How To Design A Successful Social Media Marketing Strategy in 7 Steps

Whether you’re a full time marketer or a business owner playing the role of marketer, having a strategy in place for Social Media Marketing is a must.  Without one, you won’t be able to measure results and understand what resonates with your audience. In addition, a strategy can help you learn more about your target audience, drive more traffic, raise brand awareness and positively impact your bottom line.  Find out how to create a winning strategy in 7 steps, plus the software that puts your social media marketing on auto-pilot. 

Identify Your Goals

An effective social media strategy begins by setting goals for what you hope to achieve with your campaign. Start by identifying what you want the end result to be, such as driving more traffic to your website, growing your audience, or advertising new products and services.  Without understanding what you want to achieve, you’ll have no way of measuring if your efforts were successful. 

Defining your goals is the first step. Try using the S.M.A.R.T. method when setting goals, which stands for:

Specific - explain exactly what you want to achieve.“I want to grow my audience”

Measurable - add a particular number,  “I want to add 40 new followers each month”

Attainable - Plan your roadmap to achieve the number of followers, “I must add 10 new followers per week, or two every day”.

Realistic - Decide if you can realistically achieve this. If you think you can, great!  If not, adjust your goal.

Time Bound - Hold yourself and your team accountable with an expiration date. “I’d want to do this by the end of September. 

Hundreds of thousands of people have used the S.M.A.R.T. goal method to reach their goals.  Every goal you set should have every letter in the S.M.A.R.T. formula defined.  Be sure to write your goals down on a piece of paper and put them in a place where you can read them every day.  This will help you stay on track and focused. 

Download your FREE digital copy of our Social Media Strategy for Small Business in 7 Easy Steps.

Build Your Brand

Build your brand by making it recognizable and distinguishable. Design a good logo, choose a branded font type and highlight your unique value proposition with a catchy slogan. This is how your audience will recognize you and is an effective form of marketing.  

Consistency is key when it comes to branding.  Every place a prospective customer is able to find you, should be consistently branded, including your website, social pages, directory listings (Google My Business, Yelp).  It is also important that information publicly available about your brand is consistent, such as hours of operation, location and phone numbers. When something changes, such as summer hours vs winter hours, be sure to update the information anywhere it's available. 

Companies who’ve done an excellent job of branding are the brands that are easily recognizable at-a-glance, such as Coca-Cola, Nike, Amazon, and Starbucks. No matter where you are in the world, these are brands you’d recognize.  

Target Audience

Chances are, your product or service isn't perfect for everybody, but it is perfect for a specific group or type of people.  Define your target audience by age group, income, education level, common interests and other demographics.

Once you’ve defined who your target is, you can decide where you want to focus your efforts and marketing dollars. Defining our audience and the best platform to reach them will help get the highest ROI from your campaigns. 

Each social platform attracts a different audience.

Facebook: 25-34-year-olds, with an almost equal split of men and women users;

Twitter: 30-49-year-olds, primarily men, ex-presidents, and celebrities;

Instagram: 25-34-year-olds, slightly more women than men;

LinkedIn: 46-55-year-olds with equal parts of men and women;

Pinterest: 30-49-year-olds, mostly women.

You can find income brackets, education levels, and other information from each platform with a little more research.  

Social media has played a huge role in changing the way brands market.  The data collected by companies like Facebook may seem intrusive on its a dream come true consumer end, but marketers are trying to start a dream come true. 

Not sure where to start? SeoSamba has a team of experts who can help you find your target audience.  

Creating Valuable Content

Creating content that is specifically geared towards your target audience by platform will help you gain a lot more traction than posting general updates. Posting high quality, personalized content that resonates with your audience is far more valuable and will get better results.  

People desire to form a connection with other people. So try to stay away from stock images and instead use your own photos.  Posting images of yourself and your team “in action”, before and after photos and community involvement pictures are all examples of good quality content. Take it one step further by using mentions, @tags (people/businesses/locations), #trendinghashtags, and emojis ?.

Create Your Content Marketing Recipe

Figuring out the type of posts your audience responds to can be both fun and challenging.  It’s ok to experiment with a variety of content, such as teasers for blogs published on your website, podcasts, short videos, promotional posts with coupons or special offers, shared content from relevant, quality sources, posts about trending topics, and quotes are all ideas that you can try out.  It might be that a mix of all of these works best for you.  The idea is to keep it interesting. 

Audiences respond to different types of posts depending on the platform you’re on, so experiment until you find the best formula.  Be ready, however, to alter your recipe because consumer needs change frequently. Things that may affect what your audience responds to include elections, the season, severe weather, current and local events, and sports. As a marketer, being like a chameleon can be helpful.  

If you need some ideas, websites like Google Trends can be handy. You can also reach out to a team of professionals, like the Social Marketing team at SeoSamba, who can find ideas through keyword research and better define your target audience. 

Automation for Social Media

Automating your posts using a planning calendar that automatically distributes your social posts on your behalf and can save a lot of time and brain damage. It gives you the option to plan your entire month of posts in one session and helps you stay organized and on point with your strategy.  Social Media Automation means you can schedule social posts, duplicate posts to different social media networks, track relevant content, repurpose successful content and automate performance tracking and analytics. 

If you’ve got someone posting on your behalf, using a calendar to plan out your posts allows you to review scheduled content and approve it. In addition, it keeps you “in the know” so that you’re never blindsided or surprised. 

SeoSamba’s social automation tool gives you all of these capabilities and is also available through the SeoSamba Social Marketing App for iPhone and Android. Try it free today! New features, such as picture collages, are now included with the app.  If you’re a multi-website owner, you can manage all your websites and social media in the centralized Marketing Operating System dashboard.

Analyze Social Metrics & Performance

Track your results to determine what actions or conditions were decisive in your SMM strategy. Analyze complex numbers to improve your input and output using social media metrics. 

Save time and get a bird’s eye view of post-performance through SeoSamba’s automation dashboard. It allows you to view the number of followers you have, as well as impressions, clicks, and shares for all of your social accounts across multiple platforms in one place. 

View as a whole or isolate individual accounts quickly.  Business owners with multiple locations and people posting especially like this feature for quality assurance, coaching, and brand control. 

SeoSamba helps you streamline your marketing efforts and brings you the latest technology at your fingertips. In addition, the social media automation tool is user-friendly, whether you will be managing it yourself, have a marketing manager, or even a third-party company that handles your social media.

Try it free today by downloading the app on iTunes or in the Play store. For questions or to inquire about our different packages available, including a complete done-for-you service, contact us at sales@seosamba.com 

SeoSamba serves thousands of multi-location businesses and franchise networks worldwide, with service centers in the United States and Europe. SeoSamba’s hybrid, open-source framework is built around the Marketing Operating System dashboard and the SeoToaster CMS with a built-in CRM for an all-encompassing centralized digital marketing solution. SeoSamba offers turnkey franchise marketing agency services with a franchise sales CRM for emerging brands and franchise SEO solutions. 

For more information about SeoSamba’s services email info@seosamba.com or call + 1 (877) 450-9894.

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