Social media marketing can be an effective component of your overall marketing strategy when properly aligned with your marketing goals. But where do you begin? Here are several steps you can take to integrate social media into your marketing strategy.
Establish a Content Marketing Goal
When developing a content marketing strategy you want this idea to support the company’s marketing and business goal as well. These two goals tell you what content is most desirable for your readers and what social media platforms to present it through to reach your mass target audience.
A good goal should be measured with the S.M.A.R.T. goal guide.
- Specific
- Your goal needs to be specific so you know exactly what you need to achieve. The questions what do I want to accomplish, why is this goal important, who is involved, where is it located, which resources or limits are involved, and others will help you get very specific.
- Measurable
- It needs to be measurable you can easily track your progress and know specifically how much more you need to do to reach your goal. To develop a measurable goal, ask yourself the questions how much, how many, how will I know when it is accomplished?
- Achievable
- Having an achievable goal is important because you want to push the company to its full potential, but also don’t want to set yourself up to be unsuccessful. When thinking about your goals achievability, think about how you can accomplish the goal, and how realistic the goal is based on other constraints, such as financial factors?
- Relevant
- You want a relevant goal so you are not wasting time, money, and efforts with trying to accomplish something not needed to advance the company. To judge the relevancy, you can ask the questions does this seem worthwhile, is this the right time, does this match our other efforts/needs, am I the right person to reach this goal, is it applicable in the current socio-economic environment?
- Timely
- Every goal needs a target date so that you have a deadline to focus on and something to work toward. To figure out what a good timeline for your goal would be to see what you can do in an hour, day, or week to judge the time needed.
SMART is a tool that effectively guides you towards achieving your goals. It can also improve your ability to reach them by encouraging you to define your objectives and set a completion date. SMART goals are also easy to use by anyone, anywhere, without the need for specialist tools or training.
Produce a Social Media Audit
Before you can create a social media marketing plan, you first need to assess the current state of your social media presence. This means looking at the analytics of current users/followers, identifying what platform your target audience is using most, and analyzing how your channels compare to your competitors.
Upon completion of your audit, you should have a good idea how your social platforms are performing, how they are representing your company, and how to improve them.
Identify Appropriate Social Media Platforms and Presence
Choose what platforms best meet your goals. For example, if you wanted to increase brand awareness you might choose Twitter as your platform and use hashtags to gain traffic to your page. Researching which platforms are best for your marketing strategy will help you establish the most applicable channel or channels for your company.
Here are a few links Hootsuite provides you to see the demographics and statistics of common social media platforms.
Facebook demographics and statistics
Instagram demographics and statistics
Twitter demographics and statistics
LinkedIn demographics and statistics
Snapchat demographics and statistics
Pinterest demographics and statistics
Another way to determine the most appropriate platform would be to look at your products and industry. These will help you identify the platform best suited to reach your target audience and create a higher engagement rate. If you are having trouble deciding which platform or what content best suits your company, you can always check out your competition for an idea of where to start.
After you have identified the social media channels you will use, the next step is to establish your brand’s voice, tone, and style you will carry out on the site. You will decide this by studying what will best work to achieve your goal.
Create Content
Every company’s content will be different depending on their industry, goals, and other various factors. To ensure you have appropriate content, research your target market and how to create content they will want, expect, and enjoy seeing.
Another thing you can do to help your post generate more views, regardless of your goal, is to optimize profiles for SEO. SEO is Search Engine Optimization which helps the visibility of a website or a web page in a web search engine’s unpaid results. An optimized profile can significantly generate more traffic to your profile.
Track and Report your Analytics
Tracking your campaigns is crucial to many parts of accomplishing your goal. One way this is beneficial is you can see if you are on track to achieving success, and if not, you know to tweak what you are currently doing.
What you should be tracking will depend on your goal. To see what content you should be looking at to measure your success, see the chart below.
To track these analytics there are many tools you can use such as Google Analytics or Twitter analytics which are free. Others tools include Hotjar or Socialbakers which are fee-based but can help measure your company’s success on social media platforms.
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