The Ultimate Guide To Social Media Marketing Strategy

A Social Media Marketing Strategy is a set of tricks brands use to enhance brand visibility and boost conversions through social media platforms. Today, brands rely deeply on social media to enhance their reputation, brand recognition and market goodwill.  Social media platforms are slowly becoming the true face of modern brands, making them spend a lump sum on their marketing efforts, including creating an effective social media marketing strategy.

Of course, not all businesses and brands are capable of planning and executing an entire effective social media marketing strategy, so there are firms and digital marketing agencies like SocialPlug that offer social media marketing services along with other online services such as search engine optimization (SEO), influencer marketing, and online brand building to name a few. They have creative teams that brainstorm new and unique ideas to promote brands and sell their products or services.

Social media marketing is devised to launch, promote and increase a brand or business’s online presence. The content you post, the story you add, the comments you pin, and the interaction you do with your potential customers or audience are naturally a part of social media marketing strategy.

The following are the main types of social media marketing strategies -

#1 - Content marketing

This strategy uses contents of different forms to draw customers’ attention and keep them closer. For content marketing, individuals or businesses use any form of content, be it blogs, podcasts, infographics, emails and videos and place them strategically to keep the customers hooked. To ensure the purpose is efficiently served, brands hire experts to focus on producing high-quality content backed with real-time data and figures in most cases.

#2 - Advertising

It is the most common social media marketing strategy, leveraging non-personal and publicly-funded marketing communication. Whether it is an audio message or a visual one, it promotes or directly sells goods, services or a conceptualized idea. In short, it is a message that brands pay for to the people doing it on their behalf. However, creating ads and running social media campaigns on different platforms comes with significant advertising costs.

#3 - Influencer marketing

Many users across different social media platforms have been posting content frequently on various niches, including entertainment, information, comedy or knowledge, and have built their follower base over time. Brands connect with such and ask them to incorporate the brand's products or services into their content, indirectly encouraging their audience to buy it. An influencer can be anyone from a YouTuber, a blogger, a video game streamer or an Instagram personality. In exchange, influencers charge a certain fee or compensation from brands.

#4 - Paid media marketing

This is a simple paid media concept where brands pay for the advertisements. This strategy is used to take inorganic marketing initiatives, and most often, a paid placement agency is involved in it. They help enhance click-through rates, conversion rates, and overall traffic to the brand’s website.

#5 - Social media management

A social media manager constantly tries to attract more followers and potential customers. It is a long-term strategy but is equally effective and can bring big returns to the brand over time.

The step-by-step blueprint for creating a social media strategy for any brand or business is as follows -

#1 - Define key objectives

Every social media strategy has a particular goal. You cannot select or pave a path for yourself without knowing where you want to go. So, define the objectives you aim to achieve for your business or brand and then proceed further.

#2 - Identify audience

Not every content is meant for everyone. While some people will like a particular content, other users will simply scroll through it without even looking at it. This is why it is essential to understand and know your audience and prepare strategies based on their likes and dislikes. Attracting the right audience for your brand will help you achieve your marketing goals easily.

#3 - Choose key messages

Your message drives your strategy. If your social media activities do not reflect the brand message clearly, the strategy won't work. Thus, carefully define the message you want to deliver to your brand's audience.

#4 - Check for key platforms

A social media strategy is never related to only one platform. There is YouTube, Instagram, Meta and X. For some brands, even WhatsApp is an effective platform to share their messages. Choose the right platform to focus on. If you are targeting multiple platforms simultaneously, ensure tweaking your content or message per the nature of the content that the platform supports.

#5 - Plan strategic activities

This is where you start planning activities that align with your social media strategy. What to write, how to post, what caption to use, which content type to choose, everything needs to be discussed and decided in this step.

#6 - Create suitable content

When your objectives are clear, the target audience is known, the platform is decided, and the activities are planned, comes when you would need to think about the content to be posted or published.

#7 - Select schedule

Most brands create a social media calendar to follow and schedule the posts and content to be posted throughout the period at regular intervals with precise timings. On occasions and festivals, special messages are put across the social media platform, including the discounts offered, if any. By scheduling the posts beforehand, brands can make sure the messages get posted at the scheduled time on relevant platforms.

#8 - Roll out

This step marks the beginning of you posting content across different platforms and channels using different online tools and extensions.

#9 - Start monitoring

Again, the content you post will have some action on it. Different metrics, such as likes, comments, shares, and other engagement metrics, inform you about the performance of the content on the social media platforms. This, in turn, helps you check if you are on the right track.

#10 - Conduct review and analysis

This is the last but crucial step. Posting content and monitoring doesn't mean it’s the end of the process. As a brand manager or social media marketer, you need to constantly manage the content, review your strategy and make the necessary adjustments wherever and whenever necessary.

Social media marketing has a wide scope; hence, there are many ways to track and analyze performances. For instance, every social media platform has built-in analytics that can help you understand the engagement rate of every single social media post or activity performed on it. For example, Instagram offers crucial key metrics to every user that they can easily check and understand to make better decisions and improve their marketing strategies.

On the other hand, there are numerous third-party apps, websites, online tools, plugins, and extensions that are available on the internet for both free and paid versions that businesses can install or place to generate analytics that marketing agencies can use to comprehend how exactly the social media marketing strategy is performing. By using social media analytics, brands can generate comparative analysis and work on their operational efficiencies.

The importance of social media strategy for any brand or budding business on the internet lies in the fact that -

• It helps build a solid social media profile and enhance the digital presence of the brand or business.
• The strategy is widely used to achieve different business objectives and marketing goals.
• It increases brand awareness and engagement.
• It helps generate authentic leads that can be converted into sales.
• The strategy assists in promoting brand trust, goodwill, market reputation, and performance measurement.
• It drives revenue and helps customers connect with the brand through different platforms.

It is crucial to have a social media marketing plan for your brand, given the efforts that your competitors are putting in to ensure they have stronger visibility online. In such a scenario, the traditional marketing methods seem to lag, making it a better choice to switch to contemporary marketing techniques. So, create your business’s stronger online and digital presence through social media platforms and see how it works wonders for you.