18 Best Social Media Marketing Strategy For 2023
Social Media Marketing strategy can be described as the aggregate of marketing techniques and strategies that a company or an individual uses to promote and sell their product or service through the various social media platforms available on the web today.
It involves the meaningful dissemination of information to the public regarding your product or service through Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other social media sites.
Social Media marketing deals with the process of developing your brand reputation in the social media community. It also involves ensuring the delivery of quality products and services to the customer resulting in full customer satisfaction.
What do we mean by social media marketing strategy?
The benefits of social media marketing are plenty. We know that social media is unavoidable in current times. It has a massive reach and can create a positive opinion of your product and service in a very short period of time. Therefore, it is mandatory to have a convincing and solid social media marketing strategy in place for promoting your product or service on these platforms.
A strong and sound social media marketing strategy includes all the essential elements that increase your visibility, reach and influence on your target customers.
The key elements that need to be taken into consideration when forming a social media marketing strategy are:
- What your Brand is all about.
- Clarity about the message you want to convey about your product or service.
- Target customer/consumer
- Competition and their strengths and weaknesses
- Budget
The main elements for social media marketing strategy are the following:
- Specific content
- Reach
- Interesting
- Timely
- Measurable
- Attainable
- Entertaining
The most important aspect of social media marketing is to create your brand’s recall value and to create awareness about your product or service. Your product should elicit a positive response in the mind of your consumers. The potential of a product or service becoming a success in social media circles is immense. After all, the majority of your target groups can be found in one or all these social media channels.
18 point social media marketing strategy that ensures high productivity as well as Return on Investment(ROI)
Determine your main goals
The most important task before creating a social media marketing strategy is to determine the objective of marketing your brand. Why do you want to venture out on social media platforms with your product or service?
The main goals often comprise of some or all of these points below:
- Expanding your consumer base and networking
- Reaching maximum customers in your niche, thereby increasing sales
- Creating a positive perception of your brand to attract new leads
- Driving traffic to your website through links on social media
- Reaching out to your existing customers and providing them with customer support and assistance in case of doubts and inquiries.
It is often a mix of all these or some of these objectives that drive companies to market their brand on social media platforms.
For example, if you are a budding chef and you want more people to know about your unique recipes, you can start your channel on Youtube, posting videos of your recipes, and the methods of preparing them. Here, your goal will be more visibility and traffic generation to your channel.
On the other hand, if you are a restaurant and you want to promote your menu, then your goal will be visibility to attract more customers to your place and increase sales.
In this way, we have our specific goals according to which, we strategize our social media marketing plan.
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Research your audience/consumer
The possibility of generating sales and improving brand reputation through the various media channels opened up quite a lot of avenues for business enterprises. With social media channels, came a variety of social media analyses to0ls that helped ascertain the target consumers for a product or service. It made our efforts a lot easier and manageable to carry out market research.
The different social media tools can give you an accurate assessment of the core group that comprises your target market and can help in effective social media marketing.
Gender, ethnicity, education, salary, and standard of living are some of the data that can be retrieved from such social media analysis tools. You can tailor your content accordingly, catering to the targeted audience.
A concomitant of your research for target groups is your decision to use the most viable social media marketing platforms to carry out your social media marketing strategies.
Here, I will give you three examples for better understanding.
Pinterest is one of the most amazing social media platforms for everything related to home decor, interior, food, travel, clothing ensemble, motivation, etc. According to various market surveys over the years, it is seen that more than 60% of Pinterest users are women. So, it makes sense to create women’s specific content to publish on Pinterest.
LinkedIn is one of the most sought-after platforms today for youth and the educated fraternity. It is a place for job seekers, analytical, research-inclined minds on the lookout for comprehensive curated content that can benefit them. Marketers in such platforms have to work assiduously creating high-quality content that provides in-depth knowledge in a particular subject to gain attention and followers for the products they want to sell or the services they want to render. Companies that deal with education and job can very conveniently post on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is a great place to promote Vocational courses, different certification courses in your organization.
Instagram is a buzzing, peppy place for individuals mostly between 25-34 years of age (According to statista.com research in July 2019) This makes it a thriving place for marketers willing to promote and sell products catering to women in this age bracket. So, what can be some of the products that can be well marketed on Instagram?
The clothing line, beauty products, hygiene, diet food, exercise, related topics are some of the niches that can generate definite leads and turn them into customers on Instagram.
In this manner, market research can help in creating appropriate media-specific content for all social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, etc for social media marketing.
Start from fewer platforms and branch out from there
When charting out a social media marketing strategy, it is important to have a look at the budget and how much money can be allocated to the promotion techniques in social media marketing. It is advisable to start from one or two social media platforms and later expand to different platforms. Remember promoting a product or service requires that you give loads of time into it.
If you cannot attend to the accounts in the platforms and give them all the required attention, your brand reputation is vastly affected by the inactivity in the said platforms. The repercussions can be very harmful like losing the number of followers or negative reviews owing to the absence of follow-up.
Innovation
When advertising your brand or product in social media marketing remember to opt for a mix of the different media available to form attractive and engaging content. Make use of the advantages of infographics, video, audio, and a combination of different media to have a winning social media marketing strategy.
A single type of content can get boring after some time. You will not want people to lose interest in your brand. Publish content in a way that evokes interest and excitement. Provide anecdotes to delineate your points with clarity. People always understand a point better if you provide clear concise examples.
Create company pages on Linkedin, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram
Every social media platform demands that you pay attention to their format when strategizing social media marketing of your product or service in those channels. One of the foremost tasks while framing a social media marketing plan is to create business pages on all the popular social platforms.
Make professional pages for your business. Go through the examples available on the web. Use templates to write and format your core points. Another key point while creating business pages is that you have to create separate content for each platform. Keep the main points of your marketing the same and change the way you present your point forward.
A business page on Twitter will be different from a business page on Facebook or LinkedIn for the same product or service. Make sure you give attention to all the small details that go on to play a big role in your social media marketing.
Social listening
Social listening in the social media marketing parlance is the method by which you track your metrics and monitor your mentions across social media sites.
The most important metrics for social media marketing are
- Reach: Denotes how much your reach is within the social media site and how many people are actually aware of your product.
- Engagement: Denotes how many people are engaging in your content. Likes, comments, shares, referrals are all part of this metric and gives you details as to how your product is faring in the various social media platforms.
- Conversions: Denotes different meanings to different people. For some it might be a purchasing decision by a consumer, for some subscription to your channel, newsletters, email notifications might be the definition of conversion.
- Acquisition (Click through Rates, PPC, Bounce rates) – Denotes the visitor metrics. How many new visitors to your website, how many existing visitors are frequenting your site, how many are leaving the site after getting on the landing page (Bounce Rate). They give you an idea of the impact your brand has on your consumer.
- Activity: It is your activity on different social platforms. Denotes the number of social media posts and the resultant benefits from the post. It is a reflection on the company’s income and whether all social media marketing strategies are garnering profit or not. If it isn’t achieving the desired results then you need to re-strategize and market your product or service differently.
Create Marketing personas
Developing a market persona or a buyer persona from the data received from the research and analysis of different metrics and tools is a long-term approach for your product and service to thrive in the market. While organizing and curating content for your niche audience, a very useful method is to answer the 5 W( Who, why, where, what, when) and 1 H(How) relating to your consumers. It helps you create a model consumer profile based on all the metrics from assessment and research. As a result, it becomes easier to position your product to your target groups in a far more convenient manner. The result is that you get a very productive social media marketing technique.
Consider the following
- Who (The details of your target group comprises the Who)
- Why (Why will they be interested in your product? Why would they choose your product over your competition)
- Where (Out of all the social media platforms, which are the places they frequent the most?)
- What ( What do you have to offer to cater to their needs?)
- When(When is it the most relevant to post content about your brand, your product details, and your services?) According to research, posting content at a specific time of the week and day can yield maximum results.
- How (How are you going to market your product to the audience)
Keep track of your Competition
It is not recommended to obsess overtly over your competition. But at times, comparative analysis in the social media arena can provide you with a very valuable understanding of where you might be going wrong in your strategy of social media marketing if any. You can use the information you gather to improve your techniques. When you spend on your social media marketing, it makes it compulsory for you to track your competition’s performance from time to time.
Here are a few points to consider when analyzing the competition for social media marketing
Identify your competition across the social media channels
The most important step is to identify who your competition is and in which social media channel they are most active. Go to their pages and observe the layout, design, and technicalities. See how user-friendly their page is, how interactive they are.
Gather data
Gather data about their social mentions through the tools available in the market. You get a host of free and paid tools to track yours as well as your competition’s performance on social media.
Analyze their activity
Collect information on their activity on the social media pages.
- How long do they engage?
- Frequency of their posts?
- Customer reviews?
- What is their tone while interacting with their consumers?
- Do they address the queries promptly?
- How many shares and likes do they get?
- Get an overview of their engagement and activity.
Analyze their profiles and the content
Go through their posts and evaluate how effective their content is. What is the ratio of the video to audio? How are they getting their point across? Do they provide a lot of backlinks? Do they produce original content? How comprehensive is their ‘ABOUT’ section?
Analyze the website content
Most of the companies hyperlink their website on all the social media platforms they are on. Go to their websites and see how they produce their content. Go to their blog section, see how frequently they make blog posts, analyze whether their blog posts are long-form content or short-form, get an idea about the writers of the posts and their levels of expertise. Blog posts are very important for particular niche businesses. Fitness, healthcare, Fashion, are important niches that require the presence of blog posts.
Use the analysis of the various data to make changes to your strategy, if necessary
You’ve gathered the required data. A lot of important information may come up after the analysis. You may be emphasizing the wrong social media platform. Maybe your content needs a reshuffling of a media mix. If you are experiencing a slump, make the required changes to boost your business.
Be organized, Keep a journal
It is essential to be prepared about the schedule of posting your information and other details about your product when creating a social media marketing strategy.
Have a definite plan as to when you are going to post content on the different social media platforms. There is a very important point to consider in this. Make sure you don’t over-promote your brand. After a point, it becomes redundant, and leads and consumers can be put off by your overzealous attitude. Strike the right kind of balance between posting relevant content and not going overboard promoting your product or service.
Keep a digital journal and jot down the schedule of posting content. Allocate at least 30-45 minutes every day to go through your social media channels. Interact with your followers, post some brief interesting snippet, something that’s uplifting. Remember all your content need not be centralized on advertising your product.
Visibility and a shared connection and interest for common things with your consumers are as important to your social media marketing and reputation as is the goal of generating sales. You don’t have to categorically mention your product every time you appear on your channels.
For instance, for a company that specializes in beauty products, mentioning how people are innately beautiful is a great way to build a rapport with your consumers. When you are promoting a fitness brand, emphasize the benefits of the fitness aspect. Highlight how important it is to remain healthy for a person’s good and not necessarily for appearances. These small gestures go a long way in positive social media marketing for your brand.
Humanize your approach towards your target group. The relentless pursuit of promotional tactics might be harmful to your social media marketing.
Give utmost importance to your schedule. If you plan on posting content on a particular day, do it. When you go back on your word, you create a dent in your reputation and as a result, your social media marketing suffers a setback.
Find inspiration
Observe, assimilate from your surroundings. You will get plenty of ideas for your content. You have to curate original content to stay relevant in your industry. Get inspired by stories around. When you analyze and research you get a fair idea of what actually resonates with your target consumer. Human interest stories, stories that include a surprising value always have an impact on the consumer.
Position your product wisely. Use lesser-known channels as well
Social media marketing strategy emphasizes the correct use of different platforms to attain maximum results. Some social media channels are not as popular as others. The advantage of such channels is that a lot of times you find your niche audience on these platforms. It gives you the required boost in terms of new customers from an entirely different platform. A lot of times lead generation can actually lead to potential customers.
A good way of using your social media marketing is to pin tweets and messages on social media platforms. When you pin a tweet on Twitter or pin a comment on youtube, that appears at the top thereby creating more visibility.
Vine, Vimeo, StumbleUpon, Foursquare are some of the platforms that can be incorporated successfully in your social media marketing strategy.
Engage and create a loyal fan base, conduct polls, surveys, and different contests from time to time.
Make sure that your tone is affable and that you are coming across as helpful to your customers. Different contests, polls, surveys are a great way to interact and make a connection with your existing and potential customers. Polls and surveys are a regular feature on Twitter and Facebook. News channels, media houses all conduct surveys and polls. In this way not only do they get to engage with their customers immediately, but they can also get direct feedback from the people. That can help them evaluate their social media marketing strategy further.
Be authentic and try to achieve the greatest quality in terms of your brand, product, or service
One of the greatest lessons, while doing any kind of business or gearing up for a social media marketing strategy, is to be authentic and honest about the quality of your product or the availability of your services. If consumers realize that you are not true to your words social media can turn out to be a harsh place with the possibility of a lot of backlashes.
Set up accounts and request for account verification for originality
The different social media platforms come with the ability to authenticate your page to avoid duplicity and wrongful use of patents and trademarks. Twitter, Instagram offer blue ticks beside your name to let people know you are the real business entity. There can be several people who might try to take advantage of your company name and reputation and create fake accounts. The verification tick is the way to let your consumers know which page is real and which one is not.
Use your offline marketing to spread awareness of your online presence
Marketing through conventional offline media like television, newspapers, and radio has long been prevalent. Now we can go a step further and integrate the two. One very useful strategy of social media marketing is to provide links to your social media channels in newspapers, magazines, and television. That way people who are not aware of your social media presence can have a look at these links.
Advertisements on social media channels
Social media marketing employs a lot of techniques to increase your brand’s reach and visibility among the masses. One such social media marketing strategy is social media ads. They are a great tool for social media marketing and can effectively yield very favorable results for your product or service.
We have two kids of promotions. One organic which is free across the social media platforms and the other is the paid form of promotion.
Organic promotions are effective up to a certain point. But if you want more and more people to know about your product it is essential to invest in paid forms of promotions. Since paid advertisements do not have the constraints associated with organic promotions you can use them to your benefit as and when you want them to.
The organic social media marketing promotions can be tailored and tweaked to create content for paid advertisements.
Four things to keep in mind when creating customized paid advertisements
- Specific content-driven ads for your targeted audience
- Create innovative phrases and lines for the different platforms keeping in mind the nature of your target groups. You have to create varied versions of your ad for the same product.
- Be meticulous and design and create cost-effective ads. Optimize your content for reducing money wastage.
- At times when you are not that adept at making ads yourself keeping in mind the viability, budget, and other factors, consider the option of outsourcing your ads to specialized companies or people. They deal with this kind of promotion all the time. Hence they can be able to effectively utilize all the resources you have and produce a winner advertising campaign.
- A lot of social media allows you the option of a call-to-action button on their platforms for marketing your product.
Some of the ways in which you can engage new leads through paid online advertisements in social media marketing are:
New Deals and Offers: Announce limited-time offers and new deals to your target audience as well as your existing customers. This can induce new lead generation and can help garner new consumers for your product.
Product promotions: Online ads are a great way to promote your existing product as well as the new range of products from your brand. Customized ads can help reach a wide variety of people who can then make purchasing decisions based on how the ads have influenced them.
Webinars/event promotion: This is a very popular social media marketing technique. Webinars and live question-answer sessions are a popular way to connect with your target groups.
Free Giveaways: Giveaways are great incentives to attract new customers as well as keep your existing customers happy. It gives a boost to visibility and is a very beneficial social media marketing tactic.
Frequent content automation is not desirable
Before explaining why content automation is not very desirable in social media marketing to let’s learn a little about what content automation is actually.
Content Automation(CA)
Content automation is the process of removing human involvement in the day-to-day content curation for a digital medium. It is one of the most popular digital marketing strategies now. Content automation programs and makes sure that you don’t have to devote extra time organizing and collating content regularly. It is feasible as well as time-saving. This helps a lot with aggregating our content and also promoting blogs, websites, etc.
However, frequent content automation can lead to a disconnect between you and your consumers. That can lead to a dip in visitors and sales. In any social media marketing, it is very important to create camaraderie between you and your existing and potential customers. It ensures your loyal fan following and helps to establish your brand on social media. However, it can be a good social media marketing strategy.
Automation has a huge advantage and should be used. But in the process of automating your content do not forget to add the personal element to your social media marketing strategy.
Improve and optimize
Once you have the initial results at hand, you will have a fair idea of how your brand is performing based on the different metrics that you’ve chosen. Work on the areas that need attention. Improvise. Strive for better overall engagement always.
For instance, Hashtags on Instagram ensure that you have wider visibility across the social media channel. Make sure you use most of the hashtags relevant to your business. They can go a long way in spreading awareness about your business. They can help you gain followers to a large extent.
Tip
Social media marketing is a long-term process of gaining a loyal fan base and making sales. Make use of all the tools you have carefully. Create a logical marketing strategy that will yield profits in the long run. Start it with a Content Writing Course today.
