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Building Social Media Marketing Strategy

In the ever-changing landscape of social media marketing, having clear and well-defined goals is more than just a good practice—it's a necessity. Learn how to build a social media strategy for your brand with this comprehensive guide.

min read

Dec 24, 2023

Social Media Marketing

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Creating a Social Media Strategy

In the fast-paced, ever-changing landscape of social media marketing, having clear and well-defined goals is more than just a good practice—it's a necessity. One framework that has gained considerable traction for setting these goals is the SMART criteria: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely. By employing SMART goals in your social media marketing strategies, you position your efforts for greater focus, effectiveness, and measurability. This comprehensive guide will delve into the ways you can integrate SMART goals into your personal or corporate social media branding strategy, and why this approach is worth your time and investment. Creating these goals for your social media marketing strategies can help keep your efforts focused and effective. Here are some questions you can answer and additional information to get you started:

Setting Specific Goals

Specific: Why is your small business on social media? You should have a direct and specific objective in mind for your strategies and find out which channel will help you accomplish them. Some business owners simply want a place to connect with customers, while others are more focused on increasing conversions or traffic. One of the foundational elements of a solid social media strategy is a clear and specific objective. Why exactly is your small business—or even you, as an individual—active on social media? Whether you aim to increase customer engagement, drive website traffic, or boost sales conversions, having a specific goal will guide your every step.

Brand Awareness

This goal revolves around increasing your brand's visibility and familiarity among potential customers. Instead of just pushing promotional content, it's more effective to share material that showcases your brand's unique personality and core values. This approach helps in building genuine and enduring brand recognition.

Leads and Sales

Social media is a powerful tool for driving sales and generating leads, whether it's through online platforms, physical stores, or directly via your social profiles. Engaging with followers meaningfully increases the likelihood of purchases. Strategies might include notifying followers about new products and promotions, incorporating your product catalog into your social profiles, or offering exclusive deals to your followers.

Audience Growth

To attract new followers, it's important to introduce your brand to those who haven't encountered it yet. This involves identifying and participating in conversations relevant to your business and industry. Utilizing social media monitoring tools to track specific keywords, phrases, or hashtags helps in understanding and engaging with these discussions. This approach not only solidifies your core audience but also helps in reaching new, adjacent audiences more effectively.

Engagement

Social media thrives on user interaction. Thus, finding innovative ways to engage your existing followers is crucial. Given the ever-changing nature of social platforms and their algorithms, maintaining high engagement levels can be challenging. Simple tactics like posing questions can significantly boost engagement. Remember, engaged customers can become advocates for your brand, but they need compelling reasons to do so.

Website Traffic

If your primary focus is to drive traffic to your website or generate leads, social media can be an effective channel. Tactics like promotional posts or targeted social ads, especially when tracked for conversions and URL clicks, can provide insights into your social media ROI. It's advisable to concentrate on a few key goals to avoid overcomplicating your social media marketing strategy. Simplify your approach by selecting one or two primary objectives and align your team's efforts towards achieving them.

Setting Measurable Goals

In order to assess the effectiveness of your social media strategy, your goals must be measurable. Metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) should be your best friends in this endeavor. What data point or metric is most valuable to your business? One of the foundational elements of a solid social media strategy is a clear and specific objective. To tell how effective your strategies are, your goals need to be measurable. Each social media network has a number of metrics for businesses to measure their efforts. There are also tools that help track engagement and conversion metrics for you, such as Google Analytics, as well as specialized social media listening tools. Why exactly is your small business—or even you, as an individual—active on social media? Whether you aim to increase customer engagement, drive website traffic, or boost sales conversions, having a specific goal will guide your every step.

Reach

Post reach refers to the total number of unique individuals who have seen your post. This metric is crucial for understanding the actual penetration of your content in users' feeds. Expanding on this, it's important to analyze factors that influence reach, such as the timing of posts, content relevance, and audience engagement levels. Assessing reach helps in optimizing content strategy to maximize visibility.

Clicks

Clicks represent the total number of times users have interacted with your content or account, such as clicking on links, images, or the profile itself. Monitoring clicks for each campaign is vital to discern what elements capture user interest or drive them towards making a purchase. This data is instrumental in fine-tuning marketing strategies to enhance user engagement and conversion rates.

Engagement

Engagement is calculated by dividing the total number of social interactions by the number of impressions. This ratio provides insight into how positively your audience responds to your content and their level of willingness to engage with it. High engagement rates typically indicate content that resonates well with your audience, suggesting a strong connection between your brand and its followers.

Hashtags

Evaluating the performance of hashtags involves identifying the most frequently used hashtags and those most strongly associated with your brand. Understanding which hashtags align best with your content and brand identity can inform future content strategies, ensuring that your messaging remains relevant and resonant with your target audience.

Organic vs. Paid

Distinguishing between likes derived from organic content and those from paid promotions is critical. As organic engagement becomes increasingly challenging to attain, many brands resort to paid content. Analyzing the impact of both can guide you in allocating resources effectively, balancing your investment in paid advertising with efforts to boost organic reach.

Sentiment

Sentiment analysis involves gauging how users react to your content, brand, or specific hashtags. It's essential to understand the emotions and perceptions that your campaigns evoke. Are they positively received, or do they stir controversy? Deep diving into sentiment analysis can reveal how people discuss and feel about your brand, providing invaluable feedback for refining your marketing strategies and brand messaging.

Define Audience

Before you start crafting your personal brand, you will need to determine who you are trying to reach. Is it other industry thought leaders? An individual at a particular company? Recruiters? The sooner you define the audience, the easier it will be to craft your story, as this will help you better understand the type of story you need to tell and where you need to tell it. Are you reaching out to other professionals in your industry, potential clients, or maybe recruiting firms? Knowing your audience informs the narrative and style of your brand's social media presence. Your audience essentially helps shape your brand’s story and dictates the platforms where that story should be told. Different social media platforms cater to different audiences and types of content. Depending on your specific goals, one channel may serve you better than others. Do your research and choose your platforms wisely. For example, LinkedIn is usually more effective for B2B marketing, while Instagram is better for visual storytelling aimed at consumers.

Social Media Brand Identity

Your personal or corporate brand isn't just about your current competencies and skills; it's a vision statement for your future. Assessing your strengths and weaknesses in the light of your brand identity can be a form of personal or organizational development. Your personal brand can be viewed as a reflection of who you are today; and also a roadmap of where you to go. In addition to understanding your existing skills and competencies, try assessing your strengths and weaknesses and how your personal brand factors into your own personal development. By doing this, you’ll uncover the skills and traits that make you distinct, as well as the areas where you need to improve or gain new knowledge in order to advance. Forecasting where you want to be in five or 10 years—and the attributes you want to be known for—can help you better determine what steps you need to take in order to get there.

Carving Your Niche

Keeping your message focused for your target demographic will make it that much easier to both create content around your personal brand and have others define you easily with visual cues. Consider carving a niche, and then take it even further by creating a unique niche within your niche. Forecast where you'd like to be in the next five or ten years. This exercise will help you tailor your current strategies to align with your future goals, making your path forward clearer and more achievable. The best personal brands are very specific. Keep your message and content consistent to one niche topic to become memorable within a targeted community. The narrower and more focused your brand is, the easier it is for people to remember who you are. When it comes time to hire a speaker or something similar, your narrowed-down brand will be what they remember.

Authenticity

Consistency

Being consistent is very similar to having a narrow focus—it’s easier to get recognized for one topic if you consistently create content and brand voice around it. Ensure that your personal brand promise stays consistent, both online and offline to establish similarity. Working in a corporate context should narrow the realistic creative freedom for your personal brand and allow for you to easily establish a consistent identity. Don’t underestimate how tiny inconsistencies can derail personal brand effectiveness. Creating a helpful framework like writing a list of unique themes can help you expand your creative horizons in a corporate environment where users can also struggle to differentiate themselves enough between colleagues.