We are now in a society that has become dependent on social media. From any type of business, both big and small, having brand awareness online is no longer an option but a necessity. However, with the increasing popularity of various social media platforms, brands are becoming more unsure of what they should do, wondering what steps they should take or if there are any tips on how they should approach it.
In this article, we will discuss and delve deeper into the best practices that brands should learn about and consider incorporating into their social media marketing strategy.
Social Media Marketing Strategy Guide
Social media platforms enable brands to interact with their audiences, increase conversions, and, ultimately, increase sales.
1. Identify Goals
A smart business practice is to always start by identifying your goals. Your goals are what give your marketing campaign vision and purpose while providing your brands with a benchmark for determining your success and highlighting the other factors that need to be improved.
Setting goals is the foundation of any successful social media marketing strategy. While brands are aware of the things that they want to achieve with their marketing campaigns, it is not enough. They should also ensure that their goals are realistic and can be used as metrics for future marketing plans and strategies. With a clear business goal, brands will know the steps they need to take in order to achieve their objectives. This is where the S.M.A.R.T. marketing objectives come into light.
S.M.A.R.T. stands for specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound – the method for creating targets for your social media marketing strategies that have a clear and achievable timeline that aligns with your business objectives.
- Specific
An effective social media marketing goal should be clear and specific. Specific marketing objectives enable effective planning. You have to make sure that your goals are specific enough to make them a to-do list.
Your general goal can help you determine where you want to focus your efforts. However, putting ambiguous goals on your to-do list, such as “I want my brand to be known online,” would be difficult. Is being able to build brand awareness on a single social media platform count? What about the number of followers of your brand? Brands should set goals that are specific enough to track.
- Measurable
Your business should have the means to measure your social media marketing success. Determine a quantifiable objective so you can track progress and determine whether or not you met the goal or not. When developing your objectives, avoid ambiguous terms and instead, exercise clarity.
Example of a measurable goal: I want to reach 100k followers on Instagram.
If you are unable to determine the effectiveness of your marketing strategy in achieving your goal, you should reconsider your goal and set a more specific one.
- Attainable
Ensure that your goal is realistic and realizable and that you will be able to achieve it given the right circumstances. There’s nothing wrong with having high expectations for success, but you should also consider whether your marketing objectives are realistic given your brand’s capacity and resources.
Effective goal setting in a successful marketing campaign ensures that you are planning your steps wisely and are able to establish a realistic time frame that will allow you to carry out those steps.
- Relevant
The goal of social media marketing is to connect with your target audiences and effectively communicate your business offerings as well as your brand message, allowing you to successfully acquire, retain, and grow your loyal customers. For this reason, your marketing goals must correlate with the objectives your brand wants to achieve.
Creating a top-down hierarchy of goals in your marketing strategy creates a strategic approach to what you should work on first based on the level of importance of each goal.
- Time-Bound
Your marketing goals must be time-bound. A timeline depicts your marketing plan’s chronological progression over time, from objectives and strategy to completed action items. Social media marketing goals should have a duration or a time limit to add accountability to help you make sure that your goals will be met.
A timeline also allows you to track progress and adjust your objectives accordingly. If one of your goals is nearly complete, you may decide to stretch it to see if you can accomplish even more.
2. Understand Your Audience
You can’t gain followers unless you know who you’re trying to attract first. Your message will be ineffective unless it has been tailored to the audience you are attempting to reach. Making relevant audience research is essential for a successful social media campaign.
Who are your customers? What are the things they care about? Do they already know your brand? What do they think about your brand? What are the things they need to see to make them believe that your business offerings are worth their money? These are some of the common questions you should ask yourself to ensure that your social media marketing strategy includes thorough target audience research.
Determining your target audience involves much more than just a superficial buyer persona because it includes their pain points, motivations, and how your brand can provide the best solution that they require.
3. Develop a Better Content Planning
A content strategy is the one that guides your content development in order to achieve your business objectives. Your content strategy is regarded as your vision. Even the finest content strategy will fail if there is no clear and transparent plan for putting it into action.
A well-crafted and executed content strategy for your social media marketing campaigns not only help your brand drive more traffic and conversions, but it also connects you to your audiences, building a strong and trusting relationship.
4. Create Interesting Content
Content is the foundation of all forms of marketing. As a result, it should always be pertinent to your branding and target audience. It is what used to attract, engage, and connect your brand to your audiences.
To promote the release of the film Tomb Raider, Tanke had the idea of collaborating with the famous web granny, Danielle, to a series of challenges confronting Alicia Vikander, the actor who played Lara Croft. The promotional content captured the interest of the audience by highlighting the funny and entertaining reactions of the influencer to the series of challenges.
Whether your brand is trying to sell products or services, well-crafted content in your social media marketing can be a very effective way to attract customers and motivate them to avail your brand offerings.
5. Engage With Your Audience
Engaging with your followers is essential for developing a community and helps your brand to appear more personable.
There are several methods for engaging your audience. These include:
- Respond
- Tag
- Link
- Hashtags
Social media is not a one-way street. Social media users are able to message or leave comments on the brands’ social media posts with their inquiries about your brand.
Respond
Commenting and liking other people’s posts, personally responding to new followers’ messages, listening to their concerns, and addressing their issues quickly all help your brand grow in terms of building awareness through social media platforms.
Tag
Some followers might be interested or have inquiries about particular information about your brand; you can tag them when you post about it. This type of social media engagement gives your brand a positive image and shows your audience that you care about them.
Link
Keeping your audience engaged and interested in your blogs with the intent of making conversions is a real challenge . Your content may be excellent but you’ll still wonder why your conversion rate remains low.
Provide links to your blogs, In your content strategy, include links in your social media posts. This tells your followers what you want them to do next.
Use Hashtags
Social media posts can be hectic with large numbers of comments and replies. This is also true for posting your brand promotional content. Help your audience cut through the clutter by using hashtags.
6. Establish Brand Authority
Brand authority is the trust a brand has earned among customers. It is also the level or degree to which they regard your brand as an expert in the field or industry your brand operates. There are several factors that contribute to your brand’s online authority. It includes compelling content as well as customer engagement via social media. Maintaining an active social media presence is an effective way to connect with your target audiences. The following are some tips to effectively build your brand authority online.
- Create Authoritative Content
Adding a blog section on your website is a good idea to help your brand stand out and drive traffic to your website. A blog post with authoritative content can elevate your brand to a reliable source of information. Engaging blog content can also provide your audience with a reason to visit your website.
- Keep Your Social Media Profiles Up To Date
Over time, content posts on your brand’s social media profile become uninteresting and outdated. It is important to keep your social media pages updated with fresh and relevant content. You may have a prospective customer read your post, and you do not want them to come across any irrelevant content. This is part of the reasons why you should update your social media posts on a regular basis with relevant and evergreen content.
- Host Events
Hosting events to promote your brand takes time and quickly depletes your campaign budget. However, it helps your brand get recognized by other prominent brands and new communities.
Gaz Réseau Distribution France, a French gas distribution company hosted events in collaboration with Tanke with the goal of boosting brand awareness and traffic to the Showroom. The event was separated into two phases; First, the opening event where the brand’s clients, partners, and the influencers Showroom are present. Second, is the DIY, Do It Yourself workshop where the influencers introduced the GRDF’s services. Tanke organized these events on a mini-site where the public could sign up for the workshops.
Not every brand has the resources to organize large-scale events. One solution is for the brand to sponsor popular events relevant to its field. Big events offer paid sponsorships, which allow brands to reach out to event attendees.
7. Maintain Brand consistency
Brand consistency is essential for effectively building your brand authority. If you do not keep your brand consistent, your audience may become confused.
Brand consistency allows you to stand out from the crowd. Maintaining your branding voice, color, and style across multiple social media platforms sets you apart from your competitors.
8. Collaborate with Influencers
Collaborate with the right influencers who are relevant to your marketing objectives, depending on the goals that your brand wants to achieve.
Cucci partnered with Tanke to promote the launch of the first fragrance in the series of four that were designed by Alessandro Michele, the avant-garde Gucci Bloom. Tanke collaborated with social media influencers and artists to produce an artistic interpretation of the perfume.
The influencer campaign, partnering with 28 social influencers, was able to reach 612K followers online and produce 167 content pieces in a form of photography, painting, paper art, set design, floral composition, and collage.
Rather than collaborating with influencers who may or may not positively contribute to your social media marketing strategy, setting your campaign goal before deciding on the type of influencers with whom you will collaborate allows you to effectively reach your objectives.
9. Stay On Top With Daily Posts
TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube are social media channels that look for consistency. Their algorithm preferes accounts that post content regularly. Determine what is best for your brand. It could be once per day or three times per week. However, you should stick to it. When deciding on your posting schedule, aim for consistency.
Every Successful Campaign Starts With A Careful Planning
A well-planned and effective social media strategy boosts your performance online. Utilizing novel ways to interact with your audience helps your brand to further grow by reaching key communities. There is no denying that social media marketing has numerous advantages for all businesses, large and small.
Social media platforms are always changing and reliant on new emerging trends. Brands can fully benefit from the advantages that social media marketing has to offer by utilizing the best practices of social media marketing.
