Social media marketing strategies constantly change. What worked in the past, may not work today.
So, if you want to build a brand, and get tons of social traffic and customers, you need to keep up to date.
However, that doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to be a social media marketing expert. You can still promote your business on social networks, but only if you have a proper strategy.
With the right social media marketing strategy, everyone can drive social traffic to their website, and turn that traffic into clients.
Here are 8 key ingredients of effective social media marketing strategy in 2018 that you shouldn’t ignore:
1. Define Your Goals
Every step you take when you do social media marketing depends on the goals you set. You can’t start doing something unless you’ve made it clear where you want to go, and how you will get there. In other words, you should know what you want to achieve, and have a plan ahead on how to do it.
Here are some tips to help you define your goals:
- Recognize the needs of your business, as well as its potential,
- Choose objectives suitable for your business,
- Make your goals specific, but also realistic.
For example, you may want to find new, more reliable suppliers for your business, and grow tenfold. But, in reality, your business may primarily need a better sales team, and real growth would be 30%. Defining your goals will set you on the right track with your marketing, and you’ll protect yourself from being discouraged or defocused.
2. Consider Your Budget
Once you set your goals, you should consider the money you’re able to allocate for social media marketing. Always go back to your goals and see whether your budget is in line with your expectations. You can’t expect miracles on a shoestring budget, no matter what you do. This is so because you’ll always have competitors who are attracting the same group of people.
Bear in mind that social media is free, but an effective social media marketing never is. Strengthening your brand, getting higher ranking in Social Search really pays off. This is how you get customers from social sites.
You may need to assign money to the following activities:
- Creating engaging social media updates,
- Social media scheduling tools,
- Social media analytics.
Don`t forget that your strategy needs time to become effective. So, don’t spend money on every tool you`ll find on the web to make it work if you don’t see results in a few weeks. A proper social strategy has to have a long-term effect on your business, so focus on the long term, and spend your resources wisely.
3. Create High-Quality Content
Sharing content on social media platforms is important because without it nobody will know about your brand. But, having an engaging content is even more important. It strengthens customer relationship, brings more social traffic, and improves brand image.
This is how high-quality social content looks like:
- With smart hashtag usage
- Unique and of high-quality
- Informational
- Engaging
- Visual
Good content is a KING. It creates value for your brand. And people will trust your brand enough to become your clients. Keep in mind that you can’t create lasting brand value with borrowed content. You want these social posts to drive people to YOUR website, not to a competitor’s website.
4. Choose Social Media Platforms
Never waste your time posting on every social media platform out there. Many businesses spend time and money on the wrong social platforms, simply because the target audience is not on those social platforms.
To avoid wasting time and money, pick a handful of social platforms where your potential clients are most likely spending their time. When you choose the right social media platforms, you are more likely to engage the right people, and get more of them to become your clients.
5. Identify Your Ideal Audience
There are about 2 billion monthly users on Facebook, 330 million on Twitter, 500 million on LinkedIn, etc. But that’s not your market. There is a small fraction of these big numbers that are looking for your services.
It is your job to know exactly who your audience is, and then try reaching them through your social marketing efforts. These are the people who will be attracted to your social updates, click on your links, and become your customers. This is your ideal audience.
6. Explore Your Competition
Exploring your competition matters a lot in creating effective social media marketing strategy. When you know who they are and what they do, it is easier to take a step ahead of them.
Always track the content they post, the engagement on their profiles/pages, as well as their tactics.
But, be unique at what you do and never put yourself in a copycat position. Instead of copying your competitors, learn from their achievements and failures, and figure out ways to be better than they are.
7. Engage With Your Audience
Don`t you feel great when users share, tweet, like, or comment on your posts?
Then make sure users feel the same way.
Effective social media marketing is not a monologue. It is based on communicating, connecting, and engaging.
Without building relationships, your strategy will be unsuccessful. So always be there for your customers to respond.
8. Track Your Progress
Tracking your progress is the last but probably the most important thing to do. It helps you find out if the strategy you use worked or not. It gives you the chance to improve your next moves and create more successful campaigns. It simply helps in creating effective social media marketing strategy.
While Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, etc. have some sort of reporting, you’ll want a single Analytics dashboard that revolves around your blog posts. Google Analytics makes this somewhat possible, but Popilzr analytics goes a step further by tracking social traffic per blog post and shows you where this traffic is coming from. With this tool, you can easily find out how effective your social updates are. It tells the number of social updates you share on each network, the social traffic generated per update, per social network, and it groups this neatly in one easy to use table.
Key Takeaways
Having an effective social media marketing strategy helps you become a social media marketing expert and do your best online.
Forget about short-term traffic of your blog posts. With the 8 ingredients of effective social media strategy we’ve listed above, you are likely to capture much more of the ongoing in-social search traffic, bring more visitors on your webpage, and get customers on the long-term.
And, make sure Populizr is part of your strategy because no strategy is effective without measurement of effectiveness.
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