By The Pollack Group
What happens when you work hard to create amazing content for your audience to view and appreciate, but your content gets lost in the vast sea of existing content? Is it your content? Is it your audience? Often it is neither. You can have fantastic content and a willing audience, but you might be going in with a weak social media marketing strategy.
In today’s digital age, people are continually utilizing different social media platforms to share small bits of their lives. Therefore, having a well-planned social media strategy is essential to get attention to your content.
Strategy matters when partaking in social media for your business. Strategy is about creating a proper roadmap that relays your goals to avoid spending time on great content with that does not reach or resonate with your target audience. Content for content sake tends to get lost in the vast online world.
However, with a well-planned strategy, you can make sure that the right people see your content. A good content strategy starts with a clear goal. That goal can be anything important to your brand or business, but it should be defined and should have a measurable outcome. You may want to drive traffic to your site, connect with your audience, reach a bigger audience, or sell your products/services.
Whatever your goal is, a strong social media strategy can get you there. There are a few simple steps to take your social media strategy to the next level.
Step 1: Determine The Right Type of Content
Identifying the right content for your audience can be defined through a testing period. Set a specific amount of time to test your content. Try testing different variables to understand their impact. Examples of testable variables are different tones, content variations, quote graphics, infographics, and many others.
Once you have your content defined, be sure to analyze the performance of the different types of content you are trying on for size.
Testing different calls-to-action and headlines are also good for understanding what works best with your audience. Be sure to focus your efforts on your audience’s content preferences and continue to steer into those preferences for at least three months. Use analytics and data to understand your audience’s content preferences and how effective it is.
Step 2: Perform a Content Audit
This is a secondary analysis period where you are looking through your channels’ current performance to make any possible re-directs for the upcoming new quarter. Essentially, by doing this, you can identify the things that are and are not working.
Things you want to look at include: What type of content gets the most engagement? When is your audience the most active and social with your brand or product? How does audience engagement compare against your competition?
Asking these questions is vital to gain a better understanding of your content and your competitor’s content. It is invaluable to look at your competitor’s following size, engagement rate, and posting frequency to better understand your audience.
Step 3: Choose The Best Social Media Channels
Narrow your efforts, as a start, all the way down to one or two networks to focus on solely. Picking many different networks to start with can make it challenging to keep track and dilute your efforts.
Choose the social networks where your audience is the most active. For example, if you are targeting the content to a professional audience, utilizing LinkedIn would be a great place to start. Here are some recent platform stats to help guide your decision from 2020.
Facebook Marketing:
-The largest social network with 2.2 billion monthly active users
-Comes with a long list of targeting tools for accurate reach
-Most consumers use it and are active on it.
Instagram Marketing:
-1 billion monthly active users
-High engagement rates
-Highly visual platform
-Easy discoverability with hashtags and geotags
Twitter Marketing:
-330 million monthly active users
-Lost of conversations on various topics
-Easy discoverability with hashtags
LinkedIn Marketing:
-590 million total users
-Great way to reach B2B consumers
-Best platform to find quality B2B content
-Ability to publish an article on the platform
Step 4: Measure Your Results
Be sure to use analytics to track your follower growth and engagement rate. Use UTM (Urchin Tracking Module) parameters to track your online marketing campaign’s effectiveness based on traffic from specific posts, campaigns, and platforms. This allows you to see precisely where the activity is coming from in your website analytics.
It is crucial to track your brand sentiment to see how others feel about your brand. Social listening involves monitoring various social media channels for mentions about your content and brand. Be sure to use social listening to see what people are saying about your brand, products, and company.
Social listening is a valuable tool that will help inform your content decisions and audience targets. An example of a popular platform that many use for social listening is HubSpot. This allows you to track engagement to your content easily.
Step 5: Reap the benefits of a strong marketing strategy!
Now for the final step. Enjoy the benefits of all of your hard work. You have planned out a thorough social media marketing strategy. From custom creating content to defining your audience, all the way to growing your following.
Now is your time to sit back and let organic growth roll in!
Making use of these five simple steps will take your social media marketing strategy to the next level. You will be having more impactful engagement with your audience. Whether you are a start-up, marketing firm, or social media influencer, having a solid social media marketing strategy is essential to improve your brand.
