Marketing and advertising on social networks without a clear plan, tactics, and strategies, from an advertising campaign, turn into chaotic spam. After all, if you do not have a promotion strategy in social networks with clearly defined goals, then, first of all, you will not be able to find out if you get a return on your efforts. In this article, we will tell you what key points should be included in your marketing strategy in social networks.
Five Key Questions That an Effective Strategy Can Answer
Any strategy defines a vector of advancement and development, therefore it is based on goals and objectives. An effective SMM strategy answers five questions:
- To whom do we sell?
- What do we sell?
- How to sell effectively?
- When and where to promote the product?
- What properties of the product to develop?
Therefore, before you start moving towards social networks, answer these questions and part of the work will already be done. Below we will talk about this in more detail.
Define Your Main Goal
Yes, you have seen this advice in many articles that deal with strategy development, and it does not even have to be a business one.
The reason is that this is the most important piece of advice. It’s not wise to go to social networks simply because competitors or companies from other niches do this. They pursue some kind of precisely defined goal. For example:
- Increase traffic to the site
- Increase the number of subscribers and followers
- Attract new customers
- Improve communication with the target audience
- Increase sales
- Increase brand loyalty and brand recognition.
Kristin Savage, blogger, writer for IsAccurate point out that “Depending on your goal, the practical steps that will be included in the strategy will vary. Or they may also not differ significantly but will have different priorities.”
Choose the Most Suitable Social Network
This should be done based on the specifics of the target audience. For example, if your target audience is business owners, then look for them on Linkedin, if they are teenagers, then they live in Snapchat, and millennials (or the most solvent category of the population at the moment) cannot imagine their life without Facebook and Instagram.
We recommend starting with one key social network for you, and then, having some groundwork and the first analysis of the results, gradually move towards other social networks. Of course, if this makes sense for your business, because, for example, you won’t find teenagers in Linkedin, but you can find a fresh target audience on Facebook and Instagram.
See What Competitors Do Within It
The analysis of competitors, both direct and possible, is important in the formation of the strategy. It is important to determine which companies can attract customers in this area and answer such questions:
- What unique services can you offer the client?
- What we do better than our competitors (for example, longer working hours, the availability of special discounts and programs, the presence of a specific category of goods in the general assortment, etc.).
Next, you should analyze what practical actions they are taking within the framework of social networks. Particular attention should be paid to:
- The number of subscribers.
- The average number of likes for a single publication.
- The number of publications per month.
- The style of writing texts, their average volume, tone.
- The quality of visual components, their format, general style.
- Corporate identity, logo, colors.
- Common pros and cons.
Summing up, note the strengths and advantages over competitors, as well as those indicators that need to be improved to maintain competitiveness in the market.
Determine the KPIs You Want to Receive
Common KPIs include the number of brand subscriptions, monthly transitions from a site to a profile and vice versa, comments, reposts, and likes. Additional KPIs include coverage, involvement, the cost of one involved participant, target actions and quality indicators. For all metrics, set realistic targets to achieve.
Identify Key Content’s Type
In general, your priority social network has already completed half of this task in your place. However, the specifics of your business and the problem you solve is also important to determine the most appropriate type of content that your subscribers will like most.
- For example, if you are a travel blogger, then there is nothing better than beautiful photos and unique videos.
- If you sell technical equipment, teach your customers how to use it with guides, tutorials, and instructional videos.
- If you are a fitness trainer, then you can use the entire arsenal of content tools. It can be videos, photos before and after, valuable tips, guides on how to perform certain exercises, and much more.
Yes, and do not forget that the quality of your content is a determining factor in the success of your marketing strategy on social networks. To keep this metric at the highest level, use the following tools
- WoWGrade allows you to order high-quality texts.
- BestEssayEducation will be able to help with expert articles writing.
- Grammarly is just an indispensable tool when you need to remove extra spaces and typos.
- Canva to come up with great, customized and unique designs for social media.
- Hashtagify will help you to analyze the most popular hashtags and find the right ones for your posts.
Think About Additional Methods for Interacting with Subscribers
This is certainly a cool way to post quality content, but there are other ways to effectively interact with your current subscribers and also attract new ones. For example, these are promotional offers only for subscribers, contests, and marathons. Think about these opportunities and write them in your strategy as well.
Analyze Your Results
Advertising and SMM promotion on social networks is quite cheap. That is, you get customers much cheaper than, for example, with contextual advertising. But, if you ignore analytics, achieving such a result will be extremely difficult. You need to measure literally all indicators:
- How many subscribers did the promotional publication bring?
- What categories and individual publications provoke the most activity of subscribers?
- How much money do you need to spend on advertising in order to get the transition to the selling page?
- How many of the following subscribers make a purchase?
If it turned out so that the social network you work in is ineffective for you, then the analysis will help determine where exactly you made a mistake.
Conclusion
Social media marketing strategy is part of integrated online marketing. Plan it taking into account the peculiarities of website promotion, the needs of the audience and the ways of selling your product. Evaluate the effectiveness of the strategy every six months. Based on the results of the assessment, you can make adjustments to it.
