show

Now, since we are all well aware of the benefits, it is now time that we move down to social media marketing strategy. Let’s learn the best way to move forward with social media marketing.

When we talk about strategy, there are five steps to ensure your social media marketing plan works.

Step # 1: Identify Your Buyer Persona And Segment Your Audience

The first step for an effective social media marketing strategy is that you understand your buyer persona. By understanding the buyer persona, you can become more capable of meeting their needs.

To understand your buyer persona, think deeply and imaginatively about your target audience. Think!

You have to decide what your audience will look like and why are you reaching out to them? You will further have to decide how you can classify this audience into potential groups?

For example, if you are selling custom made shoes, you might want to classify your target audience who is interested in purchasing custom made products. They can be the modern-day millennials who like to wear stylish apparels. They can be athletes since they like to stand out from the rest of the crowd. All of this information will help you to understand your buyer persona so you can reach them.

Step # 2: Identify the Social Media Platform Where You Want to Market

Just as much as building up a buyer persona is important, it is equally important that you know which platforms you’re going to choose to share your content. There are several social media platforms that can give you a major breakthrough in the Internet world. But, it is up to you to decide which platform is the best one where your target audience resides. It can be Facebook or it can be Twitter.

For that, you will have to perform your own research.

If you know what your audience needs and interests are, you will know on which social media platform are they more likely to spend their time and perform business. For example, if you are a business skilled in selling custom made shoes to millennials, your target social platform should be Instagram.

It’s where you will find most millennials spending their time.

Here are some other social media stats just to develop your understanding.

• Snapchat: Generation Z makes up the largest portion of the 300 million users.
• Facebook: Millenials make up the largest portion of the 2.2 billion users.
• Youtube: Millennials, closely followed by Generation Z, make up the largest portion of the 1.9 billion users.
• Twitter: Millennials make up the largest portion of the 335 million users.
• Pinterest: Older millennials and younger baby boomers make up the largest portion of 250 million users.

Step # 3: Content is King! Henceforth, Make Quality Content That Matters

There is a strong chance that people visiting your social media account have previously visited your competitors in the market. So, they are more likely reading the same marketing gimmicks which others have already posted on the Internet. What they are now looking for is something unique!

Henceforth, it is increasingly important that you make sure the content you publish is of great quality. Spend time investing your budget in hiring the most professional content developers who can create marketing headlines to win your audience in just a blink. You need people who are highly creative.

You can even use your current customers and promoters to help you generate user-generated content.

For example, if you’re running a custom shoe business, make sure that your brand has a unique logo and a tagline that sets it apart from the rest. Each of the posts that you are sending out is unique and special in its own way. Double-check if you are using the right hashtags and your captions are perfect.

Above all, pay special attention to wording and context. Your grammar should be perfect too.

Step # 4: Organize a Periodic Schedule to Post Your Social Media Posts

Knowing when is the best time to post your social media posts is what really makes or breaks a business. There are several markets and each of them comes online at different times. You need to identify which of the posting times are the best times to send the word out to your desired audience.

For example, if your custom shoe business is running in the African region, it is important that you should do detailed research on when average Africans come online on your desired social channel. If your research indicates that they are available during the evening hours of the day, then make sure that you schedule your social media posts and automate them to send it out every day at the set time.

There are several tools that can help you organize your social media for effective management.

• Sprout Social – It is a great tool to organize and plan out content creation. It will help you manage campaigns and schedule posts. It also provides you to review content and send perform analysis.
• HubSpot – It is a great tool to publish and monitor your content. It helps you create powerful new connections in your niche. With Hubspot, you can schedule and publish content in advance.
• HootSuite – It is a great social media management platform that helps you to find, manage, schedule and report on your desired content. The tool is great for measuring the ROI on a social media campaign.

Step # 5: Lastly, Analyze the Impact & Observe its Results

How would you know that the practices you have instilled are the right practices? You won’t be completely satisfied unless your efforts don’t complement your successes based on the objectives.

To analyze the results, you will require a way to keep track of all your posts on every channel. And it can be best done by keeping track of all the important social media metrics.

What are social media metrics? It is the data accumulated by businesses to measure the success of a post performing on social media. It helps marketers measure the impact of a post on the target audience. It may include information on user engagement, likes, shares, follows, comments, etc.

To measure social media metrics, one must use the following software

• Twitter Analytics
• Facebook Analytics
• Instagram Insights

There are countless social media networks that allow users to put forward their businesses in front of over a million people every day. Sending out a word in front of your target audience may sound all tricky, but planning what to share on which platform and when to share it decides how well you perform. It’s a dog eat dog world out there and if you want your social media to be sizeably profitable, then you have to be manageable and more effective. You need to understand social media before you step down into the mud pool. Hopefully, this article is good enough to enlighten you on the power of social media.