You can consider social media as a tool for a successful and growing marketing strategy. So how do you create effective social media marketing? What are the steps that you must take?
Here, you’ll learn every step you need to take so you can create an effective social media marketing campaign that others will want to engage in, and social media marketing techniques that you’ll ultimately be able to benefit from.
Determine Your Goal
The first thing you must do is to determine the goal of your campaign. Do you want to promote an event, get traffic to a new site, or develop a transformation strategy? Whatever it is, the goal should be clear and well understood. You should figure out what actions followers do when they see your posts, and once that’s done, you’ll be able to create content that is ultimately going to help others and attract them to your product or service.
Knowing where you are going, will give you a better road map on how to get there.
Determine how you’re Going to Promote
Next, determine how to promote the campaign on each of the social media channels. You could use short videos on Instagram or Facebook, or even just create a page with a good banner image. You can also use Twitter to promote images and your brand name.
Before you begin, understand the channels you’re using, and the purpose of each of them. If you know how to promote before you do it, you’ll be able to generate content that people will want to see and interact with. If you haven’t started using advertising tools, the best thing to do is try them, and figure out what works for you.
Look at Current Social Network Presence
If you already have a social media presence, the first thing to do is to look at where you are. Take a look at the networks you’re on, see if they’re fully optimized, are there any that are bringing better value, also make a research on your competitors, check out how you match up against each of them.
With this, you’ll be able to see how effective you are, are there any campaigns and channels that are actually worth the effort, and are there any untapped markets. This is a big part of social media marketing, and by doing a thorough audit, you’ll be able to better understand the state of your social media at this point.
Create a Mission Statement
The social media mission statement will propel your future actions. Put this at the beginning of your plan, because this will reflect your brand identity. You can even put this on the social media site too if it’s relevant. Having this in your plan will allow you to rightfully align everything, and create a better presence on social media.
Mission statements are great for any business since they can help you keep all of your goals in order. There are many social media brands out there that don’t have a good mission statement, but you see it in the content they put out. It tends to be irrelevant, choppy and doesn’t fit. Creating a social media mission statement is essential to the success of your brand and business, and it can help you build a better idea of where you’re supposed to go, and which path you may need to take.
Identify your metrics
How you determine whether a campaign or efforts are successful in social media marketing involves a lot of different metrics. It isn’t just the followers, but monetary values as well. After all, do you really want to spend a ton of money on something that won’t pay off? The answer has to be no.
While conversions are awesome, also look at the rate of them, the time a person spends on the site, their reach, mentions of the brand, and even just look at how people feel about it, whether they are sharing or talking about it. See where you’re tagged, and you’ll be able to use these as metrics for success.
Create a Content Schedule
This is actually putting together the calendar and schedule of your social media presence. When is the best time for you to post content? What’s the message you’re looking to generate on engagement channels? Well, you should put together a basic outline of what your week or month will look like, having each day a post or two for the campaign you want to focus on, whether that’s a monthly campaign or even just a biweekly one. After all, once you have a schedule, you can generate the content that you want to put out, and you’ll have a great view of what exactly you need to do.
Content Creation
Now we are onto the fun part, content creation. At this point you should have a calendar, but if you’re worried about what you should do, post some videos, images, posts on your blog, information about your company, and news stories. You should at this point know the ideal customers, have the mission statement, and from that, you curate content. Ebooks and interviews are also really helpful at this point too. You can even join a podcast, and you’ll get to not only guest on it but also promote your site.
There is never a limit to how you create content, but you should focus on the content that works with the mission statement, and is fitting to your skill set. Content is how you fuel your social media, so if you want to feed it and make it grow, this is your top priority. Use the calendar to get started on this journey.
Schedule it All!
If you haven’t schedule it yet, the second you have gathered significant content, go to a social media management tool and just schedule it . Hootsuite and Hubspot are excellent social media schedulers. Buffer is also a great one, and once you have it scheduled, you’ll just go along the ride and let it do the work for you, so you can do the rest of the fun stuff.
Use a Social Media Management Tool
This was grazed upon in the previous point, but if you want to leverage your productivity, a social media management tool is actually really helpful. Without these, most marketers would face burnout, and it allows you to scale everything easily. Scheduling is one of them, but you can also compile your content, answer questions, and even utilize chatbots in order to keep everything completely straight.
Social media is hard work, and if you’re working with five or more different channels, do you really want to manually deal with all of them and then manage your business as well? Probably the answer is no, so if you don’t want to deal with the issues that can come out of being overwhelmed with regular posting, then make sure you’ve got a management tool.
Respond to Queries
Never leave questions unanswered. The ground rule is that you want to make sure that if there are replies, you answer them. Not responding makes you look bad. If there are comments, even a simple ‘like” or heart can do the work. So, do that, because it will let them know that you’ve acknowledged what they comment and even appreciate it.
Track Your Stuff!
Finally, there is this step. If you want to succeed with anything on social media, you always track down what you’re doing, analyze it, and then optimize it for success, by making changes of anything that isn’t working properly, to something that does work. It’s a basic tenet, but if you want to get results, you track your stuff and then optimize it for success.
You take those metrics, look at them, plot them with visualization, and then analyze your efforts. The data should tell you what your most effective channel is, and which ones are better left in the dust.
If you do this, you’ll be able to put yourself on the correct pathway to success, and if you are running a specific campaign, you can see just how effective it is, and then go from there, create the best results that you can, and generate success from your efforts.
Conclusion
Social media is the future. Almost everyone has a Facebook account or a Twitter profile, and it’s time for you as a marketer to invest in the right tools and strategies to fully utilize it. If you haven’t already put together an effective social media marketing campaign, you can take advantage of all of this, and from there, generate the business plan and the success that you want. Use social media marketing so you can run campaigns that matter to others, and ones that can generate numerous amounts of success for your business, and also for your brand’s identity as well. Social media is really powerful, we encourage you to use it.
Emily Bartels
Latest posts by Emily Bartels (see all)
- 11 Steps to Create an Effective Social Media Marketing - February 18, 2019
