5 Ways to Maximize Your Social Media Marketing Strategy
If you’re a business that offers a product or service, you need a marketing strategy to maximize your online presence. A crucial part of that marketing plan is your social media strategy. Simply having social media accounts and posting the occasional update isn’t enough, though; there’s probably much more you can do to use the accounts to their potential.
1. Align Your Social Media Goals with Those of Your Company
Your social media strategy does not stand alone. It’s one piece of your greater overall marketing strategy, so why should its goals be different?
Unlike personal social media accounts, where you may share some cute stories and links, update your friends on your kids and grandkids’ antics, or “check in” at a location, your business social media accounts were (hopefully) set up to generate leads and benefit your bottom line.
So, for example, if you have a marketing goal to expand your product line, your social media accounts might focus on:
- Running campaigns that highlight your new products
- Posting information and updates on your product line
- Offering incentives to try new products
2. Set Objectives for Your Goals
Goals mean nothing if you aren’t measuring them. You’ll need to set parameters and create metrics to determine how effective your marking strategies are.
Using the example in #1, some things you can do is:
- Gather statistics on the effectiveness of your campaigns
- Collect information on where new leads are being generated
You will also need to quantify your goals to achieve your objectives. Make sure your objectives are reasonable and achievable. So, if you’re running campaigns and offering incentives to try your product, your objective might be to get 100 people to try your new product every month.
3. Identify Your Target Audience and the Most Effective Social Media Channels
To maximize your success and effectiveness of your social media marketing strategy, you’ll need to create a buyer persona that defines the characteristics of your ideal customer. A buyer persona represents a fictional identity that describes people within your target audience who share similarities.
A buyer persona usually contains information like age, gender, occupation, income, interests, pains, problems, obstacles, habits, likes, dislikes, motivations and objections. So, if you are rolling out a product like a new skin product that reduces wrinkles, your basic buyer persona would likely be women over the age of 30. But if you can collect additional information, you can refine your target; the more details you have, the better you’ll be able to target the customers who want and need your product.
You also need to determine which social media channels work for your business. Some channels may work better for your business than others. You can use your buyer personas to determine which channels are most preferred by your target audience. Once you know which social media outlets your prospective customers are spending the majority of their time, you can focus on those channels and ignore the others.
4. Check Out Your Competition
If you can narrow down your top competitors who offer similar products and services, you can further research their social media networks to determine how they’re marketing. See what they’re posting and what the engagement level is. Here’s a simple formula for measuring engagement:
Last 20 posts * number of engagements (shares, comments, likes) / total number of fans
Of course, it’s not a perfect formula, but it can give you a pretty good idea on your competitors’ effectiveness at engaging customers. You may get some valuable insight and tactics to use for your own social media posts.
5. Create a Content Strategy
Just as your website must have great content, so it goes with your social media posts, as well. Content on social media has three components:
- Type – The type of content can be in the form text, images, links, videos, etc. The voice and tone you use should represent your product, business and buyer personas. In other words, it can be humorous, instructional, serious, etc.
- Time – The time you post also depends somewhat on your buyer persona. However, you will need to do some trial and error to determine the best times for you.
- Frequency – If you post too often, you can appear annoying. On the other hand, if it’s too seldom, you may not be capturing the market sufficiently. This factor also needs to be tested to get it right.
There are other factors and tools you can use to improve your results Social Media results. But if you concentrate on doing these five things, you are on your way to a more effective social media marketing strategy for your business.
Contact Philadelphia SEO for Growth today to learn how we can help you get found and get leads. We offer a free audit of your website to show how your website currently stands.