2021 is the year where everyone is hitting the reset button and is looking forward to moving on from the disaster of 2020. So it is a perfect time now to fine-tune your social media marketing strategy and grow the online presence of your business. At CyphonDigital, we provide high-end social media strategy and management solutions to companies and help them grow their brand.
Keeping your presence sound in social media can be a daunting task, and only a group of dedicated professionals can help you out. So we better understand the sector and learn how to help brands smartly tackle their goals with a laser-focused purpose. That is why we created a list of things you should include in your social media marketing strategy that will help you grow your brand quickly. So without further delay, let’s get into it!
Set Goals That Make Sense For Your Brand
The first factor you need to decide while creating your social media digital marketing strategy is, “what do you want from social media?”
Creating a comprehensive social media strategy always starts with setting goals. Maybe you want to build a community or a dedicated follower group, or perhaps you want your social accounts to drive more revenue this year.
Regardless of the requirements, the goal-setting will define your content and strategy on social media.
First, however, you have to make sure your goals are realistic. It is always better to tackle smaller objectives that allow you to scale your social efforts reasonably and affordably.
Here are some of the social media goals that any business can set and calibrate towards their business.
Increasing Brand Awareness
Brand awareness means getting your name out there. Increasing your brand awareness is a great way to bring your brand close to the customer.
Now, to have the best impact, make sure you post a wide range of content on your social media. If you are only publishing promotional messages, then it’s high time you stop it. Instead, create content that focuses on customer persona and your brand values.
Generate Leads & Sales
Your social media strategy works to generate leads and sales. But, remember, whether it’s online or in-store, your followers won’t automatically start buying things from you.
So make sure you have content that showcases your unique propositions and alerts customers about new products and promos.
Grow Your Audience
Social media is a great way to grow your audience. With the right social media strategy, you will be able to bring new people into the fold.
So make sure you find new ways to introduce your brand to folks who haven’t heard of you before. One significant aspect of growing your audience is to find conversations around your business and the industry that matter the most. That means you will need to monitor or listen to specific keywords, phrases, and hashtags.
Once you know what people are talking about, you can quickly strategize accordingly to reach the core audience.
Boosting Community Engagement
Your social media strategy should always boost community engagement to grab the attention of your current followers. Make sure you are constantly experimenting with messaging and content.
Two of the most effective methods we found in our experience are utilizing user-generated content and hashtags to promote the brand or products. Even something as simple as asking a question can boost your engagement rates. Remember, your audience can be your biggest cheerleaders if you give them something to do.
Driving Traffic To The Site
Social media is your best bet if you want to focus more on generating leads and traffic. Make sure you keep an eye out for your social media strategy. Whether through promotional posts or social ads, keeping an eye on conversions and URL clicks will help you find your ROI from social media. So make sure you set your goals accordingly.
Researching Your Target Audience
When it comes to social media strategy and management, making assumptions will devastate your business. However, you don’t have to do it anymore with the sheer wealth of demographic data and social media analytics tools. All you need to know about your audience and what influences them is already available if you know where to look.
In a recent Sprout Social survey, it was revealed that 72% of businesses are currently using social media as a source of data and insights to make business decisions. Therefore, you should check out the numbers of the network and your preferred demographic to create a more informed decision when researching your target audience. Here are some key takeaways that you can use for your social media strategy:
- Facebook & YouTube are prime networks for ads because it attracts a high-earning user base.
- Social networks like Instagram and TikTok have more millennials or Gen Z. Meaning you should focus more on bold, eye-popping content for the younger demographic brimming with personality.
- Women vastly outnumber men in Pinterest, which boasts the highest average order value for social shoppers.
- The user base for LinkedIn is well-educated, making it a hub for in-depth, industry-specific content. Now the content might be a bit more complicated than the ones you see on Facebook or Twitter, but that’s what LinkedIn’s users look for.
Remember, you don’t have to focus everywhere at once because that can leave you distracted, and you can spread yourself too thin. Make sure to focus only on the social channels that your core audience visits frequently.
Now, knowing about the social channels, your audience visits is only half the work. You need to learn more about the people you want to target for your brand. That’s why brands utilize a social media dashboard to understand more about their audience.
The dashboard provides you with a complete overview of who’s following you and how they interact with you on each channel and usually shows which social networks are seeing the most activity.
This sort of information helps you with making decisions on which social channels you should focus on. Keep in mind that social media dashboards aren’t the only sources for audience data. There are other sources of valuable audience data to supplement your social media insights. Check out Google and email analytics or even your best-selling products to find out what the people like.
Establishing Important Metrics & KPIs
Regardless of what business you are in, your social media strategy should always be data-driven. Make sure you keep digging into data to find the metrics that align directly with your goals.
Confused about which metrics to focus on? Here are some of the most important metrics you should look into:
- Reach: The post reach is the number of unique users who saw your post. It’s a metric that will show you how far your content is reaching the user’s feeds.
- Clicks: It’s the number of clicks you have in your account. You have to make sure you track the number of clicks. It’s essential to understand what drives curiosity or encourages people to buy.
- Engagement: It’s the number of social interactions divided by the number of impressions. It shows how well your audience perceives you and their willingness to interact.
- Hashtag Performance: You have to make sure you find out what your most used hashtags are and which hashtags were associated with your brand the most. When you know these, you can help shape the focus of your content going forward.
- Organic & Paid Likes: These are interactions attributed to paid or organic content. For brands gaining organic traction is hard, and that’s why brands usually turn to ads. Make sure you understand the difference between organic and paid likes. Once you know that, you will budget both your ad spend and the time you invest in different formats.
- Sentiments: This metric informs you about how the audience reacts to your content, brand, or hashtag. Check if the last campaign was offensive to your audience, check the sentiments associated with the hashtags you used, and find out other questions like that. Remember, you have to dig deeper and find out how people are talking about your brand.
Remember, utilizing the right metrics and KPIs will ensure how effective your social media strategy will be. In addition, the analytics numbers will tell you the context that circles back around to your original goals. So make sure you look into the numbers.
Creating & Curating Engaging Content
The best social media strategy always depends on the content you have, and by this time, you should have some idea about what to publish based on your goal and brand identity.
In addition, if you researched your target audience, you also know which networks to target. Here are some of the most effective content strategies you can integrate into your social media strategy.
Content Themes
If you’ve looked up established brands, then the odds are you will feel like their social media posts just scream their brands. You can use tools like filters to captions and beyond. Many brands rely on the same content formats and creative touches to create their aesthetic. Content themes are designed to help you become more consistent and zero in on a content strategy that makes sense for your brand.
You can try to cycle between memes, product photos, and user-generated content while sticking to a rotating color scheme. You can use a social media management tool to help you keep track of all social content sources.
It will also help you organize your media library and schedule your posts in advance. If you want to narrow down what content you should be publishing, you can look at social trends and get inspired to create innovative content.
Utilizing Stories & Time-Sensitive Posts
Stories are one of the perfect tools to boost the impact of your social media strategy. They can tap into your followers’ FOMO (fear of missing out). Story-styled content is both interactive and can’t-miss. It will pop up on your followers’ feeds by default, and it helps your brand’s account to “skip the line” and stay fresh in the audience’s minds.
It’s the perfect tool to take your followers behind the scenes and make your social feed feel a bit more personal. You can use the stories to take your followers on a journey without them having to leave the comfort of Instagram!
Short-Form Video
Short-form video is taking over the internet with TikTok and the recent rollout of Instagram Reels. However, both long-form and short-form productions dominate the online space as their engagement rates are through the roof for all platforms. So you better pay attention to it when creating your social media marketing strategy.
Create Posts That Show Your Human Side
People are looking for connections more than the online iteration of door-to-door salespeople with the pandemic going on. Therefore, your content should be unique and personable content, and it should be the cornerstone of your social media strategy. Never shy away from an opportunity to show your audience the humans behind your posts.
Competitive Analysis
Before setting your social media campaign, you need to know what your competitors are up to. While you can use third-party tools to dig deeper into your competitors and determine what makes them tick, we suggest you don’t do that if you are starting. You can easily find out what they are up to if you do a simple review of competitors’ social presence.
A simple Google search goes a long way into helping you do your competitor research. You can use Google to find out the most valuable keywords, phrases, and industry terms. Once you find the information, check out the social channels compared to your promotion strategy.
Now, you are not copying their ideas but seeing what works, finding out what the target audience likes, and then creating a social media strategy that matches your brand identity while catering to the target audience.
Use your competitor’s socials to discover how they utilize and weaponize their social media to bring in customers. Then, adapt your social media strategy to counteract and win over your shared audience.
Time Your Social Activity
Timelines are critical if you want to make headway into social media. Your audience expects to put out fresh content and always be “on” for them. They expect you to be on their timeline, and that can be a bit of a tall task if you are only starting your business.
However, there are ways you can maximize your exposure by tweaking your social media strategy. So let’s check out what you can do.
Posting At Peak Times
You will easily find the peak times to post with some research, but what if you aren’t there to communicate with the audience when they engage? Well, that all will be for naught.
That’s why you should always try to assure your audience about social media or community managers’ availability and are ready to answer any product questions or concerns when you tweet or post. So knowing the peak time to post isn’t the only part of it. You have to be there to engage with your audience as well.
Respond To Questions And Shout-Outs ASAP
Your customer expects speedy responses from your brand, and they also want meaningful conversations. You cannot overlook these core elements of networking. Please make sure you make an effort to ensure conversations or engagement opportunities never to leave them unattended.
You will see a considerable uptake in performance from your social media strategy simply by being present and talking to your audience. That’s why social customer care is vital for any brand that wants to increase audience awareness.
You should never leave your customers hanging regardless of whether you are responding to a compliment or responding to a question. While most users believe that brands should respond to social media messages within four hours, the average is usually around 10 hours.
You can designate specific tasks that will help your staff run like a well-oiled social media team to be more efficient. Make sure you are always on top of your social media strategy’s social customer care aspect if you want to beat your competitors.
Work With Social Experts
So there you go, you need to integrate those things into your social media strategy that is proven winners. So make sure you take a look into this list and optimize your social media marketing strategy to hit a home run.
However, we wouldn’t be surprised if you find all this overwhelming. That’s where CyphonDigital comes in. We provide specialized social media strategy and management for businesses from all over the world.
So if you need social media management services or know more about how social media strategies can help you grow your brand, feel free to get in touch with us, and we will help you out. If you have any other questions regarding social media or digital marketing in general, you can drop them in the comments below or hit us up on our socials, and we will get back to you right away with all the answers.
And with that being said, that’s about all we have for you today. We will come back with something new for you soon. Until then, see you!
