Complete Guide to Create a Solid Social Media Marketing Strategy

We’re long past the days when businesses were reluctant to be on social media due to the fear of seeming unprofessional. Now, nearly every company has a professional profile on these platforms, but because of that, simply being online is no longer sufficient. To attract and connect with potential customers, you need a well-thought social media marketing strategy.

Whether you’re completely new to these platforms, or you want to try out a new one, this comprehensive guide will help you plan your marketing for social media from scratch. I’ll go over what a marketing strategy for social media entails, its benefits, and a series of tips to identify the best course of action for your business so you’ll have everything you need to get started.

Let’s go!

 

What Is a Social Media Marketing Strategy, and Why Do You Need One?

Social networks like Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter are valuable digital marketing tools for businesses. In fact, a 2023 study discovered that 59.9% of the global population has a social media account, so having an online presence can definitely help you attract your target audience and effectively promote your products or services. 

Sadly, this is not as simple as it seems. Due to the large number of users, being noticed on social media is getting harder every year. This makes sense if you consider that, in order to capture people’s attention, you must compete not only with businesses but also with other creators and personal accounts. 

But the good news is that you can create a social media marketing strategy to carefully consider and integrate all your brand’s actions into a comprehensive plan. For example, a proper strategy will help you establish—and maintain—a consistent brand design for your company, guide content production, and make it easier for your marketing team to keep everything on schedule.

 

Benefits of Social Media for Business

If you’re a small business owner, you might wonder whether a social media marketing strategy is worth the effort. Beyond the benefits I just mentioned, there are various reasons why you should definitely consider developing one: 

 

Position Your Brand and Increase Awareness

It’s been discovered that 46% of customers confirm that they’re more likely to buy from a brand they remember and are familiar with. This demonstrates that, for businesses today, establishing a strong, recognizable brand identity is fundamental if they want to boost sales. 

Social media platforms can help you with that because their visual nature enables you to showcase your identity to its fullest potential and raise awareness among huge audiences. For example, you can brand the pieces you share so people start associating elements like your logo with your profile and content.

More importantly, you can infuse your personality and vision into everything you post, making it easier to appeal to an audience that shares your values and goals.

 

Drive Traffic and Generate Leads

Creating ads that could reach a massive audience used to be a feat only the biggest companies could strive for, but with social media, you can post content that has the potential to travel the world in seconds. 

Social media was born out of the idea of sharing things with the people you love, which is why many of them actively promote content sharing. So, if you create an interesting and entertaining piece, there’s always a chance it’ll go viral and bring in a flood of new followers and potential customers to your account.

On top of that, just by adding a link to your website in your profile or posts, you can easily turn that influx of followers into valuable traffic for your website and even for your online shop.

 

Humanize Your Business and Build a Community:

Transparency and honesty are keys to gaining your customers’ loyalty, and with social media, connecting with them is easy because you can reach them directly with content that gives your business a human face. For example, you can create behind-the-scenes videos, make polls asking viewers for their opinions, and even film yourself answering FAQs to make followers feel like you’re right by their side.

This is what’s often known as building a community around your brand. By directly communicating with your audience, you’ll create an approachable persona they can familiarize themselves with and trust. Additionally, keeping an open stance will help you gain valuable feedback you can use to improve your product or service and better understand your customers’ needs.

 

Gain Backlinks and Improve SEO

Did you know that being active on social media can also improve your SEO? Well, CognitiveSEO ran a study analyzing 23 million social media shares in which they discovered that shares, likes, and comments on social media can influence how search engines rank your website. 

The logic behind this lies in how social networks rank profiles. Engagement metrics like these are measured by the algorithm as social cues, and this investigation discovered that search engines also refer to them to determine your site’s visibility, reputation, and authority.

For example, if you repost a blog article’s link on social media, all the engagement it receives will be interpreted by search engines as a sign that your content is valuable and relevant. Additionally, the more attention your content receives, the better its chances of going viral. Which can lead to an increase in traffic to your website, and high-quality backlinks.

 

Steps to Create a Social Media Marketing Strategy

As you can see, marketing social media can be a great growth factor for your business in many ways. So, here are 6 steps you can follow to come up with an effective marketing strategy that helps you get the most out of social media and start generating more revenue for your business:

 

1. Identify Your Ideal Audience

Social networks bring all kinds of people together, but most of the time, they’ll all have different backgrounds, various interests, and specific online behaviors. So, it’s virtually impossible to come up with a strategy that appeals to every single person. For that reason, I believe that finding the ideal audience for your product should be the starting point when creating any social media marketing strategy.

To identify your perfect target audience, you should build a buyer persona, that is, a portrait of your ideal client that reflects their tastes, style, profession, and even their interests and values. Although fictional, buyer personas are detailed descriptions based on thorough research, and they’re a valuable tool that will help you understand your target customers better. Ultimately, this will help you pinpoint the best and most effective ways of reaching them.

 

2. Choose Your Social Platforms

Once you have the knowledge you need about your target audience, it’s time to choose a platform to connect with them. Although this isn’t set in stone, different generations tend to use different networks. For example, Facebook is one of the few social media channels where you can find and engage with Baby Boomers. Meanwhile, usage statistics show that Millenials spend most of their time on YouTube, whereas Gen Z prefers TikTok.

But your industry and niche and your prospects’ particular interests will also influence the platform you should choose to promote your product or service. For instance, Gamers use streaming platforms like Twitch and Discord to meet with other fans and watch popular creators play their favorite games. However, if you’re targeting professionals or even another business, LinkedIn may be the right network for you. 

As you can see, there are many options, so establishing a presence on every platform isn’t really a realistic or sustainable goal. That’s why I recommend that you find out where your target audience spends most of their time and focus solely on those social channels.

 

3. Set SMART Goals

One of the most common mistakes businesses and creators make when managing social media for business is not establishing clear, achievable goals. Solidifying your presence online requires constant, deliberate effort, and not setting goals for your actions may lead you to achieve nothing—or even worse, not seeing the results you’re getting.

To set valuable goals for your social media marketing strategy, I recommend following the SMART technique. By making them Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound, you’ll establish clear, attainable, and meaningful objectives that provide clarity to your team and help you evaluate your efforts more easily.

An example of a SMART goal may be: “Gaining 1,000 followers in six months by sharing consistent, entertaining videos every day and interacting with my target audience”.

As you can see, it’s specific and measurable because it sets a concrete number; it’s measurable because it establishes a specific time frame; it’s relevant because it’s a valuable objective for the business; and because of all that, it’s achievable.

 

4. Develop a Content Strategy 

Being spontaneous on social media is great, but for those days when you can’t find inspiration, you need a content plan that guides your actions and gives them structure.

To make sharing quality content a daily matter, you should establish five general, relevant topics to focus on. For example, if you’re a clothing brand, you can focus on the season’s trends, historical facts, educational content, celebrity outfits, and product reviews. From each topic, you’ll be able to derive a series of more specific posts. 

Let’s take educational content, for example. You can explain to followers how to find their own style, give tips on how to properly take their measurements, or clarify the difference between winter and summer colors. 

The goal is to have a series of broad topics to choose from when you need inspiration for your posts. However, you should keep in mind that content creation is a collaborative process that often involves the efforts of designers, copywriters, and strategic marketing professionals all coming together. So, to ensure work gets done properly, assess your resources and make a content calendar. It will help you keep up with obligations, and meet your deadlines without breaking a sweat.

 

5. Consider Paid Ads

In the early stages of business social media marketing, reaching a wide audience organically was easier. Today, however, due to the increasing competition and the constantly-changing algorithms that even their creators don’t fully comprehend, you may find yourself constantly sharing content, but barely meeting your goals.

That’s why many businesses include paid ads in their social media marketing strategy. Unlike traditional advertising mediums like television or billboards, advertising on social media is very cost-effective because they tend to leverage the PPC method. This stands for pay-per-click, meaning that you only pay for the leads that converted with your ad, not for those who saw it and ignored it. 

Last but not least, social media platforms offer incredibly granular targeting abilities. You can create campaigns segmented not only by demographics but also by your target’s interest, and even their previous actions, such as having visited your profile once. As a result, you can precisely target the audience that’s most likely to be interested in your product.

 

6. Always Measure Your Results!

If you didn’t already know, most platforms offer highly valuable information that you can use to improve your social media marketing strategy. Just by setting up your profile as a business one, you’ll get access to your account’s performance data and audience demographics. 

But how can this help your efforts? Well, for example, you can analyze your audience’s behavior habits to determine the best times to post. Additionally, you can measure your results to determine which content receives the most interaction so that you can replicate that format from now on. 

Keep in mind, though, that analyzing isn’t a one-time thing, and that you have to regularly adjust your strategy to match the results. Harness that data to scale up what works, and abandon what doesn’t.

 

Tips for Your Social Media Marketing Strategy

Once you’ve properly developed a social media marketing strategy, it’s time for its implementation. Here are my personal suggestions to make the most of your social accounts and build lasting relationships with your audience.

• Be consistent. Post frequently, monitor engagements with your company, respond to interactions, and follow trends to succeed on social media. If you want to use a social media marketing strategy to expand your business, you need to keep an active profile.
• Keep an inbound approach. Don’t use social media to directly promote your business. Users go to these networks to find entertaining content, so all of your attention should be focused on sharing informative and exciting pieces. By building a positive impression on customers, you’re promoting your company in a natural way.
• Repurpose and repost content. Coming up with original ideas to share online every day is one of the hardest aspects of content marketing. That’s why you can repurpose old content to stay consistent. Turn a blog post into a carousel, make a reel out of a tweet, or cut a webinar into a series of videos. 

• Create diverse content to avoid boring your audience. Besides posting frequently, you have to provide diverse pieces that are both interesting and relevant to your community. Take advantage of common formats like how-tos, quick tips, industry news, and influencer campaigns. And make use of the variety of formats social media offers, including images, videos, stories, live streams, online stores, and more. 

Remember that if you don’t provide what your audience is looking for, they’ll find it somewhere else!

 

Wrapping Up

Funny content and compelling marketing videos are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to social media. In fact, social platforms can be a unique place to showcase your products, gain valuable knowledge of your customers’s lives, and tell your brand’s story.

You don’t need to be an agency offering social media marketing services to succeed online. Just by knowing your audience and putting that knowledge into creating content that’s relevant to them and their struggles, you’ll be able to come up with amazing things. 

And always, always, planning ahead.