Easy Steps to Create a Winning Social Media Marketing Strategy

Your social media marketing strategy, when it is thoughtfully created, will guide you on how to build your business, grow your network, increase your visibility, and of course, sell your services on social media. It also helps you to build an engaged audience while focusing on your business goals. But, to achieve the best results, you need to be strategic in your planning. In this article, we'll highlight the steps you need to create a social media marketing strategy and how to achieve consistent results $$. Keep on reading, friend!

What Should your Social Media Marketing Strategy Contain?

A social media marketing strategy is a work plan that outlines your goals and how you will achieve them on social media. This includes your business plans and the key metrics to track your success. Before you can proceed with a step in a social media marketing strategy, you need to define the preceding step. Why do you have to do this? Because they are all connected.

Work towards increasing your brand awareness and online presence and building a loyal audience while aiming to achieve your financial goals. That said, we can summarize the steps in a social media marketing strategy into goals/objectives, target audiences, key metrics, content mix, channels, and implementation. By aligning these steps, you will get positive and consistent results in your business.

Steps to Build your Winning Social Media Marketing Strategy

A good social media strategy will assist you in standing out and attracting the right customers to your brand. It also helps you to know what works and on which platform you should be spending more time and energy: 

Start Where You Are

One of the mistakes online business owners make is thinking that many media channels equate to a larger audience which is not always true. Study the content and conversations across your Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, or Twitter accounts carefully.

You want to understand how much engagement you get on each platform and how you can boost that. This is the part where you conduct a thorough social media audit and take note of all you've been doing, right or wrong.

Next, study your competitors on each platform, including the big ones, the small ones, the old ones and the new ones. Once you have gathered all that information, it's time to get to the real work, defining your goals.

Define Your Business Goal and Objectives

Set your business goals according to what you want to achieve in your business. Start by writing down everything you and your business stand for, including your goals for the next few years. 

Create a marketing plan and include the steps of how to support your work in achieving your business goals. These goals should weigh in on quality and quantity and must be SMART‒ specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timely.

Common Social Media Marketing Goals to Set for your Business

• Boost your brand's awareness
• Increase traffic to your website
• Increase community engagement
• Nurture your brand's reputation
• Create demand for your services
• Build social proof and establish your credibility
• Generate quality leads and get customers
• Boost conversions
• Become a reliable identity and a thought leader in your niche

A golden rule towards achieving your goals is aligning them with your business's vision. To spice things up, remember to add big and audacious goals that would inspire you on the hard days to keep on moving forward. 

Identify Your Target Audience

We can't over-emphasize the importance of identifying your target audience. You need to know who you're selling to and their preferred social media channels.

Each piece of content you create on social media should also appeal to them and answer questions they may have about your services before they even ask. Your ideal audience will also want to get to know your better, and you have to be ready to share with them content and information beyond just promoting your business. 

Understanding your audience's demographics, interests, and motivation is also essential. It always helps to talk to some of your existing customers and spend time doing online and, when possible, offline market research.

Set up a survey to understand who are the people who would most likely buy from you. You want to know how they think and behave and their preferences. 

It also helps to create an ideal customer avatar. Ask questions like what they enjoy doing. What does a day in their lives look like? When will they be able to engage with your content on social media? How and when? What do they like to read? How do they spend their free time? What are their priorities in life? Are they married? Single? Love pets? Do they exercise, go to art class or read in their free time? The more you know, the easier to connect with them in your communication. 

Since you don't create content for a generic audience, you must be specific when identifying your target audience. Bring your ideal customer avatar to life by creating a personality and attaching a name to it. This process will save you from vague descriptions and lack of clarity.

Key Metrics

The next step is to determine what metrics to measure growth on your social media platform, including monitoring social media analytics to measure your insights and visibility on these social media channels. All the channels come with various, easy-to-understand analytics tools for measuring key metrics. We use Loomly and Tailwind, and they both offer plenty of data to help us understand how to do things better. 

Key Metrics to Measure your Growth

1. Engagement: This section will look at engagement metrics like shares, likes, and comments. If you use Twitter, retweets also counts. 
2. Awareness: In addition to measuring your engagements, rating your awareness online is crucial. Clicks and impressions are important metrics to measure your brand's awareness online. Check out the number of clicks and impressions on your social media content. How many mentions are you getting? Measure your reach and find out the strength of your brand's voice.
3. Conversions: One of the key metrics is conversions, and these help you confirm if these engagements are converting to clients or customers. What is your return on investment (ROI), and how are your sales?

All in all, metrics can be misleading, and it is important to focus on the ones that show how your business can thrive and what helps you to market and sell your services. Vanity metrics such as likes on a post are much less important than receiving comments, DMs and people clicking on your links to learn more about what you offer.

Choosing the Right Channels

Choosing the proper channels and the number of channels will help you make more effective social media plans. Remember, sometimes less is more. If you are a solopreneur with limited time and budget, we recommend choosing one social media channel and acing that one first. Once you establish yourself on this first channel, you can move on to expand your presence to the next best one. Don't try to be everything and everywhere because you will wear yourself thin quickly, and you will be left with a lot of work and not enough outcome. 

Consider what channel would suit your brand's purpose and where your services would perform the best. Also, you need to be sure that your target audience is present on the social media you choose to work with. As much as you want to span different platforms, you need to focus on where your audience hangs out and where you can appear with impact. 

Think about each social media channel, why people use it, and how that purpose fits your brand and services. Finally, consider if it is consistent with your brand identity. 

Create Your Social Media Marketing Content Mix

Creating your content mix helps you to stay focused, consistent and passionate about your message. There are many types of content that you can develop, such as news, video posts, podcasts, pictures, carousels, Reels, lives, and written content. Creating different content formats helps to add rhythm to your social media content, and you entertain and engage your audience better. However, having a variety of content on its own isn't enough. You have to produce high-quality content that offers value and serves your audience. 

You need to put creation, curation, and co-creation into consideration. Your content should entertain, inspire or educate your audience. Besides adding a good mix of content, you want to diversify your content to fit different media channels. It helps you connect with the various audiences on those platforms, and you can avoid making repeated posts, especially for those following you across different platforms.

Schedule your post with consistency, and again, sometimes less is more. This game is not about posting 3 times a day and running yourself to the ground, but rather committing to doing less but doing it as best as you can. Plus, avoid being too salesy and take some time to provide value, share information about your life and your business, and shine your expertise in your posts before you start selling. 

Content Formats to Choose From:

• News
• Promotional content
• Customer and influencer features
• Contests and giveaways
• Community events
• Behind the scenes
• Q&A sessions
• Tips and tricks 

Implement Your Strategy

It's not enough to have your social media planned out because you need to implement it too. Draft a plan including what needs to be done and what processes and systems you can automate or outsource. Give yourself some deadlines so that you can track your progress and stick to your own plan. When you get your desired result, you can consider paid advertising to target your audience better, increasing your visibility and, in turn, improving your Return On Investment (ROI).

Conclusion

A winning social media marketing strategy requires you to show up with absolute consistency. You need to test, analyze, measure, and reflect regularly. Always compare present results with the past to see if there is a place for improvement. Above all, be social and engage with the needs of your followers, especially when it aligns with your business purposes. A good strategic plan will help you to keep your eyes on your goals while supporting you through the daily, monthly, and yearly tasks so that you can show up for your business and your brand with consistency and impact.

And there is more! Here I am sharing with you a list of Things You Should Never Do on Social Media to help you learn more about a good strategy. If you are feeling lost, overworked and burned out while trying to build your business and not feeling confident about what steps to take, reach out and book a call with me. Let me help you create a simple digital plan to help you build a six-figure business to give you freedom, flexibility and success.