How to Start a Social Media Marketing Strategy

A social marketing strategy helps your business to identify a goal which you want to achieve in your business. It is a guideline created to understand your purpose, audience and optimize the results. Below are the key steps to start the strategy:

1. Set a social marketing goal

You need to know what you want to achieve with the use of social media. The goal should match the vision and mission of your company.

There are some goals which are suitable for your company, which includes to raise brand awareness, improve sales, increase ROI, and gather loyal customers.

2. Research, research, research! Based on your audience

You must understand who is your target audience and how to reach them. You may define your audience by researching on their demographic, interests, and behaviors.

Apart from that, you need to identify the online platforms that your audience use, like Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, WhatsApp etc. Therefore, you can create a post or ad on certain online platform to reach your audience.

3. Identify your social media metrics

Social media metrics is the use of data that determine the impact of social media activity on your business revenue.

Engagement metric is an important data which helps you to understand about the relationships between your business and your followers. There are some metrics you need to pay attention, including reach, clicks, engagement, hashtag performance, organic and paid likes, and sentiment. These data show the effectiveness of your content.

4. Research your competitors

Before you start creating your content, you have to know what your competitors are doing. You need to make a research on them by looking at their ideas or strategies.

From your competition’s presence, you may determine what strategy is working for them and how you can adapt it into your business.

5. Create an engaging social content

You must create a content which is eye catchy. The content should be relevant to your audience and it can capture your audience’ attention.

There are few types of content, including video, image, poster, and text.

6. Timeliness is the top priority

Timeliness is the most important tool. The frequency and time you take to respond your audience will influence their perspective on your brand or your business. Your need a social media monitoring tool which helps to monitor all your channels. You may also interact and respond your audience across all the channels with the tool.

You also need to identify the best time to engage with your audience. A research should be done to learn the best time to post on social media. Hence, your content can reach your audience effectively.

7. Assess your result

After you post a content or ad, you need to monitor the result. You might analyze your result by monitoring the metrics behind your campaign. Hence, you can improve your marketing strategies as the social media is constantly evolving.

Source: https://sproutsocial.com/insights/social-media-marketing-strategy/#competition