How To Build Social Media Marketing Strategy For 2021 And Beyond

Do you want to use social media to market your business? For you to effectively use social media for marketing purposes you have to come up with a good plan. Most businesses go online with the sole purpose of promoting their brands, but they don’t know how to go about it.

You are a business owner, and you must know that social media has several networks that can be used to increase traffic and to attain marketing goals.

How do you attain your goals as a business if you don’t have a strategy or any plans? Worse still, you might not even know the expectations of your audience.

It is important to create strategies and plans. Your strategies will show you where you’re heading. A plan is the actions you will take to reach there.

Building a Social Media Marketing Strategy

The following questions are essential when creating your social media marketing strategy.

Reasons you want to be on social media

The first question is why. You can’t just get on social media because other people are on social media. There are several goals you can set and achieve with social media. You can attract higher traffic on your website, you can promote your blog using social media, you can use social media for marketing purposes, or even use social media channels to sell your product and services to your customers.

You can use social media to hit more than nine goals. These are:

• Increase your brand awareness
• Increase your leads
• Drive higher traffic on your website
• Increase your revenue
• Create a community around your company
• Promote brand engagement
• Provide customer care services
• Increase mentions on media/press

When getting into social media, chances are you will have multiple goals. There are no limits on how many goals you must have. It is advisable to have a couple of goals and set a target to achieve them.

Who Is Your target audience

After knowing why you’re going to be on social media, you have to analyze your audience. Without knowing your audience you won’t be able to know what or where and when to share.

For example, if you are a brand dealing with health products chances are that your audience loves to read about health-related content so you will have to post incredible health content on your social media channels.
The best way to target your audience is by building marketing personas.

You can use the approach below to create marketing personas:

• Who is your audience (age, gender, location, income, job type)
• Your audience’s interests
• What social media platforms your audience uses (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter or LinkedIn)
• When do they pay attention to the type of content you share
• Why are they interested in the content
• How do people embrace the content

If you have been running your business for a while, you probably have an idea of your target. However, if you just started your business, you will have to build a marketing persona from scratch.

What you are going to post on social media

You have to think of the type of content you will post and whether it will be in the form of videos, images, or themes. To remain relevant, you have to share top quality content. Avoid committing the same mistake other businesses are doing by posting excessive promotional content.

Your content should be entertaining as well as informative with little promotional material. Remember, social media platforms are meant for social interaction, not for marketing and selling your product only.

Where will you post

After knowing the kind of content to share, you will proceed to the next step of identifying the ideal social media platforms you will use to post your content. You don’t have to put up your brand on all social media platforms. Just choose the platforms that you feel your target audience can be found in. Again, this is why you should know your audience well.

If you target a younger audience, platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter might be the right places to post your content. Professionals mostly use a platform like LinkedIn so it might not be an effective platform for your young audience. If you want to target high professionals, a professional platform like LinkedIn will help you reach your audience.

When will you share

This is the most ignored part of a social media marketing strategy yet the most important one. In this part, you have to figure out the right time to post your content. For you to choose the right time, you have to know your audience’s behavior or habits. You can’t just post anything at any time.

Try to find out your audience’s online behavior because the behavior will help you know the right time to post. When you put up posts when your target audience is offline, chances are your audience might not see the post.

You might post interesting content but if you post the content at the wrong time chances are that your content might become irrelevant and lack the expected engagement.

Steps For Social Media Marketing Strategy For Businesses

1. Set Your Social Media Marketing Goals

Most businesses face problems when they try their foot on social media because of not setting relevant goals. Business owners know that their businesses are supposed to be on social media but they have no idea what goals they want to achieve with social media marketing strategy.

It would be best if you spent enough time crafting your social media marketing goals to avoid unnecessary challenges that you could avoid by setting goals.

Your social media marketing goals should be compatible with your overall business plan. Of course, you will need strategic goals for the business so your social media marketing goals should complement your business goals.
Set goals that have meaning because you are building them for a suitable social media marketing strategy for your company.

Your social media marketing goals should be SMART:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Attainable
• Relevant
• Time-bound

Smarter goals will help you meet them swiftly knowing that you are smashing them.

Although you want to challenge yourself to attain those goals, you have to keep in mind that your goals should be realistic and achievable.

You need to set limits. We are saying this because you cannot succeed on all social media channels thus, there’s no need of trying out all the channels.
Trying out all the social media networks will strain your resources because they are too many and might not perform well.

You don’t many channels, you only need to perform well on the channels that your target audience spends the most time.

Also read : SpyFu: improve your marketing strategy and get ahead of your competitors in no time!

Suitable Goals Your Business Can Set

Below are some of the typical social media marketing goals that you can set for your business while considering the SMART formula:

• Increasing brand recognition
• Increasing sales
• Increasing your return on investment
• Attracting people to increase in-store sales
• Expanding your customer base

2. Determine Your Metrics

Your social metrics goals should complement the goals you set. Most businesses create a social media presence and invest time and resources on social accounts without considering whether there is a success.

Go through the marketing goals you set and see which metrics give you a clear answer to whether you are hitting your goals or not.

3. Choose Your Audience

Don’t assume that everyone can be your audience. There is no point in having millions of followers who have no interest in what you are offering.
This is why you shouldn’t buy fake followers because they don’t engage with your account and worse of it some are just bots.

You want people who have interests in your products or services and they can spend on what you’re selling.

Choose a market that is relevant to your business demographically. That way, you will not have followers who are not interested in your products.

4. Select The Right Social Media Channels For Your Audience

You don’t need to worry about how you will be able to manage multiple social media channels. You can just choose a few, maybe one or two that are right for your business marketing needs, and manage them.

In most cases, picking up a channel that your audience spends most of their time is one of the best decisions you can take.

How do you discover where your target audience spends their time?
You can find out by surveying and ask your customers their preferred social media channels.

You can start marketing on their preferred social media networks then go wider. Most channels that tend to have various customers are Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Facebook is a beast when it comes to social media marketing for both small and big businesses.

Instagram on the other hand is suitable for businesses that have a lot of visual materials to share.

5. Carry Out A Competitor Analysis

No business operates without competitors. If you are not operating in isolation, you have to carry out a competitor analysis to know what your competitors are doing when it comes to social media marketing strategy.
Learn about their strengths and weaknesses. This will help you know what customers expect and make some improvements to a good customer experience.

Your competitor’s weak points should give you insights into gaps that are yet to be exploited.

Your competitors might have a strong presence on Instagram but a weak presence on Facebook. You can use their weaknesses to your advantage by putting more resources on Facebook instead of heightening the competition on Instagram.

6. Set Up Your Accounts Properly

Your social media accounts should be set properly before promoting content. Customize your profiles using relevant logos, images colors, and graphics. This is a very critical stage because your profile portrays who you are and what you do.

Take time to create a bio and link them to your social accounts.

7. Choose The Type Of Content To Post

All successful businesses know the secret of social media success is determined by the content they post. If you want to tap into that success, you have to consistently post premium quality content.

Many businesses share extremely promotional posts. This is a very huge mistake. Such posts are a turn-off and that is why you shouldn’t post such content.

8. Design Suitable Content For Your Viewers

Create content that is interesting and suitable for sharing with your followers. It would help if you did not forget to include images and videos where necessary. Always remember that a post with a video or image on it is likely to be shared than the one without a video or image.

People most often get attracted to visual content. If you are using visual-based channels like Instagram, you will realize more engagement on your posts when you include a video or image.

Most people tend to decide on a product after watching a video about that product online.

What More?

You can utilize social media to promote your blog too. A blog is a part of your business. If you want to draw more traffic to your blog, can share exciting posts and include a link to your blog so that you can capture the mind of your followers.

Final Word

Building a social media marketing strategy is not a walk in the park because you have to consider the final result. You have to change your thinking and focus on the bigger picture.

However, once you get a grip on it you will realize that a social media marketing strategy is rewarding. A social media marketing strategy guides you so that you won’t just post content aimlessly.