What is a social media strategy?
Simply put, a social media strategy is a plan that outlines your social media goals, the tactics you will use to achieve them, and the performance metrics that will be tracked. Your strategy doesn’t have to be complicated. You want a simple and precise plan in meaningful, measurable ways. This will help you identify channels and tactics that succeed and those that fail. Watch this webinar to learn how to love your social media strategy! Ultimately, your social media strategy should increase your target audience’s brand awareness and engagement across social media.
What are the benefits of a social media strategy?
Maybe you’ve run a successful social media campaign or you’re good at engaging with the content you post. This one time success is within reach. However, the hardest part of social media marketing is consistency. Do you understand why the campaign or post was successful? Can you copy it easily? Creating a social media strategy can be scary to think about, but it offers many tangible benefits for your business, such as
- A Guide to All Social Media Activities
- Improving Brand Awareness
- Providing Communications Customer Service and Support
- Improving Audience Targeting
- Driving and Increasing Website Traffic
- Content Optimization
- Generating Higher Quality Leads
- Creating Social Media Influencers
- Promoting your unique content that can go viral (remember the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge?)
- Offer social commerce and shoppable posts
- Information, which you can analyze and measure
As you can see, social media has huge benefits, so creating a strategy will help you achieve your business goals and increase customer engagement.
Although content Marketing and Social Media Marketing are closely related, there is a difference between them.
Marketing strategy is the right place to start if you want to direct and improve your social media activities. It includes some basic elements like audience research, creating personas, choosing social media platforms and more. Content strategy focuses on content formats and results. So you should look at content creation, communication and tone, content timing, etc.
What is a social media engagement strategy?
Your social media engagement strategy is important because it creates relationships with your audience across different networks. It helps you manage your community through social media and build your brand.
The two main goals of an engagement strategy are:
- Community management: This can be done by offering advice via a blog, responding to post comments, answering channel surveys and taking surveys or polls to learn more about your customer base. .
- Grow your following: Interaction is key here, so provide valuable content such as engaging video content, attract potential customers with free content or contests, or simply present your brand as active and helpful by engaging people in your networks in a responsive manner.
User Generated Content (UGC) can play a key role here because it is proof that the people who support your brand are talking about it and are not coming from your company or marketing team. Here are four great examples of UGC to inspire you.
What are the steps to building a successful social media strategy?
Now that you understand the basics of a social media strategy, let’s move on to the steps you need to take to create a strategy. We’ll also highlight where you can integrate your content strategy and engagement strategy into your overall social media activities to ensure you’re covering all the bases.
Here are 5 steps to creating a successful social media strategy, including:
1. Know your target audience
The first step in developing any strategy is to know your target audience. There are thousands of different categories of people on social media, and you want to target your ads and social media posts to those few who will actually convert into potential customers. And for that, Ms. Alka Thakur uses her expertise to help clients identify their right target audience on social media and then figure out ways we can serve that audience.
The second part of this step is also to do a lot of research on anything and everything related to your product and service category, from competitors to other market entrants with similar service products, and only then can you develop appropriate strategies to proceed. your business marketing plan
2. Create interesting content
The second and most important step would be to create content that your target audience would not only be interested in seeing, but would be interested in. The content you create defines your current customer base and helps attract new customers. Our Nagpur social media marketing company at OSK works round the clock to help clients create the best content for social media.
3. Engage with your followers
Your followers can be existing customers or potential customers who are interested in your brand. Either way, it’s the best way to get a return on investment from whatever you’ve spent marketing your brand on social media. communicate with followers, not only to retain them, but also to engage them and know their feedback to improve our products and services. In this century, where the customer is king, it is important to know exactly what the customer wants and needs. Running regular sweepstakes, contests and other engaging activities will help your customers connect with you on a brand level as they would benefit from the brand more than just the product or service.
4. Use a separate content strategy for different social media platforms
Now we all know that there are some different groups of people who have adopted different social media platforms and to target them you need different social media strategies for each platform. If you post content on Facebook aimed at the younger generation, which is often used by Gen x and boomers today, the result will obviously not be as effective. Ms. Alkal has always had a habit of using different social media strategies for each client for their different social media accounts and this has been very beneficial to the clients we serve.
5. Stick to your brand theme
Every brand has a theme created from the beginning that later becomes their identity. But for it to become their identity, they need to be consistent with their theme and allow customers to associate your brand with that theme. Only if a customer can retain and remember the small but important details of your brand are they likely to stay or return. By creating a specific color palette on Instagram or using a similar pattern in their posts, the client connects with them and thus increases brand awareness for their customers, ultimately increasing their ROI.