What are five things every social media marketing strategy needs?
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Social media marketing is an ever-evolving channel – from keeping up with the latest trends to understanding who your audience are, and where they live online. And, whether your goal is to increase brand awareness, drive engagement or increase customer retention, you’ll need a strong strategy in place.
Our head of paid social, Harriet Tuite, reveals how to plan and execute a successful social media marketing strategy.
Set clear objectives
Establishing specific, measurable objectives will give your strategy a clear direction. Of course, every business is different and your social media objectives will be influenced by a range of factors.
Here are a few things to consider:
- What are your wider business goals?
- Which industry are you in and what does the competitive landscape look like?
- Who are your target audience?
- Is your business in the startup phase or are you after customer loyalty?
- Which social media platforms will you be using?
Get organised with a timeline
How long is your strategy going to take to roll out? A few months? A year? Giving yourself realistic deadlines will help you stay on track, as well as allow you to manage your social media budget and time as effectively as possible.
Expert advice: To maximise performance, aim to coordinate your campaigns with any relevant events, product launches and seasons.
Don’t forget to track your performance
The term ‘KPIs’ is thrown around a lot in the marketing world, but what does it actually mean? Short for key performance indicators, KPIs are essentially used to determine how successful your social media strategy is.
These can include:
- Click through rate
- Engagement rate
- Conversion rate
- Return on investment (ROI)
- Follower growth rate
- Customer acquisition cost (CAC)
- Customer lifetime value (CLV)
As a performance marketing agency (with an award-winning social media team), we know that having a form of success measurement is crucial, especially for paid marketing channels. And we certainly practice what we preach…
Know your audience
With more and more users turning to social media for their entertainment and now shopping needs, it’s important to know who your audience are. More specifically, you’ll need to understand who you want to target with your ads.
How? Through detailed audience research and segmentation.
Whether it’s your current followers, website visitors, or both, being able to categorise your audience into demographics, interests, locations, and purchasing behaviours will allow you to be more specific with your targeting.
In other words, you’ll appeal to the right users, at the right time, in the right places online.
Social-first creative is key
The social media landscape is crowded. So, how do you make an impact?
There’s a whole host of options when it comes to creating quality content for your socials, whether that be static visuals, copywriting or snappy videos. Getting the creative right is just as important as identifying your audience, otherwise, you risk losing their attention and failing to hit the desired levels of engagement. Oh, and you’ll need to tailor it to the platform you’re using.
Expert advice: Establishing a strong brand identity throughout your social media creatives will enable you to create that ‘thumb-stop’ moment. By being consistent with your use of colours, fonts, imagery and copy, you can stay relevant and adapt to trends while still resonating with your audience.
It can be difficult to keep up with the pace of social media marketing. Don’t panic – that’s where we come in…
Whether you run an eCommerce or B2B business, our social media team will create a tailored strategy that aligns with your objectives, is achievable within your budget and drives performance.
Get in touch with us today to discover how you could be utilising social media marketing.
