.

3. Solve the problems of your followers – social media shouldn’t only be used to promote your products and services. It can also be used to interact with your customers and learn what their key concerns are. By knowing their problems, you can provide them with a better product.

4. Be honest- On social media, trustworthiness is a major quality to succeed in once efforts. How to build trust? If you accidentally commit a mistake, start by admitting to your mistakes. No one is perfect mistakes happen. 

When you accept your fault and offer transparency, you win your follower’s hearts. This shows your willingness to listen and your ability to adapt.

5. Grow your community through various quizzes, contests, offers, discounts, and challenges.

STEP 10 – Budget, Test and Automate

Budgeting

Every social media marketing strategy must include a budget to promote your posts on different platforms.

Because going into any expenditure without knowing where the budget line is drawn is not a very good idea and can exhaust your money really quickly.

Remember, the ad spend is only part of the budget. 

When calculating the overall cost of social advertising, keep in mind all the other efforts involved in social media advertising such as-

1. Design, Graphics, Videography, Editing

2. Copywriting

3. Strategy

4. Project Management

5. Ad Spend

6.Tracking Results

If you are struggling to figure out the total cost for social media advertising. That’s fine!

Start with a small amount from your marketing budget, then experiment, assess, and learn. 

Once you understand what works on each network, you’ll be capable of using your set budget in the best possible way.

Testing

Testing is a significant step in every social media marketing strategy.

Testing helps us prevent wastage of budget allocation. By testing, a marketer can assess what’s working and what’s not. And then change his strategy and budget allocation accordingly.

Examining the test results based on the KPIs you set in step #8.

Automation

With the help of automation tools, it gets easier to manage our social media marketing more effectively. 

By automating, we can schedule our post, organize our work, increase efficiency, and plan better. 

With the help of tools like Buffer and Hootsuite, we can create the content all at once and then schedule it for the posting on the best time and day.

Now, after reading this article, I think you are ready to create a social media marketing strategy.

---

How do you develop your Social Media Marketing Strategy?

I’d love to keep the conversation flowing in the comments. 

Do you know someone who could use this piece of information? If so, feel free to pass this along.

If you get the chance to apply it yourself, do let me know in the comment section your experience!

PS: I’m sharing an Infographic below to help you refer to the steps given above. Save it and share it. Cheers!

Social Media Marketing Strategy: Step-by-Step Guide Infographics