A Definitive 5-Step Guide to a Winning Social Media Strategy
Social media is about psychology and sociology more than technology — Brian Solis.
Did you know that about 3.4 billion customers in every market are on social media? Think about the world's population of 7.7 billion and envision the number of buyers you lose if your business lacks a strong social media presence (assuming of course, your business is based upon volume).
The impact of social media in business is unprecedented. As you know, customers with an excellent experience with any product or service are likely to praise it profusely and refer it to others on social media platforms. But that’s not all.
Thanks to COVID, online shopping is taking the world by storm. So, businesses focusing on their brick-and-mortar setups are missing out on the unmatched benefits of digital marketing .
And, as more and more brands are strengthening their digital presence, more transactions are happening online than ever before.
The flip side of this is that online competition is more fierce than ever, so your business needs to be at the top of its digital marketing game.
As always, great marketing begins with great strategy. Whether you are a big company looking to increase marketing ROI, or a small one blazing a trail, follow these tips to create high performing social media marketing:
Choose a Platform that Aligns with Your Digital Marketing Objectives & Is Frequented By Your Ideal Clients
A success-oriented brand sets specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART) goals. While there are many ways to attain success, the first step to building an effective social media marketing strategy is establishing goals and objectives. Without setting clear goals, you cannot develop a good understanding of your business' performance.
For example, are your social media goals to:
build community, grow your online raving fan base and grow your number of followers?
build brand awareness and identify brand evangelists?
conduct market research about unmet customer needs?
run ad campaigns for lead generation?
identify new joint venture partnerships with other companies also serving your ideal clients?
Once you’ve established your social media goals, it’s time to reassess your current social media platforms.
Are they frequented by large numbers of your ideal customers? Or, like most businesses, are you just throwing money at Facebook or TikTok because everyone else seems to be?
As I discussed in this post social media marketing is becoming even more fragmented as large numbers of people are shifting away from the big platforms onto less established ones.
Take a critical eye to all your social media marketing and reassess - are you investing time and money in the correct social media platforms?
2. Track Your REAL Results
There are many different ways to track social media results. Vanity metrics include the number of likes, followers, and comments. These are easy to track and are important in building community and brand awareness, but proving their actual value can be daunting. Your tracking needs to go further.
Focus on these metrics as well:
engagement
shares
cost per click
cost per conversion
website traffic driven through social media
3. Create Content And Irresistible Offers Your Ideal Customers Love
Forget spray-and-pray marketing - pumping out content on social media and praying something works. Just because your posts can be made live, almost instantly, doesn’t mean that you should throw just anything out there.
Every post you make needs to have a strategy behind it.
Does it support your irresistible offer?
Does it help to nudge your prospects along the sales funnel by educating them as to why buying from your company is better?
And is your irresistible offer, actually irresistible?
On that note, please also don’t pitch your followers to death. So many businesses do this to their detriment. It kills trust, is highly annoying and reveals a business that is more interested in making a quick sale than building a long-term, mutually beneficial relationship.
Our highest-converting formula for content to offers is five to one - give five pieces of helpful information to one sales pitch. Try this ratio in your social media marketing and see what a difference it makes!
4. Keep Researching Your Ideal Clients
In the last three to twelve months we have seen some significant and surprising behavioral changes in many of our clients’ target markets. If we’ve seen it almost across the board, I bet there are significant behavioral changes to your ideal clients also.
You have to keep your finger on the pulse. Don’t assume anything.
Join social media groups with people showing an interest in your services and goods to understand their tastes and preferences. Keep a close eye on product and service reviews. Keep talking to your customers and seeking their feedback. Get to know their habits and behaviors so well, you could “continue the conversation they’re already having with themselves.”
5. Monitor, But Don’t Copy Your Competitors
It is a no-brainer that you will lose a battle if you don't understand your opponent well. The same applies in business. However keeping a close eye on your competition is NOT so you can copy them.
It’s so you can innovate - do things better, bigger, differently. Knowing your competitor inside and out helps you create a strategy that is superior to theirs. But remember that the best marketing ideas are going to come from outside your industry - not in it.
Benefits of a Powerful Social Media Strategy
A well-curated social media strategy summarizes your battle plan for the next 12 months. It forms part of your Marketing Plan along with all your other marketing tactics that form your marketing engine so you and your team can hit the ground running every month. (Click here for a Marketing Plan template).
Is your digital marketing strategy stuck in the mud?
Creating a high-converting social media marketing strategy can be daunting. If you go at it alone, even simple things like creating a social media marketing plan can be overwhelming, never mind creating an actual marketing system.
We can help. Schedule a complimentary diagnostic and prescriptive marketing consult and you’ll receive at least three marketing strategies to increase the effectiveness of what you’re already doing. There’s no sales pitch. No pressure (we hate that as much as you do). But read our marketing beliefs first to see if they align with yours.
