Build a social media marketing strategy from scratch

Every post, like and share must have a purpose, otherwise, it makes no sense in putting all that effort into creating something from scratch. Every brand must have a good social media marketing strategy for it to have a digital presence. A social media marketing strategy can help you determine the success rate of your brand. It can help your execution to be effective and make your plan more concise. A social media marketing strategy is completely different from a social media plan, a strategy is more about where you are headed as a brand and a plan determines how you want to get there.

There are more than a billion people active on social media and the chances of targeting them and getting results may seem to be very high. But if you don’t have the right social media marketing strategy, you aren’t going anywhere near that mark to see any positive results. People use social media more than just connecting with friends and sharing pictures, they also use it to connect with brands.

We live in a digital world and with more communication coming your way, as a brand, it is important to stay active, respond and “meet them” when they are online. As you start getting the traffic to your brand’s social media page, it tends to get a bit overwhelming to generate engaging content and reach thousands of people. The only way to maintain it is to have a good social media marketing strategy.

The first step to build your social media marketing strategy is to conduct research. Sometimes decisions on social media are made on assumptions and that could be fatal to your brand’s image. In order to build a brand’s image and communicate its message, you must get to know your audience and collect enough data to have a better understanding of what they want and how they want it.

The advantage of social media is that you have all the insights that serve you with the kind of data that you need in order to develop a social media marketing strategy. By defining your target audience, you are most likely to understand what, who, where, why and how you need to communicate your message. The next stage is to learn about your target audience – their digital presence, likes, and interests.

The final stage in your research must focus on your competitors. Know who your competitors are and learn from them. It could help you work on your strategy by knowing what kind of communication the audience responds to and what seems to be working and what doesn’t. It is better to be aware of your competitor’s activity.

Once the target audience is established, the second step is to prepare for the social profile – the images, theme and brand communication. Setting up social media profiles isn’t enough, it is about building the brand presence and engaging the audience on your social media page. So how do you make someone follow or like your page?

You could start by setting goals and creating social media plans.Social media marketing is used for various purposes such as raising brand awareness, finding leads and re-branding. Once you have an agenda, you can focus on creating small campaign plans check your progress if you are heading in the right direction. Keep in mind to check your metrics and engagement. At the end you want people to click on a link and convert them into possible customers.

The next stage is to define the voice of your brand and give it a personality. Set the tone in which you want to communicate to your audience and see how it works with them. It all depends on what kind of approach you take, you can either be funny and engaging or professional and formal.

All this doesn’t matter if you don’t have the right content and design to back it up. Content is king, period. In the real world, a direct method is often used where you sell the product without any entertainment. But on social media, it’s a whole different ball game. People come on social media to get entertained. If you are pitching a product out there in the open, the entire plan could backfire.

The content on your page must be relevant to your audience. “Give the people what they want”. By sharing posts, pictures, videos related to your audience, you can create engagement in a jiffy! It is, however, important to be consistent with your brand identity and tone.

The last step is to implement all your research and campaign plans in order to build your social media plan. It is important to check your page and the details that are mentioned there – for example, the bio and the visuals must be short and simple. A handy tool to promote your page is to have a content plan and use different tools to utilize the platform to its maximum potential.

Social media is “the” place when it comes to engaging and communicating with people. With so much potential and activity it is a haven for marketers to promote their brands and build an audience group. With all the factors of promoting the best work and converting leads, remember that people come on social media to have fun and you must work around that and have fun too!

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