There’s no doubt about it social media should be a vital component of your overall marketing efforts. These are 11 super tips to building a customer winning social media marketing plan.

With about 4 billion people on social media, social media marketing is one of the most crucial channels for businesses to get quality traffic, customer engagement and eventually driving sales. It is one of the best ways to attract new customers.

Online marketing is one of the best ways to attract new customers, so make sure you invest accordingly in it. 🙌#smallbusiness #smallbusinessmarketing #SocialMediaAutomation #onlinepresence pic.twitter.com/yI2Tushdn5

— Get Online Australia (@GetOnlineAus) November 28, 2020

As Amy Jo Martin, an American, speaker, author, entrepreneur, and founder of Digital Royalty, stated, "Social media is the ultimate equalizer. It gives a voice and a platform to anyone willing to engage."

Brands, organizations, and institutions use social media platforms every single day to connect with their audiences, raise awareness, and drive leads and business. With an engaged following on one or more of the major social networks, brands can effectively spread the word about campaigns, new initiatives, and new products and services. However, simply having 1,000 Facebook fans or 200 Twitter followers is not the best indicator of social media success.

It’s possible to have thousands of followers who never read your posts or click on your links. The key is to build a thriving online community of your ideal fans, the ones who'll actively engage with your content, share it with their networks, and ultimately, become paying customers.

Social media has changed the way businesses market themselves online. It has forever altered how they interact, respond and meet customer needs. If you are in business, whether you are a large or small company, social networking is your online connection to customers and potential clients. Social media marketing offers visibility unlike any other medium. Thus, it is very important.

Looking to grow your social media audience? Here a 11 key tips to help you build a customer-winning social media marketing plan.

11 Tips to Create a Winning Social Media Marketing Strategy

Social media marketing is a dynamic field to win. Here are 11 tips to create a winning social media marketing strategy:

1. Define Meaningful Social Marketing Goals

First things first, you need to figure out what you want out of social media at large. Because coming up with a social media marketing plan means having an end-game in mind.

Whether that means more dollars and cents from your existing social presence or amping up your reach with new followers is totally up to you.

What matters is that you set realistic social media goals. We recommend tackling smaller objectives that allow you to scale your social efforts in a way that’s both reasonable and affordable.

2. Learn about Your Target Audience

Connecting and engaging with your audience is crucial in today’s social media marketing if you want to turn a profit.

But, in order to do that, you need to understand your audience – inside and out. You should be able to pinpoint their needs, wants, and desires -if you have a hope of creating a successful social media marketing strategy.

How can you better understand your audience?

• Survey your audience to better grasp their pain points
• Look carefully at their demographics
• Take part in conversations on forums filled with your target audience
• Respond to comments on your blog, and comment on other blogs with the same target audience
• Reply to all comments or questions on your social media channels
• Collect feedback (using one of the many user feedback tools available)

Once you get a feel for who your target audience is, you’re better equipped to help them. They want to deal with businesses who care – not just a faceless brand.

Which makes this a vital step in creating any social media marketing strategy.

3. Select Your Social Media Platforms Wisely

It is not necessary to be available on all the social media platforms, but what matters is to create an impact on a few that you are present on.

It is not the quantity that matters, it’s the quality that counts! Putting out substandard content will only make things worse for you.

Instead, research and plan your social media marketing presence that aligns with your goals and appeals to your target audience. Focus on the platforms that are preferred by your targeted demographic.

4. Establish Your Most Important Metrics

No matter what you’re selling, your social media marketing strategy should be data-driven. That means focusing on the social media metrics that matter.

Metrics marketers should keep an eye on

What metrics are we talking about, though? Check out the breakdown below:

• Reach:- Post reach is the number of unique users who saw your post. How far is your content spreading across social? Is it actually reaching users’ feeds? In the face of ever-changing organic algorithms, tracking reach is arguably more important than ever.

• Clicks:- This is the number of clicks on your content, company name or logo. Link clicks are critical toward understanding how users move through your marketing funnel. Tracking clicks per campaign is essential to understand what drives curiosity or encourages people to buy.

• Engagement:- The total number of social interactions divided by the number of impressions. For engagement, it’s about seeing who interacted and if it was a good ratio out of your total reach. This sheds light on how well your audience perceives you and their willingness to interact.

• Hashtag performance:- What were your most used hashtags on your own side? Which hashtags were most associated with your brand? Or what hashtags created the most engagement? Having these answers can help shape the focus of your content going forward.

• Organic and paid likes:- Beyond a standard Like count, these interactions are attributed to paid or organic content. For channels like Facebook, organic engagement is much harder to gain traction, which is why many brands turn to Facebook Ads. However, earning organic likes on Instagram isn’t quite as difficult. Knowing these differences can help you budget both your ad spend and the time you invest in different formats.

• Sentiment:- This is the measurement of how users reacted to your content, brand or hashtag. Did customers find your recent campaign offensive? What type of sentiment are people associating with your campaign hashtag? It’s always better to dig deeper and find out how people are talking about your brand.

An effective social media marketing strategy is rooted in numbers. That said, those numbers need to be put into a context that circles back around to your original goals.

5. Analyze Your Competition

Before you start creating content, you should have a good idea of what your competitors are up to. You can gain useful insights from a fairly simple review of competitors’ social presence.

Looking at your competition’s social channels will directly inform your own social media promotion strategy. The goal here isn’t to copycat or steal your competitors’ ideas. Instead, it’s to determine what’s working for them and what conclusions you can draw to adapt your own campaigns accordingly.

The simplest way to find competitors is through a simple Google search. Look up your most valuable keywords, phrases and industry terms to see who shows up.

6. Let The Tools Empower Your Strategy

The tools you choose will determine the strength of your entire social media marketing strategy. Think of it like building a home. If you began by putting up drywall or installing a deck, it would fall to the ground.

You need to lay down a steady foundation first. The same goes for your social media marketing strategy. Finding the right tools will ensure your strategy runs effortlessly.

You’ll need to decide which social media management software you’ll be using to schedule your content. Weigh up your options – every business has different needs and requirements.

7. Create Engaging Content

Your social media marketing strategy is obviously centered around content. At this point, you should have a pretty good idea of what to publish based on your goal and brand identity. Similarly, you probably feel confident in which networks to cover.

You can also use the art of story telling. It’s the stories that sell, not the product! We, humans, connect to stories, it is the emotional attachment that your brand builds with their audience. They inspire ideas and encourage interaction.

8. Prioritise Timeliness

Post at the best times to engage. You might see some recommending times to post late in the evening, for example. But if your brand isn’t there to communicate, what’s the point of posting at the “preferred” time? Instead, try to ensure your social media or community managers are available and ready to answer any product questions or concerns when you tweet or post. It’s smart to learn the best times to post on social media. However, it’s just as critical to engage after posting.

Respond to your customer questions and shout-outs ASAP. Not only do customers expect speedier responses from brands but also meaningful conversations on a regular basis. Your brand can’t forget these core elements of networking. It takes effort to ensure conversations or engagement opportunities aren’t left unattended.

Through social media, you gain respect as a brand by just being present and talking to your audience. That’s why social customer care is so important to brands wanting to increase audience awareness. It’s all about engagement. Through the right social media monitoring tools, you can find instances across all your channels to interact, respond and gauge customers around-the-clock.

As social algorithms go through continuous updates, organic content has an increasingly tough time reaching the majority of your audience. The last thing you want to do is ignore those who do engage and lose out on sending more down your marketing funnel.

9. Assess Your Results and Optimize

However, it’s important that you’re able to adapt your strategy as you progress throughout the year. Without continuously analyzing your efforts, you’ll never know how one campaign did over another. Having a bird’s eye view of your social media activity helps put things into perspective. This means looking at your top-performing content and fine-tuning your campaigns accordingly.

There’s no denying that a lot of social media is a matter of trial-and-error. Monitoring the metrics behind your campaigns in real-time allows you to make small tweaks to your social media marketing strategy rather than sweeping, time-consuming changes.

This dynamic approach to marketing makes perfect sense in a day and age where social media is constantly evolving. You can be reactive in the short term to get the most out of your running campaigns, and then proactively use these takeaways to inform your next major strategy.

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10. Humanize Your Brand

As much as all the digital innovations have made it easier to communicate, it is the emotion that we miss out on. By the term ‘humanize your brand’ we mean, go beyond the glass tops of these digital screens. Show your audience what goes in your office, introduce them to your employees, show the humans behind your brand. This should an integral part of your social media marketing strategy.

Remember that brand stories are not ads and sales pitches, they help the audience connect to your brand. Your stories tell them what you stand for, they display your culture as well as your values. For instance, share your plans for Friday, share the fun team building activities you have, let employees take over the social media for once and connect to the audience.

11. Embrace Your Mistakes

We are all humans, and we make mistakes. This is especially essential to accept in the fast-growing world of social media. Instead of being ignorant of your mistakes, accept and apologize for the same. Work on them and tell your customers about it. They’ll love you hear that you worked on your mistakes to provide them with better services. This should be key in your social media marketing strategy.

If you’ve made a grammar mistake or missed a comma, don’t delete the post. Probably, people liked your post, and they will notice your continuous re-posting.

Concerned about bigger mistakes? You should immediately respond apologetically, and publish a post from your social media accounts telling how you’ve handled the error and customers will understand it.

Bottom Line

Social media is increasing in importance for sales, customer support and brand image. You need a solid social media marketing strategy to stay ahead of the competition and forge stronger links with target audiences on the platforms they prefer to use.

Social media marketing can be hard work. But the benefits are difficult to ignore. If you don’t take it seriously, you’ll undoubtedly miss out on leads, customers, online visibility, and sales. Use these social media marketing tips to fine-tune your strategy until you’ve created one that wins.

Just remember, social networks are made for conversing with others. If you don’t make your audience a top priority – you won’t see results. An effective social media marketing strategy is an essential part of your overall marketing plan and, often, using unconventional ways to interact with your audience is what will allow you to improve your outreach.

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