If your game plan is to post randomly on Facebook and hope for the best, you’re setting up your social media marketing efforts to fail.
You need a solid strategy—the summary of what you plan to do and want to achieve to shape and inform your approach and, in turn, succeed in your social media marketing efforts.
While there is no one-size-fits-all formula to create an effective strategy, there are tips and tricks to help jumpstart your efforts.
This social media marketing cheat sheet covers four ways to help you develop your social media marketing strategy and, in turn, gain your expected results.
1. Create a content calendar
Getting maximum exposure and engagement requires posting and sharing content regularly and at peak times.
Doing so helps ensure your audiences will most likely respond and interact with your post and brand.
Create a social media content calendar to help you plan, organize, and schedule your content posting on specific dates and times across social media channels.
It helps you plan your social media activities, including creating and sharing links, images, User-Generated Content (UGC), blog posts, videos, etc.
Planning and scheduling can give you enough time to produce your content while keeping your content flowing for continuous audience engagement.
Use reliable apps such as modern tools for Instagram marketing and Social Media Marketing (SMM) solutions.
For example, Vista Social lets you plan and create a day, week, or month’s worth of content across social media platforms. Then, you can schedule your content to auto-publish on your preferred dates and times.
The platform offers a bulk scheduling feature for scheduling your multiple posts in one go.
It also provides a Smart Publisher that can curate and post your desired content for you based on specific categories, keywords, and the publishing frequency you set.
Save time and energy by scheduling your social media activities and tasks for seamless implementation.
2. Know your audience
Understanding who your audience is and the content they want to see on social media is crucial to your content development approach and SMM strategies.
After all, you need to know your potential customer’s pain points, problems, demographics, interests, preferences, and more to tailor your strategies and content to address their needs.
Provide social media content that speaks to your followers or benefits them, increasing your chances of engaging and even building relationships with them.
Below are other tips to help you learn about your social media audience to shape your SMM strategies.
- Gather data. Eliminate guesswork and make data-driven decisions and approaches by gathering information about your social media audiences.
For instance, use Facebook Audience Insights to get aggregated information about people on Facebook and users connected to your FB page.
The data from the tool can help you create content that resonates with your audience. Plus, you can find similar people in your current audience.
- Make audience personas. Create personas of your target audiences to help you tailor social media content that compels them into liking, commenting on, and sharing your posts.
Make your audience personas based on their location, age, job title and industry, interests, average income, etc.
Use the MakeMyPersona tool from HubSpot to generate free audience persona templates easily.
Get to know your social media audiences and potential customers as real people with genuine wants and needs. It can help you target and engage them better across your social media channels.
If you use robust user feedback software, leverage the data to know what your current and potential customers want.
You’ll have reliable insights you can leverage to provide satisfying and memorable audience experiences on social media, increasing your engagement, conversions, and sales.
3. Post engaging content
Create content that can engage your audiences effectively and drive them into acting on your offers and conversion goals.
Weave the following tactics into your social media marketing strategy to achieve this.
- Leverage content ideas that can help you achieve your social media marketing goals. For instance, run contests and giveaways to increase brand awareness and engagement with your Facebook followers.
You can also host an Ask Me Anything (AMA) session via Instagram Stories to encourage interaction with your brand, nurturing trust with your audiences.
- Use the appropriate content for specific social media channels. For example, share casual, fun videos on Instagram since that’s what IG users expect to see.
On the other hand, post more formal content on LinkedIn since it’s a platform dedicated to professional networking.
- Utilize user-friendly digital marketing software such as Canva, a graphic design tool that lets you create stunning visual content for social media even without graphic design experience and skills.
Choose from thousands of ready-to-use templates and customize them accordingly with the editing and design tools.
Creating content can take time and effort.
If you have the budget, you can always work with a professional digital marketing agency to lighten your teams’ workload while getting high-quality content for your marketing efforts.
Additionally, keep testing to determine the content types that work best on the specific social media platform and audiences.
4. Learn from your competitors
Your competitors don’t always have to be the bane of your existence. They can be great sources of information for developing and refining your social media marketing strategy with the right approach.
Learn from what your competitors are doing on social media with these tips.
- Use social media listening. Keep an eye on your competitors via social media listening.
Search your competitors’ social media account handles, company names, and other relevant keywords related to their brand.
Find out what people are saying about your competitors. Know the content types they share, whether these are funny, brand-related memes, or helpful tips on how to speed up videos using an iPhone.
Use this intel to help inform your social media marketing strategy and build on tactics your competitors are doing well.
- Perform a competitive analysis. Conduct a competitive analysis to learn who your competitors are, including ideas on what and how they succeed.
You’ll get a good sense of what’s expected and working in your industry, helping you set your social media targets.
Competitive analysis can also help you spot opportunities. For instance, one of your main competitors might be dominant on Instagram but put little effort into Facebook.
Take the opportunity to focus on channels where your audience might be underserved instead of going into a fierce battle to lure followers away from the dominant player.
Strategize to optimize your social media marketing efforts
A solid social media marketing strategy serves as your roadmap to implementing your initiatives, using the right tactics, and leveraging the best-fitting tools to reach your SMM goals.
While creating your social media marketing strategy involves a lot more than following a few tips and tricks, start with the reliable tactics in this guide to kick your efforts into gear.
