How to Build a Social Media Marketing Strategy

Social media keeps dominating across the world and more people seem to get on board every day, leading to platforms growing rapidly and attracting new users from all over the globe.

It’s important to take advantage of this great opportunity, as it can deliver great value to most business ventures and also play a major role in their marketing, sales, and advertising strategy.

After reading this article, you’ll be armed with the necessary knowledge of how to strategize your business using social media. So, what are the steps you need to take in building an SMM strategy for your business in 2023 and beyond?

The steps below will go a long way to achieve this goal. Let's go into the details:

1. Set your business and marketing goals

It’s always good to set up your goals and the primary aims and objectives of your business.

This makes it easier to break your mission/vision down into realistic goals, enabling your processes to be straightforward.

Secondary goals will, thereafter, become easier to achieve and could also be allocated using better strategies.

In a nutshell, ensure you have clear social media goals and objectives. This will assist you in achieving tremendous success with your plan and strategies.

Keep it simple and focused and avoid making long, unrealistic goals.

2. Plan your social media marketing objectives

Marketing goals are relevant to the parameters you choose to use. For instance, when you aim to grab more leads, it becomes important to track signups and email subscriptions.

These are important metrics and they let you see the bigger picture, keeping your business goals in check.

You should benchmark your marketing strategy to make your set goals easier to achieve. You should also make sure past results are a reference for future objectives.

Any marketing objective should follow the "SMART" mnemonics:

• SPECIFIC - It entails some specific visions; an example could be increasing email subscriptions.
• MEASURABLE - Your visions and objectives require measurement.
• ACHIEVABLE - The set objectives should be realistic.
• RELEVANT - The objectives are aligned with business goals.
• TIME-BASED - It’s important to set a timeframe to achieve these objectives.

Now, you're aware of how to define your marketing objectives and tie them back to your business goals. You must identify what type of people you're targeting, which will help tailor your strategy toward their tastes.

3. Educate yourself on who your target audience is

You may be the driving force behind your business, but it's not just about you. Your business has to provide for the needs of the customers.

It can be difficult to find people who are interested in your service when you're just starting. So, you'll want to try different approaches until you find something that works.

You can start by asking the right questions concerning your goals. They can be:

• What are the possible demographics and psychographics of your audience?
• How do they interact with digital products?
• How often do they checkout on e-commerce sites?
• How long ago did they make their last purchase?
• What are the educational qualifications and career paths of your audience?
• In what specific industries are they active?
• What are their job roles or titles?
• What are their greatest challenges?
• How do they interact with websites and social media?
• Where do they get their news and info from?

It should be pretty straightforward for you to group and arrange the information you gather. You can now create an audience persona for each platform you use.

This leads to a keen understanding of the individual aspects that define your target audience. It‘s how you find your audience and speak to them with authentic marketing.

In summary, do not complicate this process by having too many personality types. You need to focus on one or two personas in the early stage.

4. Research your competitors and learn how to outsmart them

You can never have a solid SMM strategy until you can research your competitors. So many businesses have failed with their online marketing plans because they didn’t invest their time in researching competitors.

When you research your rivals, you get to know what they’re doing right or wrong. And this helps you upgrade based on what they’re offering.

5. What's your content marketing plan?

If you don’t get into content marketing, a social marketing strategy cannot help achieve your brand goals.

What is content marketing? Well, this is an important part of your marketing efforts across the board. The idea is to develop and distribute targeted content, both visual and written.

Content can be created in-house or outsourced. And it should be aimed at a target audience, as your business's social media channels need quality content to be worth anything.

As such, your text, images, and videos ought to be valuable and of great quality, endowing them with other marketing avenues to contact and convert potential customers.

What types of content can you use for your marketing strategies?

• Blog posts
• News
• White papers
• eBooks
• Videos
• Podcasts
• Case studies, etc.

To manage your social media content, you need a content calendar to map out all the stages of content marketing—from research and writing to publishing on various platforms.

Looking up your competitors' content strategy helps you get started by giving you tested ideas for formulating your own.

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In addition, measure the success of your content and adjust your strategy accordingly, to see what works.

Tracking certain metrics helps you optimize your future efforts and provides insightful knowledge of what your audience members are looking for.

Doing this will not only aid in the planning of successful social media marketing but can also help with the development and execution of individual marketing campaigns.

Now, remember to work based on your budget and availability, noting the time, skills, tools, and capital you need to start and scale a branded social media account.

And if you have enough people on your side, assigning these tasks to specific team members will help ease the whole process.