Building Your Social Media Marketing Strategy

What is a Social Media Marketing Strategy?

A social media marketing strategy is a plan of the activities and content you are going to share on your social media channels.

This includes information about:

  • topics
  • phrases and sayings
  • memes
  • images
  • website links
  • post engagement tactics
It also includes details of your goals, target audience, budget, dates and times.

What Information Does a Social Media Marketing Plan Need?

When writing your social media marketing plan, you will need to ask yourself these W questions:

  • who is your target audience?
    • age and gender
    • location
    • financial details
    • likes and dislikes
    • needs and wants
    • problems they need solving
    • why they use social media
    • information they like and dislike
  • what platforms does your target audience use?
    • where do they spend their time?
    • how often do they use social media?
    • why do they use social media?
    • what devices do they use?
    • what goals or challenges do they have?
    • how much time do they spend on social media?
  • why do you want to spend time promoting your business on social media?
    • to increase website traffic
    • raise brand awareness
    • improve search engine ranking
    • make more sales
    • get new leads
    • provide another avenue for customer service
  • what information are you wanting to share with your audience?
    • jokes and memes
    • images
    • behind the scenes
    • blogs
    • products
    • testimonials
    • recommendations
    • videos
    • live shares
    • tone of voice, colours and text to match your brand image
  • when are you going to share information with your audience?
    • times and days
    • seasonal events
    • special sale dates
Once you have collected all of this information, it's time to get building your social media strategy!

How to Create an Effective Social Media Strategy

We've made a list of eight steps to follow to help you build your social media plan:

1. Set SMART goals

These are goals which are:

  • specific
  • measureable
  • attainable
  • relevant
  • time specific
2. Understand your target audience
This means creating specific audience personas, as well as researching which platforms they are using.
3. Find out more about your competition
Conducting an in-depth analysis of who your competition are, what they are doing on social media, the platforms they use, who engages with their posts, the types of posts which get high levels of engagement and the topics they cover can help you find areas where you can step in and dominate.
4. Identify what is and isn't working for you
Conduct a social media audit on your business. Identify the things that are and aren't working and if your audience is using the same platforms.
5. Work on your social media profiles
If you haven't already got social media profiles, create accounts on the channels your audience is using. If you do, not is the time to improve your profiles, and close accounts on the channels you will no longer use.
6. Research potential content
It's time to spend a fair amount of genuine research hours scrolling through social media! Look for things which inspire, entertain and engage you. Asking your audience for ideas on the types of content they would want to see is also a good strategy.
7. Create a content calendar
Now is the time to put all of your information together and create a calendar which includes information about the content you will post, as well as the content to be posted. The 20/80 rule is worth following, where 20% is business promotion posts and the remaining 80% is entertainment or education based posts.
 
8. Testing and evaluating your strategy
Once your social media strategy has been going for a while, spend time looking at how effective it has been. This means tracking your data using analytics, testing campaigns, recording down what has and hasn't worked, undertaking surveys and plenty of observation!
For further information on using social media effectively to market your business, take a read of these articles we have written:
Tags: social media  

Posted: Monday 20 January 2020


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