Your online brand popularity depends on your ability to market it across the web, especially on all the social media channels. So, creating a social media marketing strategy is crucial.
However, it can seem overwhelming, especially if you want to build an online presence for your business for the first time or are launching a new business.
Many platforms, tools, features, and products are undoubtedly available. Choosing the ideal ones and getting everything set up and running simultaneously can be daunting.
This is even harder and more confusing for a beginner without a full-time social media strategy team. So, how do you get started?
This article explains how to create a social media marketing strategy from scratch. As a bonus, you get a social media strategy template to copy and use for your business.
But first, let’s understand what a social media strategy means.
Table of Contents
Social Media Marketing Strategy Definition
A social media strategy is a master plan outlining everything you do to market your brand on platforms like Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, and Instagram. It includes creating, scheduling, posting, and engaging with your content across social media channels.
The strategy comprises the social media channels you’ll utilize to promote your brand, the content you’ll create and how to post it, team responsibilities (if applicable), marketing campaigns, choosing the target audience, and brand engagement strategy.
It aims at:
- Building brand awareness
- Growing traffic and sales
- Connecting with potential customers (prospects)
- Providing support
- Attracting and engaging your followers
- Leveraging influencers networks
The Importance of a Social Media Strategy
Social media can help in many ways, including promoting special offers, connecting with customers, providing support, and advertising new products and services. Subsequently, having a social media marketing strategy is crucial for a brand.
A social media strategy helps establish a brand. It builds and maintains a brand’s voice by creating informed followers and leading them through the purchasing cycle, from awareness through the purchasing phase to even after-sales service.
A social media strategy can help in several functions, including:
- Tell your brand’s story, which helps differentiate it from competitors.
- Expose your brand to new audiences, which increases brand awareness.
- Boost your online store by driving traffic to it.
- Knowing your customers’ needs and wants through engagement
- Boost credibility and authority when you show up regularly.
- Organically grow your customer base, which helps reduce marketing costs.
- Nurture existing customers and build brand loyalty.
Types of Social Media Strategies
There are many social media strategies that you can try for your business. Here are the five most common ones:
- Influencer Marketing Strategy—This entails creating strategic partnerships with relevant influencers in your industry to promote your products. How you do this depends on your goals and the preferences of your target audience. It can range from mentions on social media and endorsements to providing discount codes to influencers.
- Viral Strategy – In this strategy, you leverage trends to create a buzz that triggers rapid brand recognition, audience interaction, and growth.
- Nurturing Strategy – This strategy involves building deeper connections with your audience.
- Launch Campaigns—These are where you promote your latest product line to create buzz around the brand.
- Trust-building Strategy consists of building integrity and credibility through user-generated content and reviews.
How to Create a Social Media Marketing Strategy
Here is how you can create a social media strategy:
Define Your Target Audience
To succeed in social media marketing, you must identify and document your buyer personas. You can begin by establishing the demographics of your intended audience, including their gender, age, occupation, income, hobbies, and personal interests. That way, you can identify their specific needs and why they make their purchase decisions.
Start shopify Free Trial Today
It would help if you also understand your target audience’s social media motivations. Why do they visit social media platforms? Is it to explore, learn, shop, or just for fun?
For instance, a survey conducted by Hubspot gave the following as the reasons why people visit social media platforms:
- Interact with friends – 65%
- Entertainment – 53%
- Learn new stuff – 50%
- Learn about a new product or brand – 41%
Having such data gives a comprehensive understanding of the market. From this, you can determine the best marketing strategy to use and how successful it will be. You can create targeted advertising that solves the consumers’ problems or needs.
To reach the right audience, you should incorporate social media listening tools. These tools usually scour social media platforms for keywords and determine whether users talk positively or negatively about your brand. By offering this report, they help you determine your best course of action or learn how best to target the audience.
Define the Goals for your Social Media Strategy
After defining your target audience, you need to know what you intend to achieve with your social media strategy. Without a clear picture of your goals, your actions and efforts will be guided by nothing.
Therefore, start by defining your goals. This mainly depends on your business type and goals, type of audience, and the entire marketing strategy. For instance, you might define your social media strategy goals in terms of:
- Increasing brand awareness
- Website traffic generation
- Generating more leads
- Increasing customer or audience engagement
- Growing your audience
That information can help you quickly determine the best strategy to achieve the goal. However, what works for growing lead generation might not work for increasing customer engagement.
Also, don’t work on generic goals. They need to be more effective. For example, don’t just set your social media strategy goals as “Generating more leads.” Instead, work with numbers.
You can set your lead generation goal to 1,000 or 3,000 leads monthly. This helps you to measure your performance against the efforts you input.
Lastly, use what is known as SMART goals. Your goals should be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. This increases the chances of achieving your goals.
Incorporate Ecommerce
The number of users visiting social media to discover or learn about new products rises daily. Please complete the process by allowing them to shop on the same social media platforms.
This is convenient. Integrating e-commerce into your social media marketing strategy makes this possible.
While the trend has yet to gain traction, many social media marketers believe that in the future, more and more people will prefer shopping from social media platforms.
Therefore, simplifying the shopping process should be considered when considering social media marketing and customer engagement.
Research shows that by 2023, at least 25% of US social media users in the 18-—to 44-year-old age bracket will have already made purchases on social media. These figures will only grow as social media use increases.
Study Your Competition: Competitors Analysis
Conducting a competitive analysis helps you better understand your competition. What strategies work for them on social media, and which areas are they failing?
This helps you devise even more effective strategies. You can build on their work to create better content. You can avoid and focus on what works by understanding their failures.
So, how do you study your competition?
- Identify your top five competitors. Pick companies or brands selling similar products to yours or with whom you share an audience.
- Identify their social media platforms and strategies: Do they use posts, stories, or reels on Instagram? How consistent are they?
- Evaluate their top social media posts: Understand what they have included in their posts.
- Incorporate social media listening tools. These tools help you monitor your competition’s social media activity.
- Make this a habit at least four times a year: This will help you stay ahead of the competition and better target your audience.
Competitive analysis might seem daunting. Most people would prefer skipping it. However, this is one of those steps that will make your social media marketing strategy successful. It helps you avoid tackling the market unthinkingly.
Social Search Optimization
Just like optimizing for a search engine like Google, you should also consider optimizing your social media channel search. Why? Search algorithms work almost the same. Plus, more people are now using social media to search for products.
More and more people are moving from search engines to social media for product research or discovery. Research shows that around 24% of customers aged 18 to 54 first visit social media for their initial research about brands or products.
As such, if you want your products or brands to be visible on social media, experts believe you should consider SEO for your channels. But how do you do this?
- Using an easy-to-search username
- Including the most relevant keywords on your bio and content
- Using relevant hashtags
- Try using a consistent username for all your social media accounts
These few tips make a lot of difference to how people find your content or marketing campaigns.
Run an Audit on Your Social Media
Conducting an audit of your social media activities is crucial. It helps you to know if what you are doing is effective or not.
Additionally, it allows you to know what type of content or content formats customers are responding to and what types they are not. You’ll also know the best time to post your messages based on the time your audience is online.
Follow these steps to run an audit on your social media channels:
- Check post engagement: Analyze all your social media platforms to see how your posts are doing. This should be analyzed in terms of comments, shares, or likes left by your target audience.
- Identify patterns: Identify common patterns, like when the audience is online or the kind of content they engage with. For instance, are they online on weekdays or weekends?
- Do an audit for all platforms/channels: Don’t assume that how people respond to your posts on Instagram is the same as on Facebook. It is entirely different. Therefore, audit each platform independently.
The audit should show you how effective your marketing strategy is. From it, you can see whether your top-performing posts are helping you achieve your goals.
Focus on Select Channels
After trying different social media platforms for your marketing strategies, focus on those you feel can work.
They won’t be effective if you have a channel on every social media platform. Why?
- Lack of resources
- It is not easy to fully understand the working mechanism of multiple channels at once
- Your audience may not be on all social platforms.
For these reasons, focus your efforts on a platform with a high ROI (return on investment).
This ensures that your marketing efforts stay on track.
Typically, Instagram is among the top four social media channels you can focus on due to its high ROI. It’s over 2 billion viewership potential a month is a good reason why. The platform has also proven to offer higher engagement levels and quality leads. Isn’t that what businesses are looking for?
You can also add an Instagram feed to your ecommerce site. It helps the site look fresher and can entice people to buy. As research shows, you can increase conversion on your business by up to 29% by using social media.
Have a Content Strategy
The success of your social media strategy will be primarily affected by the type of content you create and post. Therefore, remember to develop a content strategy. You must know what content you will post on your social media channels.
Generally, different platforms have different audiences, and they engage with the content differently. Therefore, when developing your strategy, consider the uniqueness of each platform and its audience. This way, you can appeal to your audience through these channels.
But how do you do this?
Well, first, you must ensure that you post quality content. Finding content inspiration can help you always have fresh content that entices your audience. For instance, try to;
- Answers the questions from your current and potential customers
- Adding trending topics to your content spin
- Include customer testimonials and reviews
- Check which content earns more love by browsing various hashtags
It would help if you also determined your content mix. Use recurring post types and formats to give your audience a sense of consistency and variety.
It also allows you time to plan for the next post, as you have a specific format for doing things. For example, if you include testimonials in your posts, this enables you to plan. Find the right mix, and you’ll have a successful marketing strategy.
Employ the Right Tools
Numerous social media tools can help streamline your social media marketing. They relieve the load of manual content creation, posting, and maintaining engagement—especially if you have several channels.
Typically, there are tools and apps for everything. Some tools can search for the best ideas and generate compelling content. Others can help you schedule your posts and videos, while others are crucial for customer engagement. The right mix guarantees success in your marketing efforts.
An excellent example of such a tool is the EcommerceBot. It comes with all these features under one platform. For instance, its social media AI manager automates all these processes, from creating engaging posts and scheduling to responding to customer DMs and comments.
With that, almost your entire marketing, sales, and customer support processes are automated.
Repurpose Your Content
While unique content for every channel works, it can be much work. A better option is repurposing your content to fit several channels. Yes, not all content can be repurposed, as different channels offer unique audiences, but you can find a way to repurpose most of it.
Research shows that many marketers repurpose content for their platforms. At least 19% of them consider repurposing a key strategy in their marketing efforts.
Why should you consider repurposing your social media content?
- It saves time, as you don’t have to create new content for every channel
- Allows you to use your unique message to a larger audience
- It helps your content last longer as you update unique pieces
- You can improve your strategy by analyzing how the content performs in different channels
Even popular platforms like HubSpot admit to repurposing their content. So, why shouldn’t you?
Conclusion
The above tips will help you create a successful social media marketing strategy and optimize it for a higher ROI.
However, you also need always to stay informed if you are to survive in this ever-changing market. Don’t relax when your strategy is working. Continue learning and implementing new effective methods.
You can try Ecommercebot for free; no credit card is required. You agree to turn your E-commerce business into a success story by clicking the image below.
Also, with the AI era upon us, please don’t shy away from using its tools. They can help automate your processes, giving you more time to figure out the best strategies to improve your business.
Consider EcommerceBot for all your social media marketing plans. It automates post creation, scheduling, and customer engagement. Sign up for EcommerceBot today and watch your marketing strategy ROI skyrocket.
Social Media Marketing Strategy Template
Learning how to create a social media marketing strategy is one thing; making it is another. But don’t worry!
If you are ready to create your social media marketing strategy, here is a template. Fill in the necessary information to guide you in developing the best plan.
Define your Target Audience
Defining your target audience should be your first step. Define the audience in terms of the following parameters:
- Age
- Gender
- Geographic location
- Wants and needs
- Pain points
- Hobbies and interests
- The brands and industries they buy from
Define Your Social Media Marketing Strategy Goals
What is the purpose of your social media marketing strategy? Choose from this list:
- Increasing brand awareness:
- Website traffic generation:
- Generating more leads:
- Increasing customer or audience engagement:
- Growing your audience:
Have measurable goals with specific numbers. Avoid generic ones.
Incorporate Ecommerce
Outline how you will incorporate e-commerce into your social media channels. Determine which tools you’ll use depending on the platform.
- Instagram shops
- Instagram live shopping
- Facebook shops
Study Your Competition
Study your competition to see what works and what does not work for them. Pick five brands to analyze. Then, analyze them based on the following parameters:
- What social media platforms do they use?
- What type of posts do they post?
- Who is their audience?
- What content format?
- How often do they post?
- What’s working for your competitors?
- What needs to be fixed for them?
Social Search Optimization
Describe your strategy to optimize your social search.
- Which keywords to use:
- Hashtags to use:
Run Audits on your Social Media platforms.
- How often will you run audits
- Which platforms to run the audit on
- Which channel is performing best
- Which channel is performing poorly
- What are the best-performing types of content
- What kind of content isn’t working?
- What are your target audience’s main queries or concerns?
Focusing on Select Channels
Which social media channels will you focus on?
- YouTube
- TikTok
- Others
Have a Content Strategy
Define your content strategy.
- What type of content will you post (educational, promotional, or informational)
- What kind of content format will you post (video, photos, audio, or text)
- How often will you post (once a day, weekly, or monthly)
Use the Right Tools
Which social media automation tools will you use for the following tasks?
- Content creation:
- Content Scheduling:
- Customer Engagement:
