How to build an effective social media strategy

If you’re looking to grow your brand through social media marketing, then you need to create an excellent social media strategy for your brand first. It would be impossible to maximize social media’s power and do the most that you can do with it if you don’t have a strategy. It will then appear that you’re only posting on a platform for the sake of it without any noticeable effect or improvement on your business. 

It is important that you set goals for your marketing activities, understand your target audience (who they are and their needs), etc. All of these are contained in a social media strategy, and without one, you'll struggle to get any meaningful results. 

It doesn’t matter whether you are just trying to build your brand with the help of social media or you’re simply trying to improve on what you already have on the ground. Having a strategy is essential for your brand's social media marketing activity. 

Now that we are getting into the thick of 2021, it’s a good time for you to create a strategy if you don't already have one or you're trying to fine-tune your marketing. 

With each passing year, social media becomes even more competitive, with more brands fighting for social media users’ attention. It’s getting even more complex. 

This is more reason why you need a social media marketing strategy as it helps to tackle these problems and help you achieve your goals. This is why we created this guide to help you build an effective social media strategy. 

Here are several steps that you need to take to build an effective social media strategy.

1. Set goals for yourself

The first thing that you must sort out is why you’re on social media in the first place. The reason for going to social media would be the goal that you’re looking to achieve. What do you want from social media; to direct traffic to your site? Or reach out to the customers easily? 

There are many reasons why your brand is on social media or goals that your business is trying to achieve on social media. Some of these are:

• Get more traffic to your site
• Increase brand awareness
• Boost your revenue through sales or increasing signups
• Generate new leads
• Develop a community for your business and customers
• Increase brand engagement
• Provide your customers with social customer service
• Listen and be a part of conversations in your industry or about your brand. 

None of these goals are exclusive, so you can make two or more goals you’re looking to achieve on social media. 

Generally, you should decide on a few goals and focus on them to be more effective. This works better unless your business has a big group with different teams assigned towards achieving different goals. 

2. Identify your target audience.

As a marketer, you can’t make any assumptions, especially not when talking about the target audience. They are the reasons why you are going to social media in the first place. So, once you know what you want, know who you’re reaching out to as well. 

Thankfully, there are many analytics tools and demographic data that will come in handy for this. Most of the things you need to find out about your target audience, which will determine your social media strategy, aren’t so far-fetched anymore if you know the right places to look. 

One of the first things to keep in mind is that there are different types of audiences on various platforms. So the kind of audience that you want to reach would determine the platform that you focus on. 

Here is a demographic of the target audience, mostly on different platforms. 

• YouTube and Facebook have high earners majorly and are prime social platforms for ads. 
• Instagram and TikTok have more of Gen Z and millennials, so the content is usually eye-popping, bold, and oozing with personality. 
• Pinterest has more women than men and has the highest AOV (average order value) among social shoppers. 
• LinkedIn has an educated and formal audience known for creating in-depth and industry-specific content.

The numbers on the different platforms indicate which of them you should focus on and the type of content you will be creating. So your audience is a significant part of your strategy. Focus on the platform(s) that have the core of your audience active in it. 

3. Determine your main KPIs

Your social media must be driven by data if you want to have any success with it. So you must focus on the most critical metrics and not just any metric at all. You need to determine the one that aligns with your goals the most. 

There are several metrics, and the goal of your social media strategy or what you’re trying to achieve will determine which metrics to focus on. Some of these metrics are:

• Reach: this refers to the number of social media users that saw your content or post. Is your content reach wide enough to drive more awareness to your brand?
• Clicks: this refers to the people that clocked on your account or content. For each campaign, you should track your click as it helps you find out what drives people's curiosity and make them want to buy.
• Engagement: this refers to the number of people that interacted or engaged with your post divided by the impressions. This helps you realize how your content is perceived and the willingness of your audience to interact. 
• Hashtag performance: the performance of your hashtag can give your brand more visibility on social media. Knowing which hashtags people associate with your brand and your most-used hashtags are essential for shaping your content. 

You need numbers to determine the effectiveness of your social media strategy. However, there are several numbers; you need to pick the appropriate ones and view them in the context of your goals to see how well you're doing. 

4. Be timely with your presence on social media.

Timeliness is crucial for social media marketers. Firstly, you need to produce content regularly for your social media audience. However, you must be timely with it. The demographic of your audience should determine the best time to post on social media. You can’t post at just any time. You don’t expect your audience to be on social media round the clock. You need to find the best time to post and post at that time. That’s timeliness. It is how you’re going to be effective.

Secondly, social media is the bridge between businesses and customers, so you have to make yourself available to your customers on social media. You need to be timely in your response to them. Customers want to get speedy responses from the brands they patronize and hold meaningful conversations with them.  You need to put in the effort to ensure that you don’t forget or neglect any engagement opportunities with your audience and customers. Be sure to respond when they reach out to you quickly, and you will gain their respect and loyalty even more.

Conclusion

It is essential to do anything successfully on social media as a business without first having a social media marketing strategy. Your strategy dictates how you move in the market. Measuring your strategy helps you find out if you are doing the right or wrong things.