Social networking websites are the second most accessed websites after Google. More than 3.6 billion people were actively using social media in the previous year i.e. 2020. The number is going to further rise in the next upcoming years.
If the world has turned into a global village, then social media has become the global stage where people across the globe share the bits and pieces of their lives, families, interests, passions, achievements, etc. They also love to learn about the people around them.
Having a huge audience with different interests, ages, gender, religion, nationality, etc. is a golden opportunity for the business to make their presence there. By being available on social media websites, businesses can target their potential audience and turn them into loyal customers.
In today’s world where everything from gadgets to marketing, has been digitalized, presence on social media websites is more than necessary for businesses. It is not for the growth and expansion of business, rather for the survival of the business in a bloodhound competitive online world.
Social media accounts of businesses not only increase brand awareness but also direct the people from the networking website to their online store.
Below we have mentioned 10 Steps to create a successful social media marketing strategy for 2021.
Keep reading to discover how to build a successful social media marketing strategy for your business.
Ten Essential Steps To Create Successful Social Media Marketing Strategy
1. Determine Your Social Media Objectives
The first step to build a successful social media marketing strategy is to be very specific about your objectives and goals. Having predefined goals will help you to stay focused when you develop your marketing plan on social media.
To define your goals of the social media marketing strategy for 2021, answer the following questions:
- What is the purpose of launching a campaign on social media?
- What results does the business foresee?
- How will results be measured?
Try to answer these questions by covering every tiny detail that you can. This will prevent you to invest your time and resources in a campaign that will not be fruitful for the business.
Furthermore, you aren’t the only business that wants to increase its brand awareness and capture the maximum targeted audience, no. There are 1000s of other businesses who have the same objectives as yours. This means, you don’t have to come up with a strategy to market your brand, but also to compete with the other brands that operate in the same industry as yours.
Some of the common goals of the businesses are listed below:
- Increase brand awareness
- Generate sales
- Connect with audience
- Build a community
- Boost traffic on the website
- Generate leads
Having a clear goal in mind allows the business to invest its time, energy, and other resources in the right direction. It will also help you to measure the results.
2. Understand Your Target Audience
The second step in developing any marketing strategy is to understand who is your audience and what do they want. To make your social media marketing strategy an immense success, you first must understand:
- Who is your potential audience?
- Which type of audience will be interested in your product or service?
- How will your product or service be useful to them?
Understanding your audience involves a blend of demographics and psychographics.
a) Demographics
It refers to the description and statistical data of a person or a group. It includes information such as the age, gender, profession, financial standing, educational level, etc.
Demographics are of great business help. It helps to understand the customer and in developing the ideal buyer profile.
b) Psychographics
It refers to the information that involves the opinions, beliefs, interests, values, and lifestyle of the targeted audience.
While analyzing the psychographics data, make sure to answer the following questions by keeping in view the audience you want to target or convert as your customers:-
- Will they be interested in our product?
- How useful will the product be for them?
- Textual information or graphical content? Which one will appeal to the customers?
- Are they familiar with our brand?
Demographics and psychographics both are equally important to be understood by the business. Demographics make businesses understand who their potential customers are, and psychographics educates them why the product or service will be important to their customers.
Fetching psychographics is not easy like demographics. There are no tools that can help a business to extract psychographic data.
To collect the data, a business has to visit the sites where their targeted audience engages. For example, a blog, community forums, or an online group, etc. Read the articles, understand the questions and queries raised by the audience to observe how they behave online and what their concerns about a product or a service are.
3. Determine The Social Media Platform
It might sound tempting to have a business profile on every social media handle. Sure, it will help you to reach a mass audience, but in the beginning, it is always a good idea to start with 2-3 social media accounts and then make your presence on other networking platforms.
Having too many accounts makes it difficult for the business to manage its content and at the same time, it becomes impossible to properly engage with the audience. First, get the hang of a few social media accounts, and then gradually increase your presence on other social networking websites.
Understanding which social media platforms to select is also very important for social media marketing strategy. Because every social media website has different types of users.
For example, Snapchat, Instagram, and TikTok generally have teenagers and young users. Therefore, it is not a suitable social media platform for a business that has products for senior citizens.
Before making your account on any social platform, make sure to research and analyze that where you will find your target audience.
4. Increase Your Followers
Before following or liking a business page, people check the number of likes and followers that the business has. The more followers a business page has on social media, the more authentic and trustworthy it appears.
Without having any followers you won’t be able to reap any benefits from your marketing campaigns. To increase your followers, first, follow the pages and people who have a huge following. Engage with those pages and people, and stay active on your profile. This will slowly and gradually increase your followers. Do not aim to get 1000s of followers overnight. It can only happen when you buy fake followers.
Buying fake followers is futile for business as they only increase the number of followers while the engagement on your posts will remain low. You sure don’t want that, right?
5. Develop Concrete Content Strategy
Once you have understood your goals, who your potential audience is, and which channel will be the most suitable for your business, it’s time to move on to the next step.
Content is much more than just text. Long blocks of textual information is a big turn off for online users. Just looking at the plain text makes the online user sleepy. Try to think outside the box when you are developing your content strategy.
Try to come up with unique ideas and enrich your content with pictures, animations, GIFs, videos, etc. However, make sure not to make your content too self-promotional. Content on social media should be user-centered. It should be helpful and interesting for your followers or else you can kiss them good-bye.
Conduct polls, publish questionnaires to keep your audience engaged. And most importantly, don’t forget to use the correct keywords in your content. Using proper keywords instills energy in your SEO and reaches a wider audience.
6. Maintain Ideal Frequency For Posting Content
Having a huge following makes the business post more frequently to s the engagement on their posts.
Posting on social media is a tricky affair. Posting frequently, or more than necessary can make your audience bored. In worse cases, they might feel as if you’re spamming with your countless posts.
According to buffer.com, the following frequency should be maintained for posting on social media.
Maximum 3 tweets a day. After the third tweet, the engagement level decreases.
Posting once or twice is the maximum limit for this social media platform. Posting more than 2 posts will significantly drop the engagement rate.
18-20 monthly posts are enough for this platform. With this frequency, businesses can target 60% of their potential audience.
Post as much as you want to. Unlike Facebook and Twitter, the algorithms of Instagram will not reduce your engagement.
– Blogs
The more the merrier. Writing blogs is way more time consuming than simply uploading a picture. Therefore, publishing twice a week is enough to keep your online visitors engaged.
The above numbers are generalized and will not apply to every business. Understand the requirements of your marketing strategies and then come up with a schedule for when, how, and where to post?
7. Automation Tools
Social media marketing should lighten your burden and not be an additional load. If you have a small team and a limited budget it must get difficult for you to design and then publish the content on several social media accounts.
To save yourself from the hassle of posting the content at the same time on all the social media platforms, take help from the automation tools.
Automation tools publish the content on various channels at the predefined date, day, and time. So, even if you forget to post, no problem. The automation tool will do the job for you.
If your business is earning well, then you can opt for premium automation tools, but if your business has just started up then you can use free automation tools to schedule the dates to posts on your social media accounts.
8. Promote Old Content
Staying active on social media is a prerequisite to stay ahead in your marketing game. But, it doesn’t always have to be with the new content. Content creation is not an easy task. It takes a lot of brainstorming, research, designing, time, and sometimes money too for creating unique and interactive content.
You can generate traffic to your website by using old posts on social media pages. You don’t have to share a year old content several times a day. Instead, you can promote your old post, picture, tweet, etc. just after a few minutes of posting new content.
For example, you can select an old post from your Instagram and you can share it on your story and invite the people to answer the question that you have asked, or pour in their suggestions. This keeps your users engaged and also improves the engagement on your previous posts.
Use catchy captions when you use old content. Repeating the same content with a similar title or pictures, will not produce the desired results.
9. Work With Key Influencers Of Your Industry
Collaborating and working with social media influencers can take your brand to the next level. Influencers have a huge following. If your brand is promoted by a key influencer of your industry then it can give you 1000s of new followers and generate traffic on your website.
You don’t have to work with the influencers who have millions of followers if your business has a limited budget. Instead, look for influencers with whom you can collaborate under your limited budget.
10. Track Your Efforts
The last step to build a successful social media marketing strategy is to monitor your efforts and review the results generated from your marketing campaign.
By monitoring and reviewing your strategies you get an insight into which techniques worked well for your business and which ones failed.
Also take into consideration which type of content generated more engagement, how many people interact with your posts, which posts led the people to your website, etc. by keeping a record of these figures you can curate your future strategy by keeping in view the content that was liked the most.
Pulling The Plug
Building a successful social media marketing strategy for 2021 is mandatory if one wants to make his business successful and reach new horizons.
Social media marketing isn’t a one-time thing. It is an ongoing process and never stops. Develop a sound social media marketing strategy to promote your brand and to generate new leads for the business.
The results will not appear overnight, but don’t give up. Stay consistent and you will hit the bull’s eye!
Author Bio:
Ricky Hayes is the Co-Founder and Head of Marketing at Debutify – free Shopify theme, helping dropshippers build high-converting stores in minutes. He is a passionate entrepreneur running multiple businesses, marketing agencies, and mentoring programs.
