How to Create a Viable Social Media Marketing Strategy

If you are a digital marketer, you can’t afford to ignore the power of social media marketing to expand your business reach, generate leads and make sales. These days, the internet appears to be a go-to place for anyone who wants information or wants to do business online. Unlike in the past, these days, not many people turn to books, encyclopedias, libraries, phone calls, or visits anymore when they need information/services. People simply log into the internet to search for what they want. Marketers take advantage of this because they know that most people turn to Google or social media for a quick information search.

What this means to most marketers is that social media channels are also valuable tools for driving website traffic, engaging with target audience, building confidence and trust in their brands. This is enhanced by the huge popularity of social media channels and the ease of widely sharing information on the channels. When a marketer puts out valuable, shareable content that the target audience really likes and enjoys on social media, the material doesn’t just stay on the marketer’s platform. The audience also shares it to their own networks, making it go viral in some instances. On social media, the key to reaching a very wide audience of potential customers is to consistently create shareable content. That requires the right social media marketing strategy to accomplish.

Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to create the right social media marketing strategy that can help you to reach a wide spectrum of potential customers.
 
Understand Your Target Audience

It is difficult to create shareable content if you don’t know your audience well enough. You must know who you’re creating content for if you want the content to be shareable and effective. If you consistently create content that appeals to your audience and is shareable, it gets the best results.

Choose the Right Social Media Platforms

Marketers leverage the popularity of social media to promote their products/services. The more popular a social media platform is therefore, the better for marketing activities. This is why most marketers prefer Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and the likes to promote their products/services. These platforms have their own in-house peculiarities marketers do take advantage of. So, if you really know your target audience’s age, demographics, and interests, it’s easier to figure out which social media platform they might be spending more time online. You can figure out where your target audience is at then go out there to market to them. For instance, older generations tend to favor Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn while Creatives enjoy Instagram. The younger generations have a preference for TikTok. For effectiveness, you can choose one or two platforms to focus on instead of dissipating valuable time and energy on all the platforms.

Set Measurable Goals for Your Social Media Marketing

Measurable goals help you to know how well you are doing in social media marketing. They help you to see if you’re on the right track or not. This is why you must set these goals right from the outset of your social media marketing campaigns. If your set goal is to get more traffic, clicks, leads or sales, set the goal with a time frame when you expect to achieve it. It could be a week, two weeks, a month or even a year. Make sure the goal is specific as well to enable you measure it accurately based on the time frame.

Consistently Create Engaging Social Media Content
 
On social media, you don’t just need any type of content. The content you really need must be valuable and engaging. What this means is that if you provide value to your audience, you encourage them to engage with you in return. Such content must fulfill a real purpose for your reader. It can answer an important question, solve a real problem, instigate your audience to think, give them new ideas or trending information, or may simply entertain them. What really matters is that the content is something that really attracts your audience and keeps them interested in your post. This can stimulate your audience to leave a comment, like the post, or share it for other people to see. That’s what is extremely helpful to expand your reach. This is the reason you must encourage people to engage as well, making sure to reply to and or like as many comments as possible.

Create a Content Calendar

Creating a content calendar allows you to plan and create your content upfront. Depending on your other schedules, you may choose to work a week, two weeks or even a month in advance. What this really means is that if through unavoidable circumstances you are forced to skip a day or two, you’ll still be left with plenty of content to go out. With a content calendar, you can put out any content you want, but always make sure it’s relevant to your audience and your niche. That is the relevance that will make your readers to relate well with the content particularly when it helps solve a problem or two for them.
 
Use Paid Ads on Social Media

Yes, it can be part of your social media marketing strategy to use paid ads on the platforms. With paid ads, the in-house algorithms in the platforms know who and who to show your ads to attract clicks and traffic. Through such ads, you can eventually gain enough organic traffic to boost your business. Paid ads can also be valuable to help grow your audience.

Use Effective Calls-to-Action, CTAs

You need well-designed and effective CTAs for good marketing on social media. If your content is valuable and engaging, you need to have a compelling CTA on it. CTA is like some kind of invitation for readers to deal. A good CTA can invite your readers to buy your product, sign up for your services, read a blog post, and check out your website and lots more. Be sure your CTAs direct your readers to exactly where you want them to go from your content. To do this well, you must give them a compelling reason to go there. That depends on how well-designed and effective your CTAs are.

Measure and Analyze Results

You may be wasting your valuable time on social media if you aren’t analyzing your own results. There is no way you can know if your social media marketing is having the desired results without diligently measuring these results. You’ll only know how well you are doing if you diligently measure and analyze your key performance metrics. You must at all times keep a keen eye on your social media metrics, as well as your website traffic, and particularly where the traffic is coming from. Do not lose sight of the goals you set right from the outset which will serve as your markers for success. Even if your goals change along the line, for as long as your data shows progress, you’re on the right track. Just keep going. You’ll only make impact in social media marketing if you are patient and deliberate in your marketing efforts.