Just a few years back, you could build a social media strategy on the spot. As long as you have one in place, there’s no problem rising above your competitors, right?
But the same is true today. With millions of brands out there in the market, you need to be fully invested in creating a solid social media marketing campaign and focus on building engagement; or else you risk losing customers.
So, how can you rise above the competition? We’ll walk you through the steps towards building a winning social media strategy that boosts your sales:
First Things First ‒ Create Your Marketing Plan
A lot of people jump straight into social media without a solid, action plan in mind. Don’t be someone who sees what works and what doesn’t as you go.
Crafting a detailed strategy requires your full, conscious effort. For you to do that, you must create a SMART goals list.
- Specific
- Measurable
- Attainable
- Relevant
- Time-bound
Goal setting will always be a staple in all business and social media strategies. Creating a list to keep track of your progress and goals allows you to have better insight.
It also serves as a guide whether or not you should make appropriate changes with your approach.
Know Your Social Media Target Market
Facebook remains one of the largest social media networks today, with approximately 1.74 billion mobile active users as of 2016.
But is it the best platform out there for your brand? Is your target audience actively engaging with you?
The key here is understanding your audience.
Learn a few critical things about the people who like to buy your products. Know the average income of your returning customers, and what age demographic is particularly hard to sell.
Have a look at the demographics of your most valuable social media channels. As discussed earlier, it’s crucial to have a clear goal in mind when it comes to crafting an effective social media strategy.
Search for the best channels that correlate with these goals the most. You can back to your SMART goals and identify what exactly do you need to achieve.
You need to have a clear understanding of who you want to target, and what particular engagement you plan to have with your target audience.
Use the Social Media Rule of Thirds
Using the social media rule of thirds is another crucial social media strategy that you need to execute if you want to create a steady following – and prevent your already-existing followers from hitting the unfollow button.
While it’s true that one of your goals is to make more money and drive in more revenue to your business, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ll be strictly posting content that’s related to your brand.
The Social Media Rule of Thirds:
- 1/3 of your content directly promotes your brand, converts leads into sales, and generates sustainable profit
- 1/3 of your content focuses on sharing stories and ideas from other thought-leaders in your industry
- 1/3 of your content focuses on building your brand and interactions with others
By religiously following this social media strategy, you can achieve a lot of things. You’re signaling that your social media account isn’t exclusively there only to promote your business and bombard others with your content.
Instead, you focus on being social. You’re sharing other content that’s of value, and by continually engaging with your followers, it makes your relatable at a more personal level.
As a result, people will see your business as something of value and can turn into the most loyal of followers.
Here’s the bottom line ‒ users aren’t going to be driven to your profile if all you do is to promote your profile.
For you to gain the trust of your readers, you need to post something of value (such as educational materials) then drop something about your business or brand.
Social Media Strategy: Find Out Who Your Competitors Are
How can you ensure that you stay ahead of the pack, with the possibility of rising above your competitors?
Well, part of your growth strategy should include a detailed analysis of your competition.
By conducting keyword research, you’ll be able to identify the key places where your business rivals are getting their traffic, and ultimately, their leads.
Doing all this research can lead you into a wealth of information and data that can serve as a strong foundation for your business.
Continually refine your focus and efforts to the key areas where your company is outperforming your competitors as well.
Research your competitors and investigate their background. Analyze the particular aspects of their content that make them successful.
While it’s not advisable to steal your competitor’s ideas, you can certainly learn from their successes and failures.
Increase Your Website Traffic
Social media platforms have a broad reach. Thus, they enable businesses and brands to impact a more extensive demographic as well.
Having a dynamic social media presence on these platforms helps to drive in traffic to your website, landing page and blogs,
But, like it was mentioned earlier, you need to have a social media strategy. Creating an account and just posting will only provide minimal impact to your site’s traffic.
Find out the particular type of content that your audience prefers, and post at peak times, where your followers are more likely to see it.
While it’s possible to display the same content across various social media platforms, you still need to remember that you need to optimize it differently.
Monitor your competitor’s activity as well, to ensure that you stay ahead of the game.
Create Highly Engaging Social Media Content
Content will always be king. Curating engaging, high-quality social media content is essential to your marketing campaign.
Ideally, curate the type of material that perfectly fits your brand identity. Thus, you generally need to avoid doing things, such as reaching out to unpopular demographics without the right strategy in place.
Strike the perfect balance ‒ try to target content without becoming overly promotional about it.
More often than not, users are turned off and often unfollow a brand if there are too many promotions, or too much irrelevant material.
Invest in the Power of Video Marketing
Do you know that a majority of online shoppers watch product videos first before ultimately making a purchasing decision?
Therefore, it only makes sense that you invest in multimedia, most especially video content. Don’t be afraid to experiment with the different in-the-moment media as well, such as Facebook Stories and Facebook Live.
Measure Your Facebook Marketing Campaign
So you’re running and optimizing ads on Facebook. How do you measure theri performance on social media? With your money on the line, you have to weigh the ROI you’re getting from your social media marketing campaign.
To start, you can look for vanity metrics on Facebook Insights, such as:
- Likes
- Shares
- Comments
- Active Followers
- New Followers
Figure out what’s the cost per like. Also, take into consideration the time and money you’ve spent on the ad.
Are people also visiting your site? Google analytics is another powerful tool to analyze and track your website traffic and it determines whether or not your efforts on social media are paying off.
Also, choose a conversion metric that fits your needs, such as a conversion tracking code.
This code helps you keep track of your visitors’ actions. For example, how long they stay on your site, what they download, what particular content they look at, and whether or not they buy anything.
While Facebook has its own conversion tracking tool, Google also has an Analytics URL tracking tool as well.
In Summary
By creating a social media strategy, implementing the above action items ‒ i.e., creating an actionable marketing plan, knowing your target marketing, enforcing the rule of thirds, understanding who your competitors are, tracking your site’s traffic, creating engaging content, and measuring your marketing campaign – you’ll be able to achieve success in the long run.
