How do you craft a social media marketing strategy?

A question which is often asked! The question usually comes from a client’s awareness of the benefits of using social media to market their business but not being quite sure how to measure the value when they have specific projects in mind.

So, where do you start? At Blue Lizard Marketing, we work with customers to define their company goals first. Together we set you social media goals to align with your company objectives, just as you would with other marketing activities you have planned. I work with a number of social media and content creation guru's who can form your social media team, so we work together to develop the best strategy for you. We think about the whole company and how working with the various social media platforms will benefit you. We evaluate audiences, potential customers and methods of promotion available, along with the content required, whether that is written, a batch of new images or videos.

Goals tend to vary per client and can be fairly wide or very specific. If you are in a start-up business, you may still be at the stage where you are looking to build audiences and awareness. At little further down the line, you could be looking to reach very specific goals, such as launching a new product, increasing customers in particular sectors or expanding into a new market altogether.

Once defined, the next step is to break your goals into defined actions which are planned to help you reach the targets you have set. If we take the example of a client wanting to launch a new product, we would look at running social media campaigns to promote the fact that the product is soon to be available, promote its key benefits and features to customers, raise awareness by developing its own hashtag, connect with ‘influencers’ and drive engagement by offering initial incentives.

Finally, we create a timetable with priorities and responsibilities clearly outlined – and off we go! We do build in checks and we do tweak and revise as we go. Social media marketing is probably the most flexible marketing option for small businesses as you have the ability to switch promotions on or off instantly as you evaluate their successes, or reach potential customers directly, but be prepared to put some time into your content and evaluation.

Whether your business is new or you are looking at new platforms, you should still define you goals so you can use social media marketing to directly impact your aims.

Here’s how social media strategy can benefit your business:

• Enhanced brand recognition through increased awareness

• Increased brand loyalty

• Increase in inbound traffic

• Increased brand visibility

Goals for social media output are likely to be:

Raised brand awareness through social media

Raising your brand recognition or awareness is all spreading the word to prospective customers, which means sharing genuine and engaging content on social networking platforms which highlight and promote your brand’s personality and ideals.

Think about brand loyalty too

Part of increasing brand awareness includes a little thinking forward and making sure your customers understand and trust your offering and performance. Customers will only buy from you if they trust your brand. Furthermore as we regularly see, social media makes it simpler for customers to express what they think – good or negative — about a business which makes effective reputation management crucial.

Possible KPIs and measurements:

Awareness

• The total amount of social media followers

• How many individuals engage with your material regularly

• The total number of shares, mentions, and retweets

Loyalty

• An increase in mentions: how frequently does your brand appear in social media posts?

• Hashtags: what are consumers saying about your brand using pertinent hashtags connected to your goods or services?

• Viewpoint: What is the general user sentiment regarding your brand?

Generate leads and sales through social media

Social media marketing can be one of your avenues to generate revenue. Although lead generation is often part of the bigger sales funnel process, social media as a platform provides an excellent approach to collecting basic lead information.

Possible KPIs and measurements:

• Gaining customers’ contact information, such as email addresses

• Content asset downloads through your social media platforms - white papers, info sheets, etc

• Audience participation in social media activities like surveys and contests

Increase community engagement

As social media is all about engagement, it can benefit to play with new approaches to capture the attention of your current followers.

User engagement with your social postings is measured by the actions taken on the posts you share, such as comments, likes, and shares. This engagement provides insight into how successful your social media marketing is performing in boosting user interest.

Possible KPIs and metrics:

• Post engagement rate: the number of platform users that interact with a post, whether it is through a like, or ideally a comment.

• Share rate: the proportion of users that opt to share your content

• Time-based engagement: how many users share your content throughout a specific time scale.

Increased brand visibility

If one of your main goals is to generate leads or visitors to your website, social media can help by putting your brand in front of your customers eyes consistently.

Increasing traffic to your website from social media platforms may support your lead generation and sales conversion activities

Possible KPIs and measurements:

• The number of visitors who came from your social networking platforms

• Social media traffic as a percentage of total traffic

If you need a little help with your social media strategy or your overall marketing plans, get in touch and we can set you off on the right track.