How to Build a Sound Strategy for Social Media Marketing

If you are marketing online, it is virtually impossible for you to achieve social media marketing success without building a sound marketing strategy. If you cannot get the strategy right, you’re probably going to struggle in vain without achieving any tangible results. Building this strategy can be a fairly complex task composed of many different tactical facets. If you’ve never built a marketing strategic plan before, the best way to go about it is to first and foremost review the elements and what goes into a good marketing plan.  You can then adapt the results of that review to develop your own social media marketing strategy.

Here is how you can build a sound social media marketing strategy for your business.

Consistently Post Great Content

In social media marketing, content is king. This content must be informative, educational and even entertaining to attract audience. The more of such content you produce, the more traffic you attract to your business. Visitors are usually attracted to valuable content and nothing else. For your content to be valuable to readers, it must be well researched and written in the right context and length. It must have relevant and related images, authoritative and with detailed information or entertainment. To make it visible to search engines, relevant keywords must be surreptitiously embedded in the content. You can then share the content multi-channel to widely attract traffic.
 
Target Buyer Personas

Marketing messages that target buyer personas are usually very effective. It really doesn’t matter how large your social network is. What matters most is how many in your network fit your buyer persona. This is because only the people that fit your buyer persona are the real folks that will actually buy your products. That’s where the money is and you are in business to make money, right? Smart business owners always create content and strategies to convert consumers based on identified characteristics they’ve factored into their buyer personas.

Engage your Audience

Only an engaged audience is a responsive audience. Never lose sight of that. Having a very large audience of followers doesn’t mean much if the audience is not responsive. Even if the audience fits your buyer persona and you don’t engage them, they don’t respond. Engagement helps create the impetus for message amplification. This ultimately may result in viral messaging and consequently more traffic. You can only make engagement happen by consistently creating value in terms of content, being a real person with a strong push encouraging your audience to engage. By way of analytics data, you can get to understand how your social networks respond. That info enables you to make informed decisions about what works and what isn’t. You can then make conscious efforts to capitalize and improve on what’s working to get better results.

Post High Quantity Content

The content you post must not only be of high quality, it must also be consistent. The more content you post, the more traffic you get! Quality matters a great deal too. If your content is of poor quality, major search engines like Google will ignore it. You must as a matter of policy avoid plagiarized material or duplicate content like plague. Search engines are not very tolerant of such materials. A vital part of your content strategy should be to create a content marketing calendar to help ease the burden of creating high-quality content on a consistent basis. If you are writing about a trending or current matter, make sure you are up to date with conversations around the subject matter. If your audience is following and responding, it helps to build the type of relationship that encourages them to widely share your content.

Spend Quality Time on Marketing

Social media marketing is fun and work. You must therefore devote quality time and attention to it. Social media marketing takes time, quality time before it starts getting some traction. If you run a small business, devoting 10-20 hours a week to social media marketing is about ideal. Even if you choose to hire someone to manage your social media marketing, make sure they know what they are doing and have a clear understanding of your own social media marketing goals.

Use Cross-Functional Skills

Every business activity requires skills, real skills that produce results. So is social media marketing! Some of such skills you need are: deep understanding and use of language, strong business intelligence, great writing skills, good marketing background, good technical and working knowledge of the computer and internet technology and lots more.

Make your Strategy Easily Implementable

For a strategy to be easily implementable, it must be clear and easy to understand. Therefore, you must endeavor to write well and use the right tools of influence within your writing to get good results. This influence allows you to create content that motivates the reader towards the actions you need without appearing spammy. On social media just like many other online channels, nothing is guaranteed. You must therefore have a simple strategy that you can easily implement and adapt depending on how circumstances pan out.

Spend on Paid Ads

Yeah, you heard right. If you want quick marketing results from social media, you must spend a bit of money on paid social media ads. That can supplement your free social media marketing particularly if you have very limited marketing budget. It is best still to intensify action to get more organic traffic. That benefits your business better.

Make your Marketing Social

Social media is where you can do serious marketing and also have lots of fun if you make your marketing social. Serve your social media audience vital marketing info as well entertaining them in the process. Engage with them and generally share mutually beneficial info that is easily sharable. You can generally spend your precious time and money understanding your audience enough through your buyer personas by giving them exactly what they want. That way, they’ll respond to your marketing messages more favorably.
 
Market for Real on Social Media

Social media marketing is real marketing no doubt. That marketers like to call it social media marketing does not make it any less marketing. Social media marketing like all marketing involves content writing, communication, consumer behavior, market research, market segmentation, market surveys, direct selling, and branding, marketing tactics/techniques, marketing strategies and lots more. Your marketing is real when you do all these and more on social media to get results.