Just a few years ago, you could get away with building a social media marketing strategy on the fly. As long as you were present, you were doing more than your competitors–right?

Well it’s now 2018 and not much of the same logic applies today! With 30% of millennials saying they engage with a brand on social at least once a month, your strategy can’t be only about existence.

We want to provide you and your marketing team with the right steps to take toward a successful social strategy so your brand isn’t left in the dust.

7 Steps in Creating a Winning Social Media Marketing Strategy

1. Create Social Media Marketing Goals That Solve Your Biggest Challenges

The first step to any strategy is to understand what you want out of your efforts. Social media marketing isn’t about flipping a switch and calling it a day. Instead, social media planning should be looked at like cooking.

Once you have your ingredients, you follow a recipe and presto! But that’s not always the case.

That’s why creating goals is so critical to the first part of your social media strategy. At the same time, it’s best to set goals that you know are attainable. Asking for 1 million new Instagram followers in 2018 is unrealistic. With achievable goals, you’re more likely to stick to the original plan and continue to take on new hurdles as you complete old ones.

Social Media Goals to Consider…

Goal setting is a staple of all marketing and business strategies. Social media is no exception.

Of course, with a range of social capabilities, it can be difficult to determine exactly what your objectives should be. For guidance, here are some common social media goals to consider:

• Increase brand awareness: To create authentic and lasting brand awareness, avoid a slew of promotional messages. Instead, focus on meaningful content and a strong brand personality through your social channels.
• Higher quality of sales: Digging through your social channels is nearly impossible without monitoring or listening to specific keywords, phrases or hashtags. Through more efficient social media targeting, you reach your core audience much faster.
• Drive in-person sales: Some retailers rely on social media marketing efforts to drive in-store sales. Is your brand promoting enough on social to reward those who come to you? What about alerting customers to what’s going on in your stores?
• Improve ROI: There’s not a brand on social media that doesn’t want to increase its return on investment.
• Create a loyal fanbase: Does your brand promote user-generated content? Do your followers react positively without any initiation? Getting to this point takes time and effort with creating a positive brand persona on social.
• Better pulse on the industry: What are your competitors doing that seems to be working? What strategies are they using to drive engagement or sales? Having a pulse on the industry could simply help you improve your efforts and take some tips from those doing well.

Don’t forget to document your social media goals. Not only is it important to help you benchmark where you are, but it also improves your chances of achieving them. According to some statistics, people who write their goals down are 30 times more successful.

2. Research Your Social Media Audience

Approximately 79% of adults use Facebook–but are your customers actively engaging with your brand there? Understanding your audience is necessary to learn things like who buys your products, what age group is the toughest to sell and what income level makes up the most of your returning customers? As for social media, it’s just as critical to know your audience.

First, your brand should look into the demographics of your most valuable social channels. Like we mentioned before, you should have a goal in mind for your social media marketing strategy. This is why you need to research the channels that correlate the most with your goals.

To help you find the Social Media Channels to focus on: take a quick look at the essential demographics data for each major network – check out this guide!

Identifying Customer Demographics

While the demographics data above gives you insight into each channel, what about your own customers? Further analysis has to be completed before you can truly know your customer demographics on social media.

That’s why many brands use a social media dashboard that can provide an overview of who’s following you and how they interact with you on each channel. Most brands today are using at least some sort of dashboard. However, does your dashboard address your specific goals?

Whether you’re an agency providing insights for your clients or an company discovering your own demographics, an all-in-one dashboard solution is critical.

Sprout Social prides itself on the in-depth and essential demographics data for your social networks to help you identify your customers.

Learn more with a free 30-day trial to uncover crucial data with Sprout!

3. Establish Your Most Important Metrics

While your targeted social media metrics might be the most important step of a strategy, it’s often the spot most veer off the path. Vanity metrics like follower count and likes are always good to measure, but does it tell you the whole story of your brand on social media?

We often get wrapped up in viewing followers and likes as the truth to a campaign, but it’s smart to take a step back and evaluate the social metrics associated with your overall goals.

Engagement metrics sometimes paint a better picture, because as we’ve mentioned many times here, building lasting relationships works on social.

Large audiences and likable content is absolutely great, but here are some other metrics you might want to pursue:

• Reach: Post reach is the number of unique users who saw your post. How far is your content spreading across social? Is it actually reaching user’s feeds?
• Clicks: This is the amount of clicks on your content, company name or logo. Link clicks are critical toward understanding how users move through your marketing funnel. Tracking clicks per campaign is essential to understand what drives curiosity or encourages people to buy.
• Engagement: The total number of social interactions divided by number of impressions. For engagement, it’s about seeing who interacted and if it was a good ratio out of your total reach. This sheds light on how well your audience perceives you and their willingness to interact.
• Hashtag performance: What were your most used hashtags on your own side? Which hashtags were most associated with your brand? Or what hashtags created the most engagement?
• Sentiment: This is the measurement of how users reacted to your content, brand or hashtag. Did customers find your recent campaign offensive? What type of sentiment are people associating with your campaign hashtag? It’s always better to dig deeper and find what people are saying.
• Organic and paid likes: More than just standard Likes, these likes are defined from paid or organic content. For channels like Facebook, organic engagement is much harder to gain traction, which is why many brands turn to Facebook Ads. However, earning organic likes on Instagram isn’t quite as difficult.

4. Research Your Social Competitive Landscape

Before you start creating content, it’s really smart to investigate your competitors.

We’ll always believe you shouldn’t steal your competitors ideas, but instead learn and grow from their success and failures. So how do you find that information?

The first step is to find out who’s your competition in the first place. The simplest way to find competitors is through a simple Google search.

You can exclude the major retailer, Amazon. Search for those who show up who are in your specific industry. Next you want to see who is active on social.

After gathering a handful of industry competitors, it’s smart to use a social media competitive analysis tool like Sprout Social to track Facebook and Instagram content.

Then you will see post break downs of text, images and video to see what your competitors are doing to drive the most engagement. Once you dig through the competitive analysis, you’ll have a better idea of what your potential customers want.

5. Build & Curate Engaging Social Media Content

Did someone say content?
It’s no lie–social media content is extremely important to your marketing strategy.

Related Articles:
The Five Major Psychological Reasons Why People Share Content
Writing Web Content That Makes People Read, Not Skim It

However, it’s best to follow the previous steps before planning out content.

We recommend creating content that fits to your brand’s identity. It’s necessary to find the perfect balance between target content and being overly promotional as well.

Remember that video is vital to your social media marketing strategy. As approximately 90% of online shoppers believe product videos help them make a purchasing decision.

Ensure you have a consistent schedule of excellent content to publish that doesn’t get stale.

6. Engage With Your Audience & Don’t Ignore

Social media channels are built as networks. This means their main purpose is to be a space to converse, discuss topics and share content. Your brand can’t forget these core elements of “networking” and it takes effort to ensure conversations or engagement opportunities aren’t left unattended.

Through social media, you gain respect as a brand by just being present and talking to your audience. That’s why social customer care is so important to brands wanting to increase audience awareness. It’s all about engagement.

With all the updated algorithms, organic content has a tough time reaching the majority of your audience. The last thing you want to do is ignore those who engage and lose out on sending more down your marketing funnel.

7. Track Your Efforts & Always Improve

So, how well did you do on your social media marketing strategy? Without continuously analyzing your efforts, you’ll never know how one campaign did over another. Having a bird’s-eye-view of your social media activity helps put things into perspective.

If you work at building lasting relationships, there’s a lot less room for failure with your social media marketing strategy.

Use a Tool to Track Success

Sprout Social prides itself on the in-depth and essential demographics data for your social networks to help you track your success. Learn more with a free 30-day trial to uncover crucial data with Sprout!

Looking for more Easy Online Social Media Marketing Training for Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube and with coaching?

These G500 online training courses are for people that are beginners or intermediate Social Media Marketers. These courses could also be a great offer for your customers if it suits your businesses adjectives.
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Talk Soon,

Nicky and Dave