Social Media Marketing is a type of digital marketing that uses social media platforms to achieve marketing and branding objectives.

With Social Media, you can instantly reach a large number of people,  and Marketers should not miss out on their chance of marketing on different social media platforms as 59% of the world population uses social media. 

By using social media you can build brand awareness and authenticity, an active community with proper planning and engagement, and user-generated and employee-generated content.

To begin with, the social media strategy you need to determine what your goals are, who your target audience is, and what they want. When you implement a well-thought-out social media strategy for your company, you will earn more customers, and traffic, increase brand awareness, and your company will gain more credibility.

If you’re planning for social media marketing to promote your business, the following tips will be useful:

Evaluate your brand by doing SWOT Analysis ( Strength, Weakness, Opportunity, and Threat). It is used to assess a company’s competitive position and to develop strategic planning. It is used to identify a company’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats leading to fact-based analysis, fresh perspective, and new ideas. 

Before working on a new brand or taking over an existing one, it is necessary to understand the brand thoroughly. That is when SWOT Analysis helps us.

• Strength – In strength, you can describe where your company excels and what sets it apart from the competition. You can mention your unique technology, vision, loyal customer base as well as how powerful your brand is.
• Weakness – Weaknesses are essentially what our company lacks in order to perform its best. It might be fewer resources, more debt, less turnover, or low capital.
• Opportunities – Opportunities refer to external factors that could provide us an edge over our competitors. You must turn your strength into an opportunity and take advantage of consumer trends.
• Threats – Threat refers to potential factors that could undermine our company. It might be new regulations that can threaten our operations, financial and market trends, or what our competitors are doing successfully.

Understanding your Target Audience

The next step in social media strategy is to understand your target audience. The content that you share on social media should resonate with your target audience as the main goal behind social media planning is to get engagement from your target audience. You must first determine what type of content your audience likes and then ensure that it is consistent with your brand tone since you have to acquire these followers and convert them into your customers.

You can create different personas to represent the ideal audience of your brand. The personas can be divided into groups based on their age, gender, location, interests, the type of content they consume, and how they consume it.

If your business has been running on social media for a while, you can check the analytics and determine the best TG for your brand.

Competitor Analysis 

To create an effective social media strategy, you must keep track of your competition. You can analyze what type of content they’re posting, and what works best for them (or not). You should also keep a track of their reach, engagement, and likes.

Use all of the above information to improve your social media strategy. 

You can also keep a watch on your competitors by using listening tools like Hootsuite, buffer, buzz sumo, and many more. All you have to do is use the tool to search for their account handle, social media channel, and other relevant keywords. In this way, you can keep track of the exciting trends or how many people are talking about your competition on social media.

Choosing the right SM Platform for your business

The next step is to choose which social media platform works best for your business. It is not necessary for your brand to be on all social media platforms. You need to determine where your target audience would be while ensuring that your brand image is maintained.

Every social media platform requires a different strategy. Once you finalize the social media platform for your brand, you can start working on the strategy. For Example, Instagram is used by Gen-Z and Millenials. Here, you can share interactive and fun content. On Pinterest, women outnumber men. LinkedIn has a user base of well-educated people, you can share industry-specific and education content here.

Set up your profile – Now that we have settled on the social media platform, we can begin setting up the new profiles or optimizing the existing ones as per the guidelines. 

• We need to make sure all the fields are filled.
• All the relevant keywords should be included in our social media bio or description.
• Use consistent logos and messages on all social media platforms.
• Business contact numbers should be included on social media platforms.

Create Compelling Content

You should constantly create unique posts for each social media platform to stand out from the competitors. Many brands solve customer queries on Twitter while posting engaging or educational content on Instagram as per their business goals. 

Social Media Strategy is not just about uploading posts, you must make sure that your goals are aligned with each post that you share on social media.

You’ll need to plan a content calendar for this. A Content Calendar is the best way to keep track of important events and holidays. Social Media Campaigns gain more attention during important events. For example, you can launch a new product on women’s day or organize a giveaway on Christmas. Make sure that some of your content drives traffic to the website, including curated content, lead generation content, and a few contents on your company culture.

While planning content makes sure that we include the unique selling point of our brand, value proposition (why a customer should choose your product or service), Define a problem and then solution, benefits of buying our product, and educational content in different formats such as static, animated video, interactive stories, live videos, and user-generated content. You can use social media management tools to plan your content and schedule your posts.

Analyze the data and identify which content is most effective for your business. Once you’ve identified the strategy or format that isn’t working, re-evaluate your strategy and do testing to evaluate which sort of content works for your business. You can also analyze when and how often you should upload your content. 

Setting up KPIs

Setting up relevant Social Media KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) is the best way to keep track of your social media strategy. 

Some of the common KPIs are:

• Engagement Rate
• Website Traffic from Social Media
• Conversion Rate from Social Media
• Leads Generated from Social Media
• Revenue Generated from Social Media

You can decide your KPI based on your social media strategy. 

Likes and followers don’t mean much to your business as they are just numbers that might not get converted but make sure that you meet your KPI on a regular basis.