A social media strategy represents course of action you intent to do and hope to achieve on social media. They guide you to see what is working for your business, and what is not. The more you plan everything in details, the better outcome of your social media strategy will be. Every social media differs from each other, and each of them can be used for content re-purposing. How you can use each social media platform for greater results will be explained in upcoming blogs.
TOP 8 steps that you should always start with:
Set SMART goals
Research Target Audience
Establish Most Important Metrics
Know Your Competition
Create Engaging Content and Its Calendar
Assess Your Results and Optimize
Communicate challenges, and wins with your team
Evaluate and adjust your strategy
1.In order for you to truly achieve your marketing efforts or any success on social media, you should always start with S.M.A.R.T. goals. It stands for:
Specific – Be clear, and specific as much as possible. The narrower the goal is, the more effective planning will be. Usually, you ask yourself 5 “W” questions (Who? What? Where? When? Why?) to help you out with planning.
Measurable – Main question here is “How” – much, many, to. Your goals should always be measurable, if not you can not track progress, and stay inspired. Basically you need affirmation that will prove you are making any progress.
Achievable – Your goals should be reasonable, making sure that you have enough resources to achieve them. Ask yourself can you accomplish your goal within a given period of time, and how much time you need for it.
Relevant – Goals of your business need to be relevant with your social media strategy. You should align them with your values, and also with your long-term intentions.
Time bound – We all know in order to do something we need to set a target date, so you can start focusing on it. You should take into consideration what can you achieve from this day up until six months, or even a year, as well as what can I do today?
2.After you are done aligning your goals with S.M.A.R.T. strategy, you should always consider who is your target audience. They represent the specific group of people you want to reach with your social channels. They share similar interest, are more likely to buy your products/services based on their mutual needs. Nothing will work if your digital marketing strategy is not tailored to your audience.
In order to have great insight in your target audience, you should create their persona. Consider their:
Age
Gender
Ethnicity
Marital Status
Location
Occupation
Job Title
Annual Income
Level of Education
Goals and value
Challenges and Pain Points
Sources of Information (Internet (Blog/Websites), Books, Magazines, Influencers, etc)
Role in Purchase Process
3.After you are clear on your business goals, and desired group of people that you want to target, you should establish most important metrics. For every goal you need related metric, which will help you understand if your social media strategy is hitting success or not.
On social media you may come across different metrics such as awareness, engagement, conversion, consumers.
Awareness metrics can be looked at from different aspects. It represents how well-informed customers are about a certain situation or your business. Here we have brand awareness, audience growth rate, post reach, sharing. As well as impressions (how many times a post shows up in someone’s timeline).
Engagement metrics represent data if any customer did relevant action on your social media. Here we can include likes, favorites, comments, as well as average engagement rate. You can measure average likes as compared to your total followers, or average sharing of your posts relative to the number of unique views.
Conversion metrics that help you with a demonstration of the effectiveness of your social media engagement. Here we have:
Conversion rate – the number of visitors who after clicking on a link in your post, take action on a page (ex. register to your newsletter)
Click-Through Rate – how often people click on the call-to-action button that you have on your post.
Bounce Rate – the percentage of people that visit your website, but quickly leave the page they land on without taking any particular action.
Cost-per-Click – the amount you are paying per individual click on your sponsored social media post.
Cost-per-Thousand-Impressions – the amount you are paying every time a thousand people scroll down your social media post that you sponsored.
Social Media Conversion Rates – the total percentage of conversions that came from social media.
Customers metrics tells us how your customers feel about your brand through testimonials. Customer testimonials actually represent any review, , comment, assessment or endorsement by customers as regards to your brand.
4.Knowing your competition is the next step you should consider allowing you to learn, adapt, and grow. Ask yourself who are your competitors? How do they position themselves? What kind of pricing strategies are they using? What are their strength and weaknesses? By giving answers to these basic questions, you will be able to analyze your competition, learn from them, and find a way to differ, so you can attract customers.
By knowing who your competitors are, and what they are offering, can help you to make your products, services, and marketing strategies stand out. You can use this knowledge to take an advantage over your competitors, by exploiting whether there are gaps in the market you can exploit.
5.Create engaging content that will immediately have positive impact on your customers, encouraging them to share your posts. The way you can make your content engaging is by diversifying your content. Use text, images, infographics, quotes, videos, etc. Use subheadings that will clearly define what is located where making it readable. Be short, in terms of don’t circle around one or two information for too long. Just keep it short, and to the point. To add up, you also need to come up with interesting titles. Do not put anything that your readers may consider “boring”. Try to be compelling, and fascinating. Provide readers with facts, links, add call-to-action button such as sharing, downloading free template, registering to your newsletter, etc.
6.Furthermore, the steps you may consider is assessing and optimizing your social media strategy results:
Analyzing previous performance. Learn from your mistakes. See what is working and what is not.
Analyzing market and competitive data, enabling you to see what is happening in the environment that your business is operating in.
PDCA System (Plan. Do. Check. Analyze)
Plan – This is first stage of PDCA cycle, where you basically plan whole strategy out. Here you put out your ideas, brainstorm good options for business activities. During plan be sure to state your success criteria and make them as measurable as possible. To put it into simple words, you identify objectives for your business and then choose a course of action to achieve the desired objectives.
Do – This is the second step where you are implementing a chosen course of action. When you are done planning, at this step, in order to play safe, you can test it through trials, through small projects. For example, you could organize a trial within a department, in a limited geographical area, or with a particular demographic. As you run the pilot project, gather data to show whether the change has worked or not. Based on the gathered info, you are moving to the next step.
Check – At this step, you basically monitor the results of the implemented course of action. For example, you can analyze your pilot project’s results against the expectations that you defined in Step 1, to assess whether your idea was a success. So you evaluate the results by comparing them with results expected when the plan was developed. If you do not like how things turned out you can return to step 1, or proceed to step 4.
Act – If you are happy with what you achieved, you can maintain the current directions. If results seem to be unacceptable, you can return to the planning stage to develop and implement an alternative course of action. As with PDCA Cycle, you are not starting everything from the scratch, your improved process or product becomes the new baseline, but you continue to look for ways to make it even better.
7.Communicate challenges, and wins with your team. Every small win makes you happy, it gives you motivation to keep going, it builds your confidence. Also, you will know where you are standing, and what you need to improve.
8.Evaluate and adjust your strategy. This step is actually a summary of all the mentioned steps. You basically evaluate everything that you implemented in your strategy from initial stage, up until the end. Where you are happy with results, just keep moving. If certain results bother you, consider adjusting strategy to closely meet your desired goals and ambitions.