Create Successful Social Media Strategy In 8 Simple Steps

The landscape of social media will change drastically in 2019. Hence, if you are running your business online, then you must be aware of how to create a successful social media marketing strategy for your business in 2019.

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The reach of social media has expanded immensely over the last few years. According to a report, there are 3.03 billion active Social Media users who frequently uses social media.

Even if you’re not a fan of social media, it’s okay. It doesn’t have to be a great deal to stay away from social media unless and until you’re really concerned about your personal brand. But, what about your business? Can you afford to lose the benefits that your business can harvest with its social presence. Or should I say with the right social media marketing strategy?

Why even have a social presence?

Because your customers are there. Look at these mesmerizing stats on Social Media rolled out in 2018, it’s a big surprise for everyone to see the numbers, only in millions and billions.

Nowadays, it’s very common to see businesses just showing their logos on different social networks. It’s even more common for many businesses to not align their social media marketing strategy with their business goals. They treat it in isolation and sometimes not even have a strategy.

Why not zoom out a bit and have an overview of how social media strategy can have an influence on your business?

Why does your business need a social media marketing strategy?

Apart from considering that social media has the fastest growing user base in the world, it’s crucial to perceive the enormous chance of delivering value to your audience, look at the benefits of having a social media marketing strategy for your business.

• It allows you to reach your target audience easily
• An effective social media marketing plan helps you build an online community
• Social media helps you receive instant feedback from your audience
• Social media marketing allows you to get web-traffic and leads
• Social media marketing Strategy is cost-effective
• Social media helps you build brand awareness and exposure
• Social media helps you enhance your customer service

I have broken the entire process into 8 simple steps which will help you build your Social Media Marketing Strategy for your business.

8 steps to build a capable social media marketing strategy

1. Identify your business goals from day one
2. Craft your marketing objectives
3. Understand the audience persona
4. Research competition and know what to do
5. Develop a content marketing strategy
6. List down the resources and investment
7. Distribute the tasks among your team members
8. Track your social media metrics and ROI

The following social media marketing tips will definitely help you to create a successful brand online. Have a look at it.

1. Identify Your Business Goals From Day One

Why does your business exist at first place? Does it provide the best investment support to startups? Or like us, helping more businesses and brands to do effective social media marketing from one place, by saving a ton of time.

Understand and identify your primary business goal in the beginning, then break it down into personalized secondary goals in order to make the process simpler and straight forward. Later, every secondary goal can be allocated in a strategic manner. For example, building brand awareness, increasing customer loyalty and retention or increasing sales and alike.

Every social media activity should serve your business goal. Jumping into social media just because it’s easy to create a profile and follow people will make no difference. It’s all about your brand reputation online.

Make sure to have a clear social media goal as it would help you to measure your social media success. Having too many social media goals would ruin your chances of obtaining desired social media success.

2. Craft Your Social Media Marketing Objectives

Business goals will look shallow if they aren’t aligned with the right marketing parameters to keep a track of what is achieved and what isn’t.

Let’s say your business goal is to generate leads, then email subscriptions and signups should be a sensible metric to track.

Marketing objective should put your business goals into numbers. Let’s take the above example, your marketing objective can be set to achieve 45% more email subscriptions this month than that of the previous month.

Lack of benchmarking in a marketing effort makes it doubtful to achieve, so it is recommended to take your previous results as a baseline for the future objectives.

The above marketing objective is SMART-

• Specific- It has a specific vision of increasing email subscription
• Measurable- The vision has numbers that can be measured
• Achievable- The numbers are within the reach of capability
• Relevant- The objective is aligned with the business goal
• Time-based- The time frame is set for a month to achieve the objective

Now that you know how to build your marketing objectives that are aligned to your business goals, it’s time to clarify who is your audience so that the social media marketing strategy can build for that particular persona.

3. Understand The Audience Persona On Different Social Platforms

Your business is never about you, it has always been about people you provide value to. It’s not easy to find the right people that might be interested in your product or service. You need the right approach to get started.

Start with asking the right questions.

Before you implement your social media marketing effort or spend money, ask a few questions that I have mentioned below:

• What is the demographics of your audience persona?
• What is the educational background and career path?
• In which industry are they involved in?
• What is their job role or title?
• Whom do they report to?
• How does their day look like?
• What tools do they use to perform certain tasks?
• What are their biggest challenges?
• How does success look like for them?
• From where do they get the information?
• In which social network do they participate in?
• How do they search for vendors or sellers online?
• How do they prefer to interact with online products?
• How do they make a purchase?
• Find the last purchase they have made.

Once you have analyzed and answered the above questions, you need to organize the information you’ve gathered about the persona properly.

By doing this, you will know who is your audience and how to engage with them with your content on social media, resulting in more conversions.

Don’t put yourself into trouble by having many numbers of personas. Focus on one or two in the beginning.

4. Research Competition And Know What To Do

Your social media marketing strategy cannot hit your expectations until or unless you research about your competitors.

A lot of businesses fail on social media because they don't invest time in creating an effective social media marketing plan. Without having clarity about your social media goals, you won't be able to achieve success.

The best way to start promoting your business on social media is to look what your competitors are doing. What is working best for them?

Doing this will keep you updated about your competitor’s activity on social media which can be brought back to your marketing efforts to gain positive results.

Have a close eye on your competitor’s social profiles and every other point that you think is necessary.

Things to look at while analysing competitor’s social profiles-

• Followers and followings
• Posting frequency
• Time of day
• Type of content (link, image, infographic, GIF or video)
• Context of content (humorous, promotional, motivational or actionable)
• Track their engagement rate on different Social Networks

Even though you don’t have the exact numbers as you’re researching externally, it’s good to have an overview of your competitor’s performance. This exercise is great for benchmarking.

Not only will you be able to recognize key areas that you can enhance upon in regards to your content creation, search engine optimization, and social media engagement, but you can also help establish your company's presence with potential customers, blog readers/subscribers and social media users.

5. Develop A Content Marketing Strategy

You cannot integrate your business goals with social media marketing strategy without getting into content marketing.

Content Marketing Strategy is one of the important parts of your overall marketing objectives, which refers to the creation and distribution of self-created content -- like written, visual and downloadable.

Content can be produced in-house or by outsourcing, and can be directed towards your target persona on social media. Without great content social media is meaningless and without social media, nobody will know about your content. Use them together to reach and convert your prospects.

Different types of content for marketing strategy

• Blog posts
• Whitepapers
• eBooks
• Videos
• Webinars
• Podcasts
• Slides/Powerpoints
• Visual content
• FAQs
• Feature articles
• Press releases
• News
• Case studies
• Buyer guides

To manage all this, what you need is a content calendar, that will help you map out everything from content creation to publishing on different social networks.

There are many researches and studies that explain the different posting times for different type of content according to the timezone and audience behavior worldwide. It can help you to become more productive and less annoying to your audience.

Overlooking your competitor’s content strategy can give you corresponding ideas to get started.

Measure and track the meaningful metrics of your content and see how’s it consumed.

6. List Down The Resources And Investment

In order to understand your investment and required resources, look at the tactics you’ve chosen to achieve your business goals and marketing objectives.

Make an extensive list of tools and resources you need for your overall social media marketing strategy.

• Time - Time to research, create and share content on social media, keeping social media channels up-to-date and engage with your audience on social media.

• Design - When you create design like image, infographic or video for your content to look appealing in order attract audience, it comes into the investment part as well.

• Tools - You can invest in social media tools like Statusbrew, Hootsuite and Buffer to automate your social media scheduling, listening and reporting. It can save a lot of your time. Remember to calculate the ROI for the period of time you run the campaign. For example, if your campaign lasts for 2 months then don’t consider the tool expenses for the year.

• Money - You may also spend money in social media advertising like boosting posts on Facebook, promoting tweets or sponsoring posts on LinkedIn.
  Almost every business decides their budget first and allocate resources to their social media marketing strategy accordingly. If your budget is staying short of need then you must prioritize your tactics according to your ROI timeframe.

For example, automating your social media posting and social referral can be the part of the most important tactics as they are meant to provide faster results than other techniques.

7. Distribute The Tasks Among Your Team Members

Implementing a succuessful social strategy can be confusing at many turns as it requires multiple resources and efforts. In order to prevent it from getting overlapped or messy, distribute the work among team members by assigning them a role. This can make the process more productive and less complex.

When everyone knows their roles and responsibilities, it takes less time in execution.

Use Statusbrew for teams feature to manage your social media activities like social scheduling, social listening and reporting by assigning different roles and permissions to different team members, it’s the most productive way to act on Social Media.

You can also use tools like Trello, Basecamp or ActiveCollab to manage your team tasks, team communication tools like Slack can be a jackpot for you.

Assigning roles can look like-

• Blog post creation and distribution - Mark
• Video content creation and editing - Daniel
• Social media engagement - Annie
• Advertising (retargeting, paid ads on Social Media) - Peter
• Social referral program - David
• Customer service - Jim

8. Track Your Social Media Metrics And ROI

Your social media marketing strategy is not written only once. Along the way, you might find the discrepancy in a few tactics which are not providing you any result. Here, you can aim to have a change in your Social Media Marketing framework. This is where the Social Media Metrics come into play.

Tracking the right social media metrics can answer whether your marketing efforts are on track or there is a need to pay attention. Tracking right metrics can help you stick to your business goals throughout the process.

Your social media marketing strategy should provide you the relevant Social Media ROI. This is what matters at the end of the day.

Takeaway: We have come up with a complete guide to measuring your Social Media Metrics and Social Media ROI.

Eager to know from you

I know that this is a lot of information, but to get the right results -- we all need a right path. Social strategy requires energy, time, creativity and self-discipline.

Do you have a clear social media marketing strategy? What tools do you use to keep your team moving ahead?

Let me know in the comments.