Vedant VyasWe live in a world where 10% of our free time is consumed scrolling on Social media.
And what am I seeing is that a lot are still struggling and most importantly, they don’t know how to approach the audience on social media organically.
Or someone who hardly ever posts on social media, or what and when they post is almost the pure expression of the feeling that “we have to post something.”
The world of social media marketing is constantly changing and evolving new apps and trends to emerge in users’ interest.
Knowing the best way to market social media is challenging with so many constant changes. But we know how to track best and leverage the latest to reach targeted audiences.
All businesses need to Plan an Excellent Social Media Marketing Strategy and operate the business social media handle in thoughtful, measured ways.
According to the analysis, 40% of the customers who liked your service will recommend your business to others, so it’s necessary you need to handle social media accounts.
It’s the right time to start your social media and plan the Best Social Media Marketing strategy for 2024.
Analyze your current social media performance
Before you begin to put together your social media strategy plan for your business future, you need to think about what you will do right now.
And if you have already been using social media for a while, start by analyzing your efforts so far.
These are some of the questions that will help to find out your aim:
- Which social media platforms are you seeing for the best results?
- Which strategies are already working well for you, and which are not?
- How many followers do you already have on social media platforms?
- What is the average engagement rate on your social media platforms?
- How better does your social media perform compared to your competitor’s benchmarks?
- The last question you need to answer is, did you meet your goals last year? If not, what went wrong?
Once you get the answer to all these questions, you’ll have a better idea of what you need to work on and which platforms you should focus on. Now you must know where your “Starting point is.”
Plan relevant and realistic marketing goals
Once you accomplish all the questions, you are ready to start with new plans of where you are at in terms of your social media performance.
Now it’s time to think about where you want to stand.
Planning marketing goals is one of the most significant problems faced by many agencies, firms and businesses engaged in social media that should have taken more time to plan relevant goals for their social media.
They only know that they need to be on social media, but Why?
There is much more yet to learn about, why are they here or what they are doing?
It is essential to know the goal of why you are in the market and do your marketing strategies fit your business goals as a whole or the services you are providing.
So you should sit with your marketing manager and discuss and start with a clear, measurable goal planning with relevant and realistic ideas for better growth of your business.
Remember that you are not planning goals for the sake of it; you are doing it to help you in your business. So make sure that your goals and objectives are “SMART”.
S- specific
M- measurable
A- attainable
R- relevant & realistic
T- time bounded
The SMARTER the goals, the more likely you will be able to achieve your aims.
Make sure that you take time to nail down your goals, as they are going to form the whole foundation for your social media marketing campaign.
Create a complete vision board and distribute it to different phenomena to the business objectives that you need to achieve in the time you have decided.
The first is upcoming goals, which should be Bright!
Once you have your upcoming goals, you can break them down into performance goals.
They are essential and there are some smaller goals that are important for the contribution of the successful Upcoming goals.
For example, if your Upcoming goal is increasing your followers, then some performance goal would help you to keep track.
- Post more frequently
- Improve your total number of impressions and conversions to follow you.
- Increase the average engagement rate.
Next, you have to break the process down into process goals.
This occupies things like increasing the post frequency from 2 to 5 posts per week, using at least 5 hashtags on every post to expand and improve reach, running at least one giveaway per month to enhance audience engagement and reach, and much more.
Determine the most relevant metric
Many businesses create a social media presence and spend their time on other resources using their social media accounts.
But you should spend your time analyzing social media marketing campaigns, as it is different for every business.
Don’t stick to vanity metrics, such as the number of likes or followers your competitor or someone has.
It has very little value for the Google metric as there are many extensions for fake followers and likes for the platforms.
Ideally, you should spend your time and efforts on the marketing goals you have set above and decide which metric will provide the most satisfying answer to meet your goal.
For example, if you have goals to boost your sales and want to drive people to a particular action, you should notice the number of clicks.
You will more often take more interest in the engagement on your post. This shows how people will interact with you and your content.
Decide & understand the audience and select a suitable social media platform
It is difficult to understand the audience, as audience segments use different platforms. Each social media network is growing at different rates.
But once you know whom to target, you can focus on the efforts of that audience and social media platform.
It is an essential factor in how the user interacts with you and your content on each platform and how that aligns with your business goal.
For example, different types of audiences use different platforms in varying ways. And if you’re going to meet the goal with the audience, then make sure you are using the same social media platform as your target audience.
To succeed, you need to look at the goals you have set before and which channel is best for your goal.
So think about, What your audience desires and How they spend their most of time online.
NOTE- The better you understand the demographics and psychographics of the targeted market, the better you’ll be able to reach them on social media channels.
Select the right Social media platform for your Audience.
Some businesses are worried about how to manage and operate all the social media at a time but don’t need to do that.
You need to find the right platform for your business audience, where they spend most of their time.
You need to do some research before selecting the platform like, Where your audience hangs out most?
This wouldn’t be difficult if you really understand and know your audience. If you are starting up a new business and are unaware of this, you just start with the most preferred network and gradually widen it to include others.
You don’t need to go through all the platforms; begin with the well-known ones like FaceBook, Instagram, and Twitter. You can take a look at video platforms like YouTube.
Don’t waste your time on the platform your audience is not interested in.
Understand and identify the KPIs
In order to measure the progress of your goals, you need to establish some KPIs that reveal the essential metrics of how well you are performing.
Here are some of the examples of the KIP you might want to keep track of, depending on your goals:
Engagement rate- You can measure the engagement by dividing the total number of engagements on the account (Comments, likes, views, etc.) by the total number of impressions.
Rates/Impressions- These tell you the number of unique views on your post.
CTR(Click-through rate)- If you use social media to drive traffic to your website landing page, you probably need to measure the CTR. This tells you about the number of clicks on your link as a percentage of overall impressions.
Like, comment, share, etc.: Besides knowing the overall engagement rate, you can also track individual engagement rates.
Brand mention– It tells you how many times your brand is mentioned on the social media platform. This can help you to get a better idea of brand awareness.
Brand sentiment- This tells you how users feel about the brand by looking at the context of the brand mention and whether your image in front of the people is positive, negative or neutral.
Share of voice- How much of the social media geography does your brand occupy compared to your competitors?
Response Rate- This metric tells you how many social media comments your team is responding to and how fast they are responding.
Investigate your competitors and set a realistic budget
Most of the brands do not work in isolation. And you usually have competitors who will also be running a social media strategy.
So you definitely need to know what they are doing. What is their focus, and whom are they trying to reach and target? What are the key phrases they are dominating?
Conducting a competitor analysis would help you with a better understanding of their strength and weaknesses and also allow for a better experience of the potential customer expectations from your business.
Once you are clear about your competitor, discover their most successful social piece of content.
You should produce and share better than that so that your competitor’s audience would also reach you because of similar types of content but in a better version.
In this realistic world, business is only done with a budget. Social media marketing is a conceivable form of marketing types for most companies.
You should prepare an allocated budget as you shouldn’t spend more than you realistically earn in the increased sales, or at least the brand awareness and recognition.
In any form of marketing, you should also calculate the ROI from your expenditure, and check the goal you set before.
So as you go for the budget for social media, consider spending it all across your digital marketing platform.
Set the content calendar and the best time to post
You can manually schedule all of your social media posts, but it is bad. So nowadays, most social media networks have started using some algorithm filters.
This means that if you post the content at different times, because when your targeted audience is not online, they will never see your content.
So choose the best time to post so that it can reach your target audience.
You should use one of the post-scheduling tools to set up and organize multiple posts simultaneously.
Here are some of the leading social media scheduling tools we use: Social Pilot, buffer, SociaBee, Sendible, and more.
There are multiple features over just scheduling the number of posts, you can even assemble on each network and at the best time.
Customize your content according to your Social media followers
As social media platforms are different from other marketing platforms, they need different content. Basically every social media channel is identical, so you should customize your content for each platform.
Mainly there are four Questions you should ask yourself when you create your social media content:
- Which is the best content type for each platform?
- What is the number of hashtags for your content on each social media platform?
- What is the character count for the content on each social media platform?
- Should I use emojis in my range to deliver messages on social media platforms?
You want your content to have a general or unique look. Particularly with individual campaigns; you need to look only at some of your social media content, to be different. But people respond to the best depending on the platform.
So it’s important to remember that some social media platforms are different.
Let’s have a look at various platforms and know what type of content should be customized.
Twitter comes with self-imposed limitations. You cannot write more than 280 characters in a tweet. Your content or message should be short and on point.
You can also include links in your tweets and even hashtags(not more than 2).
NOTE: Tweet with an image performs far better than those without it.
It can be longer than tweets but don’t make them excessively so, as people can easily get bored by the wall of text.
It is always a good idea to add some personal touch and comments, even if you are simply sharing curated content.
Adding images and videos with every post related to the text performs well, as people like to see short video content. Even link posts also perform well on Facebook.
It is a Social Media Platform for Professionals, so you must ensure that all the posts you share there suit the audience.
People read the LinkedIn post hoping to educate themselves, particularly anything that will help them further in the future.
On Pinterest audience generally focuses on the images. Indeed, audiences pin Images on their theme board.
If you need to focus on the Pinterest board, your content should be around the pinnable picture. Pinterest can be perfect for E-Commerce Businesses to showcase their product.
It is an Image-based social networking platform, so you must share interesting and relevant images and short videos according to the content.
This has the advantage of listing at the top of an individual’s feed rather than being lost in the regular posts.
Instagram Marketing can be key to your Business’s success as it is the most used social media platform.
YOUTUBE
YouTube is renowned as the medium of Long-form videos.
You can post videos on it following all the themes. Your aim should be to post at least one video per week so your audience knows about the new video and will wait for it.
Uploading of videos should be well made in high-quality video quality and sound.
Consider adding ChatBot
Chatbot is one of the best and most powerful tools for a brand or business.
Do you know what a Chatbot is?
Don’t be confused with Robots; it is different.
Chatbot is software that imitates human conversation and allows brand and firms to optimize their marketing efforts and conversions.
Chatbots effectively help your brand to engage with your audience/client 24/7, even if the team is technical.
The addition of a chatbot is like a social channel that helps streamline and save tons of time.
Whether you are looking to solve customer issues or provide them with information, Chatbots are the best option that can drive more sales and brand awareness.
Engage with your audience and build the community
People don’t just go to social media platforms to look at or watch the content. They come on social media platforms to engage, interact with people, and be socially engaged.
Successful businesses/brands do more than just broadcast their audience. They even engage with the audience.
This is why you should be focused on all your social media platforms unless you have various targeted markets and are dedicated to personnel the task.
Some firms have found it very useful to create their custom hashtags. This is not only the discussion of encouraging and sharing but also makes it much easier for you to search for the posts that resonate with your business.
And to create clear communication and community, you can engage with your followers/audience.
You should be one of the “Go-to” places for your followers/audience at least once daily.
Try to make your posts and content innovative and engaging so that they can connect with you. Also, make sure that you ask them for their opinion on what they would like to see from you.
Don’t simply regurgitate your advertisement/content to them. If you want your followers to visit your post regularly, they must find some value.
Depending on the tracking audiences, you should choose the social platform and create prevalent groups and content.
Likely, Facebook Groups are ideal for B2C businesses, and LinkedIn is more focused on B2B types of businesses.
So now it’s your turn to create a group on one of the platforms to inspire your audience, and your group can also become the ideal place for marketing.
Promote your brand’s social media account.
Most social media platforms allow you to buy stuff from paid Ads. Most will enable you to target your ads demographically.
The paid promotion allows you to reach the relevant audience you are currently not connected with.
The paid promotion allows you to advertise your brand through promoting photos or videos or even the selling product.
Promote your work with Brand advocates
You might already have noticed the eagerness of the people who are very interested in promoting your brand on social media. You can say term as the “brand advocate” in your social media marketing strategy.
They might not have the reach as top-level influencers but might already have a big audience and solid market reputation.
So it is very advantageous for you to keep your product before they already know about it.
A brand advocate is a simple term for the people who like your products or services and continue to promote them organically to the new audience by supporting your brand.
It includes the executive leaders, company partnerships, existing customers or followers, and employees.
Work with influencers
Influencer marketing or working with the influence is very effective for your business as they are the robust digital creators in the specific industries that target the audience to purchase your products.
They have been in the position with their art and ambition and built a place in the social media platform.
They have many keen and interested audiences with good reputations. So, working with them will connect you to their direct followers.
So, you need to create exciting content or content that engages them when they come to your page.
Promote your brand with the influencer with the exact audience you have targeted, and if you provide good content to the followers directed by the influencer, you have given them a chance to follow you.
Run cross-channel campaigns
According to the new updates, you can tie up your one social media account to other channels together with the cross-promotion.
You can even include the brand advocating and influencer in these campaigns.
It’s difficult to handle the sales of multiple products targeting different platforms, and you might have entirely of platforms.
And it is unnecessary to include every account for the campaign. Include the platform that fits your audience specification as you decided before.
And wish to use Consistent branding across all the platforms for Cross-promotion. Ideally, create a good landing page giving detailed information and links.
Remember to create unique and creative content with good hashtags (and use the hashtag that encourages other networks to use it).
Create Content with Your Audience.
It is one of the most effective ways to empower your audience community is to let them help you to shape your brand.
You can do this in several ways:
- Run polls/surveys with your audience, share the results, and act on them.
- Host live calls with the group community where you ask them for honest reviews.
- Or do collaborations with your Audience, which will help you shape even the minor parts of a brand.
Track your channel, analyze the metric, and update your plan
No matter how you plan your social media marketing campaign, there is no promise that things will always work as expected.
So it is very necessary to track your results, as you never know about the success of your campaign.
Begin the process by analyzing your channel metrics and constantly examining its results.
Many tools calculate the metrics with the necessary data, like the insight section on Facebook and Instagram & the Analytics section on Twitter and YouTube.
You should consider the survey of your audience to determine what they think about your marketing strategy.
They might come up with valuable insights and ideas you had not thought of before. Don’t be afraid to make a change or improve your social media.
After observing your metric and audience, update your new plan and focus on the content your followers prefer from you.