Nowadays, when 90% of all social media users have used their social media accounts and profiles to engage with a business or a brand, it goes without saying that social media marketing is hugely important to building a successful brand, communicating with your target audience, and driving some traffic to your company’s website.
But what we also know is that any digital marketing efforts you make could well be a waste of time and money without a detailed strategy in place first. Having a winning social media marketing strategy is vital for giving your digital marketing activities a sense of purpose, helping you define your goals, your target audience, and setting critical targets for the year.
Of course, setting up an excellent social media strategy will be time-consuming, and it can undoubtedly pose to be a roadblock. Still, strategic thinking is vital to get measurable results. To make things easier for you, we’ve put together our seven steps to creating a winning social media strategy for your brand.
Set Key Objectives
First and foremost, you have to define your key goals and objectives and ensure they are achievable and measurable. Examples of standard, quantifiable goals in social media strategies are things like raising brand awareness, driving website traffic, conversions, and so on.
Next, decide the things that you want to achieve, and set realistic targets with a time period, like to organically grow Instagram followers by hiring an Instagram growth service, for example. Don’t stress if your targets end up being a bit off the mark, as setting these figures for the first time could be challenging.
Define Your Strategy’s Main Messages
Next in line is to define your main messages for your overall social media strategy. This involves coming up with your top-line messages, the “who we are and what we do” of your business brand, compressed into short, snappy sentences. These are the messages you will try to spread around through every social media activity you generate.
Determine the Ideal Social Media Platforms for Your Strategy
Afterward, determine which social media platforms you will use: will you focus on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or TikTok? Or perhaps you’re going to tackle all of them. Anyhow, ask yourself where your target audience is based and which channels they are actively using.
Having a presence across multiple channels is a fantastic asset. Still, there’s no point in creating an account on a platform that your target audience doesn’t use, or in starting a business account and then abandoning it. Each platform has a different style, purpose, and audience, so make sure that you select the right ones for your business.
Plan Your Strategic Activities
This is where you should get into the detail of your strategy and plan your activities on social media channels. First, consider your key messages, objectives, target audience, and then plan the steps, initiatives, and activities you will implement to achieve these objectives. It would be best to do this by taking an objective or a goal and strategically planning particular activities to achieve this goal.
Will influencer marketing help you reach your target audience, or would you instead engage in social listening? There’s certainly a lot to get excited about here, but always make sure you have your objectives, audience, and leading messages in mind.
Scheduling
After that, you need to schedule your marketing activities across your chosen social media platforms for the year. Determine the critical periods for your brand, look at events or holidays you may want to incorporate, make decisions on when you should run specific campaigns, and schedule time for activity reviews.
Content Creation
Next in line is to create the content needed to carry out your strategy: images, videos, blogs, infographics, etc. While developing your content, make sure that it’s valuable, top quality, and tailored for each social media channel where you’ll use it.
Think about your content strategy: will you incorporate user-generated content, what kind of blog posts you’ll write, how will you repurpose old content for multiple uses? Content is king, so make sure to set time aside for content creation multiple times annually.
Time to Roll Out
Finally, you’re now ready to roll out your social media strategy across your channels and follow your calendar, post content, launch campaigns, and carry out scheduled activities. While you’re at it, it’s essential that you continually measure and monitor your results to determine the most effective content and approach for moving forward.
Final Thoughts
Executing each of the steps above as part of your overall social media strategy will ensure that your digital marketing efforts are cautiously considered, effectively implemented, and measured for results. Follow them, and you’ll develop a winning social media strategy in no time.
