If your social media marketing campaigns are not paying off, it’s high time to fine-tune your strategy. Revisit your strategy from scratch. Find out if the strategy needs an overhaul or if you have to start from scratch.
As the number of social media platforms is growing, you need to have a comprehensive strategy to make your social media marketing a huge success. Even if you have an existing social marketing strategy in place, a few simple tweaks can turn it into a marketing powerhouse.
Steps to Improve Your Social Media Marketing Strategy
We have covered here a few simple steps to help you build a solid social media marketing plan from scratch or revamp the existing one.
1. Set Realistic Goals
A strategy without goals will ultimately fail. There is no doubt about it. No strategy can ever take off without a realistic goal associated with it. You may expect to grow your follower base or drive targeted traffic to your business website. Your goals determine the scope of your content strategy and the efforts to put into the content marketing campaigns.
Starting with small and achievable goals is always the right way to go. It helps to cut the stress on resources and enables you to stretch your social efforts within reasonable limits. Most businesses outline a social media plan having the following goals in mind:
- Increasing brand awareness
- Generating leads and sales
- Growing the brand’s audience
- Boosting community engagement
- Driving traffic to the website
Don’t begin with multiple goals. It may deviate you from your actual goal. Instead, pick one or two and go ahead. A clear idea of the goal helps you to choose the right social network to use.
2. Research Your Target Audience
You can’t guess your audience. It requires strategy and research. Marketers can use social media analytics tools to find the target audience and essential demographic data important to the campaign. Different audiences utilize social media platforms differently.
It’s a sheer waste of time and resources if you target audiences on irrelevant platforms. Don’t go by your assumptions. Though, analytics tools can provide enough demographic data and insight into each social media platform, do further research to get a better idea about your customer's behavior and engagement patterns.
3. Determine Your Most Important KPIs
Marketing campaigns are data-driven. Social media campaigns are no exception. Data decides the success and failure of a campaign. By evaluating its metrics and KPIs you can easily discover if the campaign met the goals.
The metrics present the overall performance report of your content marketing. Some of the key performance indicators that you can measure are post reach, clicks, engagement, Hashtag performance, and organic and paid likes.
Marketing campaigns are all about data and numbers. Analyze those numbers and put them on work to accomplish your original goals.
4. Produce Amazing and Engaging Social Content
Content is integral to your social media marketing strategy. Campaign success mostly depends upon how well you have curated the content. At this point, you have a fair idea about your audience, the social platforms they are using, and the content they will likely consume.
In this conjuncture, you need a well-planned content strategy to make your campaigns go viral. To find the best and most innovative content for your audience, you should follow the ongoing social media trends. Following are some content types that you should create, curate, and publish for your readers.
- Stories and time-sensitive posts
- Instagram Stories
- Short-form video
- Instagram Reels
While writing for your social media audience, make personalization the core of your content. A good way to find the best content is by analyzing your competitor's content strategy.
Several third-party competitor analysis tools can give you enough insight into your competitors’ social presence. You can use Google to search your most valuable keywords and find who are the competitors showing up in the result set.
5. Publish Content Timely for More Engagement
Content that is shared with the right audience and at the right time, brings more attention. Besides timeliness, regularity is also an important aspect when it comes to offering customers some value. To make sure things go as per schedule for maximum impact, post at the best times to engage.
The best time may be sometime in the morning or late in the evening. A good time to publish is when your social media manager is available and ready to answer product or service questions when you publish an FB post or make a tweet. Delay in responses creates a bad impression. Customers expect a prompt response from brands and want to initiate meaningful conversations regularly.
Timeliness and regularity are the core of social customer care. Brands willing to increase engagement and build authority should care about their customers.
6. Assess and Improve Performance
Launching a social media strategy is one thing, analyzing and finding scope for improvement is another. Regular performance optimization is important as it’s the only way to find how campaigns performed at how one campaign did over another.
Watching your social media efforts closely can present a detailed view of your content performance and further scope of improvement. Monitoring social media metrics and key performance indicators in real time enables you to find small errors and fix them before they wreak havoc.
Tarun Gupta, CEO of Brainpulse Technologies, is a prolific author and digital marketing specialist. His insightful writings span SEO, content marketing, social media strategy, and email campaigns, offering invaluable expertise to businesses worldwide. Tarun’s contributions continue to shape the digital marketing landscape, guiding success in multiple niches.
