How to Build Your Social Media Marketing Strategy

Social Media Marketing is a necessity for any business, new or existing. Having accounts like Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter isn’t just about being visible to potential clients. It also encourages engagement with your brand and can be a powerful tool in your marketing arsenal.

However, if you’ve never used social marketing before, it might feel a little overwhelming and confusing. Here are a few tips to help you get your Social Media Marketing strategy started.

Set SMART, DUMB, and Sensible Marketing Goals

If you’ve ever researched the best ways to start planning your marketing strategy, you’ll have encountered SMART goals:

• Specific: What are the specific tasks you need to accomplish?
• Measurable: How will you measure success?
• Attainable: Are your goals achievable, and how will you achieve them?
• Relevant: Are the goals and tasks pertinent to your business?
• Time-Bound: When do you need to achieve your goals?

However, just like you need a social media marketing strategy that suits your business and market, you also need a planning system that suits your individual goals.

Enter the DUMB goal system:

• Dream/Destiny Driven: What is our overall goal, vision, or dream?
• Uplifting: Do your goals inspire you to achieve them?
• Method-friendly: Can you build a practice around your goal, or master it?
• Behavior-driven: Can you develop behavioral habits that encourage the chasing of your targets?

If you need inspiration or freedom to reach your goals, DUMB might be the best way. However, if you’re incredibly task-driven, SMART might be better.

You can also try combining them. Set lofty goals, but give yourself a few tasks to achieve it. Don’t be afraid to dream, but make sure you break it down into realistic, achievable metrics. You don’t want to be demotivated when you don’t achieve your dream of hitting the million-subscriber mark in six months.

Determine Your Metrics

Which metrics are the most valuable for your business? Do you need followers, shares and engagement, or comments and messages? It’s easy to celebrate vanity metrics, such as having 100K likes on a post – but how many of those likes converted to sales?

Decide which metrics help you track your progress towards your goal the most accurately, and then focus on those.

Competitor Analysis

What is your competition doing? This question is essential for several reasons. First, you don’t want to replicate exactly what the competition is doing. Second, you can see what works in your industry, and what doesn’t.

A look at your competition’s social media channels can give valuable insight, but you can also use various online tools to get deeper insights.

Creating and Curating Content

Obviously, you need to create content to match your brand and engage your target audience. You should have a good idea of who you’re going to be targeting, and you need to adapt your content to your market.

You need to decide which platforms you’ll be posting on and adapt your content for each. Instagram is very visual, while Twitter is for short, quick, and eye-catching posts. You also don’t need to post new content all the time, either. Curated content can make up a crucial part of your social strategy.

Analyze and Optimize

You set metrics for a reason – now is the time to use them. Which of your posts achieved the goals you set, and which ones didn’t? Did you get the conversions you wanted?

Use the information and statistics you’ve gathered to work on your social media content strategy. You’ll continuously improve your posts, progressing towards achieving your goals.

Take Away

Social media is a great way to market your business or brand, but it’s not just as easy as slapping a picture onto your Facebook account. It’s important to set goals and achievable tasks, but don’t be afraid to dream, either.

Remember to keep track of important metrics, so that you can use them to improve your marketing strategy later. It’s one of the ways you can see if you’re using the right methods to engage with your target audience.

With proper planning, sensible goals and tasks, and a dash of creativity, you can use social media marketing to your advantage.