Seven Steps to Develop Your Social Media Marketing Strategy

Do you have your social media marketing strategy? If not, we don’t blame you.

Perhaps what matters most is that you are here now, In this post, we’ll walk you through an seven step plan to create a winning social media marketing plan of your own.

1. Set Your Objectives

The more narrow your strategy is the more effective the execution will be. Set specific goals and track the right metrics against the goals in order to set yourself up for a success. Set specific trackable goals.

First step is setting your objectives and goals, without goals you have no may to measure your success on your social media return on investment.

Each of your objectives should be:

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

An example of a SMART goal for your business might be “Grow our Twitter audience by 100 new followers per day.”

With SMART goals, you’ll make sure your goals actually lead to real business results, rather than just lofty ideals. This is the first step of setting a successful social media marketing strategy

Want to get deep into Objectives and Key Results? In the video below, Google Ventures partner Rick Klau.

2. Measure Meaningful Metrics

While metrics like retweets, likes and comments can be easy to track, it’s hard to prove their value for your business. Instead, you focus on targets such as leads generated, referrals, website visits, and conversion rates.

It is important that you differentiate channels, you might want to track different goals for different channels (i.e. use paid campaigns to increase brand awareness, but measure engagement for social post.)

Finally, make sure you align your objectives with your overall social media marketing strategy, this will make is easier for you to show the value of your work.

Now, start developing your social media marketing plan, in order to keep the social media strategy simple start by focusing in four goals. Below is a list of four key customer journey stages that you should focus.

• Awareness: focus your objective on your current and potential audience.
• Engagement: focus on audiences and their interaction with your content.
• Conversion: demonstrate the effectiveness of your social engagement.
• Consumer: reflect how active customers think and feel about your brand.

3. Identify Your Audience

Now that you have set your goals, next step in setting your social media strategy is  to outline your target audience. If you are not engaged on social listening, you are creating your strategy blindfolded.

Breaking down your audience will help you figure out which social media sites your active on, you posting schedule (you can also automate your scheduling via uniclixapp.com), type of content to publish, and your brand voice.

Knowing who your audience is and what they want to see on social media is the key to your content generation strategy, which can lead to likes, comments and share. Knowing your audience is critical in developing your social media fans and convert them into customers for your business. Try creating audience personas based on your social media marketing strategy. For example, a food blog might create different personal based on demographics, cuisine, common reader objective, and needs of each customer type. Such approach helps you sharpen your marketing tactics.

Finally, don’t make assumptions. Analytics can provide you very valuable information on who your followers are, which language they speak, where they live, what content they like and how they interact with your brand on social medial. Such insights will allow you refine your strategy and better targets your adds and curate your content. Social Listening tools like UniClix will allows you to track, analyze, and respond to conversations about your brand and industry online. It’s a key component of audience research

If you don’t have a social listening strategy in place, you’re missing out on valuable insights. What do your customers think about your brand? What are they saying about your competitors?

This guide will show you how to uncover those insights and more. And then we’ll tell you what to do with them.

You can easily run your own market research in minutes with tools like SurveyMonkey Audience 

4. Conduct Social Media Competitive Analysis

It is important to understand your competition, odds are they are already using social media—and that means you can learn from what they’re already doing. Therefore doing competitive analysis allows you to benchmark your metrics against others to see how you stack up.

Identify your competitors
Start by identifying your social media competition, including the platform they use. Once the competitors are identified, the competitive analysis allows you to understand what they’re doing well (and not so well). You’ll get a good sense of what’s expected in your field, which will help you set some social media targets of your own.

Such analysis will help you identify new opportunities. For example, you might find out that your competitors dominates in Instagram, but has little involvement on Twitter. Therefore, you can find new opportunities where you can focus on networks where audience is underserved.

Finally, track your competitors accounts and relevant industry keywords. Keep an eye on their content and use it to evaluate your own objectives and social media marketing strategy. With our UniClix tool you can track your competitors accounts and relevant keywords on the go.

5. Set up & update your social media accounts

Once you decide on the networks that you will focus on, then assure you set appropriate accounts and optimize them in ongoing bases. You might implement different strategy for each network based on your initial assessment analysis. For example, you might use Twitter account for branding , while you use Instagram for customer service and facebook for customer acquisition. Knowing the strategy for each network will help you set a mission statement specific to the social media network and specific objectives for each network/account. Such one sentence statements help you be very specific in goals for each account/ social network.

For example:
-Facebook is best for acquiring new customers via paid advertisement
-Twitter is a place where we build brand awareness and engage press
-LinkedIn is a network where we engage in attracting new talent
-Snapchat is a network where we distribute brand awareness content specific for your consumers

For example, at Uniclix we use Twitter for creating brand awareness and distribute our marketing content for our blog

If you don’t have a specific mission for each channel, then re-consider if having a channel is worth it. You cant have a clear social media marketing strategy without having specific mission defined for each individual channel.

6. Find inspiration

It is important that your brand is unique, however you can always find inspiration from other businesses that have great social presence.

Below are examples of inspirational and successful social media case studies, these example offer valuable insights you can apply to your own goals for each network

https://www.facebook.com/business/success

 7. Consistency and content calendar

Frequency of postings: Posting once a day is bare minimum. You have to make sure your audience is engaging with you. Suggested that you post 3 times a day to increase your engagement and chances for your post to go viral. Think of your social media channel as your store front, closing the store few days a week leads to loss of clients and business; same applies to social media network channels. Not posting is like closing the store unexpectedly for a day.

Third-party scheduler. This method leverages a social media management and posting tool such as UniClix. Where you can schedule your content across your social media platform in advance.

Caption:

• Add captions that are informative and fun, captivating captions can lead to more likes, comments, and followers
• Call to action captions are proven to lead to more comments, likes and bring new followers.

Hashtags: 

• Hashtags are masters of your engagement, try changing the hashtags based on your post. You can always save your hashtags on your phone notepad and copy/paste/edit them for each post.

Sharing content is essential, however its equally important to have a plane in place for when to share the content. Timing is the key. Your calendar needs to account the time you will spend responding to your audience as well

For each of your channel post make sure you tie it back to you mission statement, so everything you post is working towards your goals (i.e. 30% of content will drive back traffic to the blog, 20% of traffic will be be related to lead generation, 10% will be curated from other sources etc.). If you are still not sure what to post, keep this 80-20 rule in mind at all time: 80% of your content should educate, inform and entertain your audience, while 20% will promote your brand.

Related Content: A Guide To Audience Research