The trend of social media marketing is growing rapidly. The social media platforms are helping marketers to raise brand awareness and grow businesses. According to the Hubspot, 92% of the marketers have confirmed that they have increased their brand awareness through social media and 80% of them have said that they have seen an increase in the traffic on their websites because of social media efforts.

Today we have so many social media channels through which we can connect with the target audience all over the world. And undoubtedly, they are serving users with distinctive features. Example, in every social media platform, there are different community groups to reach out to the target audience. We all have the provision to select the gender, age, and other demographics to have a worldwide presence. Therefore, building a social media marketing strategy for each platform will help in expanding the business. Let’s have a look at the top 10 ways to grow social media marketing strategy.

• Define your goals and objectives:

A good starting point of every marketing strategy is to identify your goals and objectives for your social media marketing strategy. For example, if you are into B2B business, your goal would probably be lead generation or brand awareness or getting traffic on the website. Whatever is your goal, ensure that it should align with the broader objectives of the company. You can use S.M.A.R.T criteria to set a benchmark for success and determine the contributing factors to achieve these objectives.

• Know your audience:

After having clarity on your goals and objectives, the next step is to know about the target audience. It is vital to collect information such as age, location, gender, tastes & preferences, income, etc. of your target audience. The more you know about your audience, the better the strategy you will be able to create. In order to have a deep understanding of demographics, behaviour, tastes & preferences of the target audience, one of the best ways is to create buyers persona. A buyer persona is a fictionalized characterization of the ideal customer on the basis of market research and the actual data about the existing customers. You can use Google Analytics, Facebook Insights, Twitter Analysis, etc. to know about buyers’ persona.

• Set your budget:

Once you know about your goals and the target audience, it’s time to figure out how much money you want to invest in your social media marketing strategy. This decision of yours will depend on a lot of factors. If you think that you would be required a big budget, you may look out for potential investors to finance your business. Or you may want to go with a less budget just because you think that you are a small business. Whatever decision you will take, the breakdown of the budget will help you in understanding how much funds you would be required for your paid social promotions, community engagement, campaigns, etc.

• Decide on the appropriate social channels for your business:

There are many businesses that create their accounts on all social media channels. They forget the fact that the channel that is appropriate for one business may not be appropriate for others. For instance, if you are into manufacturing Kiosk, then the most appropriate channel for your business would probably be LinkedIn. If you think of promoting it on Facebook or Instagram, then it would probably be a waste of both time and money. So before making any strategy, decide on the best social media channel for your business. To maintain consistency and win the trust of the audience, use the same avatar for every social media channel. You can choose to have your company’s logo design as an avatar on all the channels. This way people will be able to recognize your brand immediately.

• Build your team:

Researchers have shown that while developing a social media strategy, small companies find it little hard to secure in-house resources to implement it. Therefore, it is vital to have a clear understanding of whether the in-house employees will head the strategy or outsource the work. You can choose to go with both the options as well. These days, it is easy to find freelancers for your work. If you want to hire freelance graphic designers for your work, the Designhill is the world’s no.1 freelance graphic design platform. The platform lets its users to get connected with thousands of professional graphic designers from all over the world.

• Generating Content:

Any social media marketing strategy requires a mix of content to be successful. It is through content that your target audience will engage with your brand. Sharing only blogs or website links won’t help you in achieving your goals. Your competitors may also be doing the same thing. To get the attention of the audience, and leave a mark on the internet, you have to produce an interesting, meaningful, and unique content for every social media platform. In order to create a consistent flow of content and develop a unified tone, its best to create content calendars.

Tip: If you plan to run any campaign, then you can link your social media page or website by adding a QR code on your business cards.

• Integrating with larger digital marketing strategy:

Social media marketing is all about raising awareness about the brand. Marketers are using social media to boost sales. That is why it is significant to integrate social media marketing strategy with other digital marketing strategies. By using tools such as Google Analytics, you can easily examine the web traffic and site behaviour of different marketing channels. The data will help you in making different strategies work together. Display advertising, email marketing, search engine marketing, PPC, etc. are some of the marketing strategies you may want to integrate.

• Posting times:

Whenever the inexperienced marketers try to use social media platforms to promote the content, one of the biggest mistakes they do is that they post their content on irregular intervals. If you want to build credibility, increase more followers, and retain the existing customers, it is important to post content at an appropriate time. Every platform has an ideal day and time to post. Example, on Instagram, the ideal times to post content is 1:00 pm to 5:00 pm and the best day to post is on Friday.

• Respond to all queries, concerns, or suggestions of the audience:

When customers are unhappy, they may turn to social media for their customer service requirements. There are a lot of statistics available online that shows that customers’ complaints are usually ignored on social media. Here are a few tips to respond to queries, concerns, or suggestions of the audience:

• Try to reply in less than one business day
• Be specific with your response
• Avoid making repetitive apologies
• Don’t make it personal
• Solve for the customer, not for your support team

• Tracking analysis:

After putting so much of efforts, you definitely want to know the results. It is where analytics comes in. No matter whichever way you choose to promote your business, analytics have become an inseparable part of the marketing strategies. It gives a detailed view of which strategy worked in your favour and which not. This way, you can make amendments in your strategies in the early stage.

Conclusion:

There is no ‘perfect’ strategy that will work all through. It is a work-in-progress that changes when required. So, follow the above tips and start developing the strategies. Do you have any social media tips or tricks that have helped you in your business? Share your experience with us in the below comment section.

This article is contributed by Campbell Joef , graphic designer and blogger associated with Designhill.com — logo design company

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