7 Essential elements of Social Media Marketing Strategy

Social media plays a vital role in every business’s success, especially in marketing. Social media helps build awareness, share content and interact with prospects and customers.

Most business people, both newbies and experienced are still not aware of top social media marketing strategies that will help their businesses and brands succeed. According to previous research findings, up to 90% of marketers claim social media plays a crucial role in the success of their business. However, only 41% are able to measure the ROI of their social activities.

In this blog post, we will be taking you through some of the essential social media marketing strategies you need to consider.

1. Know the Value Proposition

For any social media marketing strategy to be successful, you will first have to know the value your brand will bring to your audiences on social media. You can never define a deal when you are not in a position to show any agreement.

You need to know the importance that comes of someone engaging or following you on social media.

What do you want your social media audiences to know about your brand? What value will I be bringing to the audience through social media? Use these to come up with a mission statement that will guide you in the development of your social media marketing strategy.

2. Know Your Objectives

The strategy required the end goal. The objectives will be the basis of your plan and help guide you in every tactic or decision you make.

Make it a habit of using the goals from your digital marketing strategy. With this, you will successfully develop social-specific plans to help contribute to your marketing mission. It does not matter if you want to boost your website’s referral traffic, increase your social media followers, drive more conversions or foster engagement; you need to come up with realistic goals.

If possible, having benchmark goals will help you know the success levels of your efforts. With this, you will be in a position to make improvements later.

3. Who Is Your Audience?

For any strategy for social media marketing to be successful, one has to know and connect with the target audience. You also have to understand their pain points, motivations, needs and content interests.

Get into your website and the social media platform analytics discuss with your sales team to unearth important customer characteristics and insights. Then, use the report to create a customer persona. It will be the general representation detailing who are your followers and target customers.

4. Develop a Channel Mix

Every social media platform offers something unique. Most marketers have the urge to design a strategy with a presence on every platform. However, quality over quality will always be a good factor in the digital marketing space.

Whenever you are coming up with your audience research report to help create your personas, it is advisable that you try figuring out the channels driving most web traffic. You must conduct extensive research to know the social media platforms where your closest competitors are investing the most and the results they are getting.

5. Identify the Content Mix

Sharing links to your business blog or website with some content will not yield the results you intend. However, social media followers today want more.

You have to use all the social media marketing elements to good use and have the right guide to help you come up with a content plan. The content plan should have the right images, links, videos and discussion starter’s mix.

6. Engagement and Posting Schedule

Being consistent on social media channels is a key to ensuring your marketing efforts yield positive results. When you go silent for long periods, your audience will forget about you, making it difficult for you to have engagement. Over-posting can also make the right audience turn away from your social media platform due to annoyance.

Create a schedule or a plan on a daily, weekly or monthly basis that details the following:

The person responsible for monitoring or updating social media feeds
Dates and times of sharing content
Platforms for sharing content
Type of content to share

7. Data Measurement and Analysis Methods

Data measurement and analysis are essential to your social media marketing strategy. It offers insights one needs to improve on the ROI and refine your social media marketing tactics. You will have to outline the metrics and analytics tools you will use. For instance, if you aim to drive more traffic using social channels, including Google Analytics or any preferable analytics tool.

Conclusion

To successfully develop a content-rich website, keeping SEO in mind and using social media to help you connect with your audience are some of the essential elements you need for a successful social media marketing strategy. Ensure you are up to date and ahead of the game by applying the above details, and your efforts will never go to waste.