Social Media Marketing Strategy: The Complete Guide 2023

A strategy provides a vision of the future, sets objectives, determines methods to leverage strengths, and mitigate weaknesses and confirms the purpose and values of an organization. Without a strategy a business cannot thrive at all. And your social media marketing is no exception. It also needs a robust strategy to scale up your branding to the next level. 

Social media is reckoned as a game changer tool in this digital era. Leading networks like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn impact business significantly. Thus the competition of social media marketing  is becoming tough everyday. It’s not just limited to posting an image or video content but something beyond. 

Developing a social media marketing strategy is the first step you need to do. Let’s start with how you should do it.

1. Why Does Your Business Need Social Media Marketing?

This question can potentially define your social media goals. You should think about how you can use social media, whether to promote your products, drive customers to your website or to serve your customers. Some of your possible social media goals include:

• Ramp up brand awareness
• Drive traffic to site
• Generate leads
• Boost sales
• Growth in brand engagement
• Build a community
• Deliver social customer service
• Create a topic related to your business
• Listen to conversations about your role

A business does not necessarily have all these goals but must have one or more.

2. Decide Your Target Audience

You need to figure your target audience wisely. Once you define your target audience, you can then have plans on how to attract them considering their interests and behavior. 

For example, the target audience for an apparel business must be curious about new arrivals, so it should prepare and share similar stuff on its social media pages to get attention. 

You can also filter your target audience by creating certain parameters. Just check them below.

• Choose your audience based on job title, salary, gender, age, location, etc.
• Categorize them according to their interests such as education, entertainment, etc.
• Their favorite social media networks
• Their viewing time
• Best things through which they find your content

You don’t have to begin from scratch. If your business has been running for a while, you must have a good understanding of your target audience.

3. What Should You Share?

Then the next big thing in your strategy is a useful share. You have to plan what kind of topic gets more shares in your industry. They might be an image or video content. 

Sometimes image content is proved to be more powerful than video content and vice-versa. The reason depends on two things — the quality of content and industry type. First you need to make sure that your content is powerful enough to hold on to your target audience for a while. 

Second, think about the nature of business. Suppose you are operating a tour and travel business, you can post images of beautiful places with your clients. But if you are offering Limousine services, you need to give priority to videos that matter. So you are the best judge of what content needs to be prepared to get more shares.

4. Where Should You Share?

Then you need to determine where you are going to share your content, i.e. which social media platform you prefer the most. 

Make sure each social media network has its own points. Thus using each of them for different objectives will be beneficial for a business. Focus on creating profiles on various social media networks seems important and most successful businesses follow this. 

Let’s say you’re searching ZAVI, you will get the official website on top followed by its social media profiles.

You need to think on which platforms your target audiences are mostly active. Also you need to know why they use to visit the platform. You have noticed that many people love to scroll down Facebook and Insta to know what their friends are doing at that moment. 

You need to be selective. If your images are great, you can post on Instagram; if it is a video, then YouTube is the best; and if it is content, you must try out Medium to get the best output.

5. When should you share?

In the end, you have to think when you should share your content so that it can take you closer to your goal. To know all about it, you need to do a thorough research. Before deciding exactly which time of the day and days of the week you want to post, consider the behaviors of your target audience.

Let’s discuss some examples.

• Sports enthusiasts are active on social media, mostly Twitter, just before, during, and just after the events to get and interact with content about the event.
• Athletes use Instagram for showing off their cool shape after morning or evening workouts.
• People with special weakness towards travel are mostly active on social media during the weekends when they can plan for a new trip.
• Mothers of babies use social media while breastfeeding in the middle of the night.

You cannot find the best common time for your post but to target a particular section of users, you might figure out the best time.

Finally, how will you execute this social media marketing strategy?

Now you have a social media marketing strategy. But the main concern is how you execute them so that you can get the best result. So you need a set of robust plans for it.

• Choose your social networks

There are similarities and specialties found in each social media network be it Facebook, Instagram, Twitter or LinkedIn. You can pick up one that best fits your social media marketing strategy. 

A few things to consider that can facilitate you to choose the appropriate social network(s) to try.

Audience – You need to know about your potential customers and also which social media has the correct demographics.

Time – Here you have to set aside a certain time frame to be spent on social media marketing on a daily basis that includes adding an image, video or something like that.

Resources – What personnel and expertise do you have to work with? Social media emphasizes quality content. You need to gather resources required to carry out the things swiftly.

• Complete your social media profiles

When you open an account on any social media networks, you are asked to furnish your photo, name, date of birth, about, etc. A complete profile always gets optimized fast. When it comes to your business pages, you must provide the details asked by the social media platform with full clarity. 

Always try to include as many things as possible in the bio section. It will be better if you have knowledge in keyword inclusion as per SEO norms.  

Clear visuals (images and videos) have a special impact on users. Thus you need to implement it while creating your own. Image size is another thing that one leading social media marketing agency or marketer is concerned about. Thus you must care about this thing.

• Find your social media marketing voice & tone

Once you have a clear voice and tone regarding your content, your foray into social media will be bolstered further. To germinate this for the sake of your brand, you have to follow or communicate with  famous marketing personas. Improvement happens when you ask several questions to yourself and strive to answer them.

Some of your questions might be like:

• What type of personality would it have, if the brand is a person?
• What will be their relationship with respect to consumers like friend, spouse, etc., if the brand is a person?
• What are the personalities of your company and what are not?
• Are there any businesses that hold a similar personality to yours?
• What do you expect from your customers that they think about your company?

I am sure that you must end with certain adjectives that potentially describe the voice and tone of your social media marketing.

Voice holds the mission statement whereas tone is the way through which the mission is implemented.

• Revisit your posting strategy

Your posting strategy must include the type, time and the number of posts per day. Yes, one clever marketer responds to it by saying, it depends. We’re not so diplomatic. So our clear stand on them is as follows.

• More priority on creating video type content followed by photos and images. Add links to your post. Two numbers of posts daily sound good.
• Simple textual content also becomes vital if it is related to the latest stuff. Do not forget to mention your website name and contact details in it.
• According to several reports, the ideal timing for Facebook posts is around 1-4 pm, that of Twitter is 1-3 pm, LinkedIn 5-6 pm and Instagram 5-6 pm.

Conclusion

After reading out the piece, you might be confident enough to dive into social media marketing platforms right off the bat to scale up your business with the help of our vigorous social media marketing strategy. In the end, I suggest you experience the real facts and strive to unleash the top secrets of companies that have already taken advantage of social media networks. Hope you will be the next influencer!