What is a social media marketing strategy and why do I need one for my company? 

A social media marketing strategy goes over the process of creating, executing, and tracking your social media channels. Marketing online can be hard. Especially on social media, but having a social media strategy is also one of the most helpful and rewarding parts of having a business online. 

If you want your business to have an online presence you will want to include social media. Social media is the number one way to get to your desired audience and can bring in quite a few sales. 

So let’s go over how to make a social media marketing strategy step by step. 

Step one: Define Target Market and Buyer Personas. 

Target markets help you narrow in on what audience you are focusing on. Your target market should be the group of people who are most likely to buy from you coming from a social media platform. (For example, (EX:) a florists target market could be people looking online for boutonniere and corsage sets for prom.) 

Marketing to people who have no interest in your product won’t get you very far. The first thing you have to do is think of who your target audience is and why they would be interested in your brand. 

The second part is coming up with a buyer persona. Your buyer persona should be made of a collective average of what your audience is. You take all of the known characteristics and put it all into one persona. 

Give them specific details like what they do for work, what they do in their free time, and what family position they are in. But most importantly come up with their pain points. What is bothering them and how does your product or service help with those needs. This will really get you inside the minds of your ideal customers so you can optimize your strategy for them specifically. 

For further help on buyer personas, this is a buyer persona generator I found on the Hubspot website. 

Two: Conduct a Social Media Audit 

When conducting a social media audit, you go over what social channels you do and don’t have and which ones would be best to use for your strategy. 

While someone targeting for a more feminine audience would use Pinterest and Instagram, someone targeting a more masculine audience would use Facebook and Twitter. 

In your audit you should also include a SWOT analysis. SWOT stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. First go over the inner part of your brand and determine the strengths and weaknesses found in your channels, content, and social abilities. 

Next, do some social listening for your industry and determine what the opportunities and threats are for your brand. Remember that these two are intertwined. Some threats may become opportunities if seen in the right light and some opportunities may not be as helpful to your brand as to others. 

For a more in depth audit template, I would recommend reading this article from Hootsuite that includes a free template. 

Three: Goals, Roles, and Metrics 

This is where your team comes in. With help from your team, come up with and decide on the best goals for your social media. They should be based on the company wide goals you have for your brand as a whole. (EX: a florist’s company goal could be to either earn 95% customer satisfaction on sales or to to increase the profit of sales by 10%.) 

It all depends on the needs of the company and the industry you’re a part of. With those goals being used as your foundation, your social media strategy goals will be optimized for the most helpful outcome. (EX: a social media goal based on the goal to increase profit would be to increase the ROI (return on investment) of a specific social media campaign. 

This is where you need to know the metrics of your social media. In order to come up with a good goal you need to decide on the metric you are going to track. What good is a goal if you can’t measure its success? Some of the most common metrics to track in social media are content count, ROI, engagement, impressions and CTR (click through rate). 

After you have decided on the goals and metrics you are going to focus on, you must come up with an action plan. Define what actions need to be done to make the strategy happen and which order they need to be done. When it comes to social media you need to create the content, schedule the postings, react to audience engagement, etc. 

Lastly, you have to decide who on your team is in charge of which portion of the strategy. Find the best person or people for the specific tasks needed to execute each step of the plan and dedicate them to it. 

Four: Set Brand Expectations 

A common misconception in marketing is about what the brand of your company is. Your company’s brand is not determined by you, it is determined by how your audience sees you. They create the brand of your company based on their experiences with it.

What you can do is try to push them towards a specific brand based on the experience you are trying to give them. For this you need to set some company expectations. 

(EX: for a floristry, your brand expectations could be to always be kind and understanding of the customers wants and needs, and to be an expert in floral knowledge.) 

You want your brand to be consistent across all channels, so the rules given should apply to all teams. This will give your company a personality to follow. 

Your brand personality also comes into play with how you try to appear online. Keeping the same tone in your commentary and common content characteristics across your channels will help you shape your brand into what will satisfy your target audience the most. 

Five: Create Social Channels 

In order to actually post your content, you need social media channels to begin with. The first thing you want to do is research which social channels your target audience is using, and focus on those. 

Remember that you don’t have to begin your strategy on all social platforms. You don’t want to be wasting your budget and efforts on an audience that is not fully interested. Start with just the one or two best platforms for your brand and move outward once you have those down. 

(EX: a floristry may be best used on Instagram and Pinterest, while a construction company may want to focus on Facebook and LinkedIn.) 

Six: Create a Content Calendar 

After you have created your channels, you want to decide on some strategies to use in your social content. Your content strategy could be more generic like posting a series of 24 hour stories or hosting a giveaway, or it could be more company branded like creating a themed video or a series of cartoon posts. 

You want to get your ideas to your audience in a new and interesting way. This will keep them captivated by your brand and eventually get them to look further into your product or service. 

Then, you create a content calendar. This calendar could be used for all content across your entire business, or specifically dedicated to your outgoing social media content.

Either way, your content calendar needs to be detailed and organised. 

This calendar will layout when content is being created, posted, and reused throughout the entire social process. Every content calendar is specific and unique to each industry and brand. 

Some of the best softwares to use for content calendar creation are hubspot, hootsuite, and trello. For a deeper look into the best practices of content calendar creation, and an easy template to use, read this article from the trello website. 

Seven: Track, Analyze, and Tune 

The last step is to track your analytics. Go through all of your social channels and find what is working and what is not. Cut, change, and add to your strategy based on how your audience is responding to your content, and what is happening in the industry. 

The most important metrics can be presented to your team to show improvements on your goals, and the less important can be helpful in fine tuning your content and strategy. They can also help you find the right time and amount of content you give out, so your channels can be truly appealing to your audience. 

Pick a certain amount of time between each analytic check to keep consistency, and don’t ever stop! The online world is always changing so there are always more adjustments to be made to fully optimize your strategies. 

Including these steps to your social media marketing strategy will help you reach your goals and improve the overall outcome of your online marketing. 

I hope all of your strategies come out well and I wish all the best to your online endeavors. If you have any more questions please feel free to reach out! Thanks for reading!