How to create a winning social media marketing strategy

A few years ago, you could build a social media marketing strategy and then sit to wait for results. By just being present, you were guaranteed of outperforming your competitors. Today, things have changed; you cannot bank on the existence and survive, nope. Statistics show that over thirty percent of the millennials engage with a brand on social platforms many times in a month. That means for any business to flourish, it must have a online marketing strategy that is focused on engagement. Otherwise, you could be missing real customers and thus affecting your bottom-line.

So how do you create a social media marketing strategy that wins?

Create goals that solve your greatest challenges

Firstly, you must seek to understand what you are up to in as far as your efforts are concerned. Social media marketing is so detailed that you can’t afford to just flip through and stop for the day, no; you must get your best foot forward and do your planning. Just like cooking a meal or your guests, you need to get ingredients that would be edible for all and ensure the food is enough to satisfy everyone. Therefore, goal making should be your first social media marketing strategy. Some of the goals should be increasing your brand awareness, social media targeting for higher sales, doing social media promotions that drive in sales, focusing on improving the ROI among others.

Doing a research on your social media audience

Research shows that close to 80% of adults are engaging on social media and majorly on Facebook. However, you must ask yourself, are your customers actively engaging you there? You must seek to understand your audience well to know who buys your product, the group that is hard to sell to and the income level that brings more value to you. Your brand should focus on the demographics of the most valuable social channels; is it Twitter or Facebook and such. This helps you know the one that correlates most with your goals and therefore you can focus your marketing efforts there.

Establishing your most important metrics

Most brands, businesses’ Digital, and Social Media Marketing strategies have veered off the very critical path of social media metrics. Do vanity metrics such as Likes and follower count tell the whole story about your brand on social media? It is exciting to view followers and Likes as the truth in a campaign. But you need to take time and evaluate your social metrics that are associated with the overall marketing goals.

Engagement metrics paint a better and clearer picture in that it is focused on building lasting relationships and this is actually what works on social. Of course, you need large audiences and likable content but you need to also consider other crucial metrics like posts reach, clicks, engagement and Hashtag performance.

Do a research on your social competitive landscape

The first step before you begin creating the content, you need to investigate your competition. What is making them successful in their social marketing strategies? You don’t have to copy their ideas but learn and see how to avoid failures and grow from their success.

For you to win the numbers on the highly populated social media, you must come up with a strategy that is focused more on engagements and at a level which beats the competition and builds valuable and lasting relationships.