Social media is around us more and more, companies are starting to see the value in add it to their marketing mix. However, many are unsure where to start or how to develop a plan. By using social media correctly you can engage your audience in new ways, be more personable, develop new connections, and maintain the ones you have.
Just like any business strategy where you need to first define objectives, the same goes for social media as well. This important step which is often neglected actually determines the success of the social media campaigns. So before directly going into identifying channels, creating content; always set your campaign objectives. It will help you and your team to be focused and it will also help you to assess your strategy. We have some commonly used objectives for you:
Increase website traffic
Creating brand authority
Customer engagement
Improve sales by lead generation
A social media audit will help you to know your current position. So, if you already have social media accounts then it is necessary that you conduct a social media audit. It is more like a self-audit where you can select your competitors and evaluate, or it can be even done in a non-competing manner and analyze them for inspiration. Big brands like ITC, Godrej are all social media savvy. There is a lot of insightful things you may come across while researching big brands and understand what may work for you.
You must have come across this terminology while doing your graduation. In social media marketing, target audience forms the basis of your entire campaign. This is what will drive your content strategy and selection of delivery platforms as well.
Here is how you can segment your target audience:
Location
Demographic
Psychographic (can be buying habits, income, etc)
Behavioral
After completing steps 1, 2 and 3 you will have enough data to make a content strategy. Some of things which you should keep in mind will planning your content strategy is the type of content that you will produce. Will it be more of videos? Or you will be sharing ore stuff. Will your audience love a particular form of artwork and so on? We have written an entire article on content strategy which be found here:
The most effective way to get your content organized is to prepare a social media calendar. There may be many promotional activities that you may want to conduct which can be included in social media calendar. Once your content is ready, define what amount of content should go in which platforms based on the objectives we have identified. Working on content based on objectives will help to make a better calendar.
No social media marketing strategy will work unless it is monitored or tracked properly. You may feel motivated when your audience is commenting on your posts or sharing them. However, it is always to analyze the campaign with your defined objectives. You can use some indicators to track your campaign:
Unique traffic coming to your website
Tagging by audience
Direct traffic
Average value of order
Support wait time
Backlink analysis
Online tools to analyze
