There are lots of spinning plates to consider when building a social media strategy. Other than ensuring that your post scheduling doesn’t look too automated, you should also check if the content you’re publishing is suitable for the platforms you have.
From there, different questions arise. Is the strategy you built provides the results you need? Are you engaging the target audience well? What is the best time to post on Instagram and Facebook? Are your report analytics easy to understand?
These are just some of the most common social media-related questions that you might have. To answer them, you need to build a concrete social media plan. And in this article, Philip and Henry Media will do their best to help you figure out how to create it. Read on.
Ways to Build a Results-Driven Social Media Strategy
Whether you want to level up as a social media marketer or simply grow your brand even further, having a results-driven plan is important.
Here are some tips that can help you get started:
1. Define your goals
Your goals will determine whether your social media strategy is effective or not. It will also define how much time and energy is needed to achieve success. That’s why creating realistic goals must be your first step.
Star by tackling small objectives. This will enable you to scale your efforts in a way that is both affordable and reasonable. Here are the common goals that brands pursue when promoting on social media:
- Increasing brand awareness
- Generating more leads and sales
- Growing your audience and customers
- Boosting engagement rate
- Driving website traffic
Any combination of these goals great. It will also help you better understand which platforms to use and which ones to remove from your strategy. If you’re in doubt, just keep your plan simple instead of complicating it with too many goals – it might distract you in the long run.
2. Find your target audience
Once you’ve figured out your objectives, you should find your target audience next. Knowing who you need to target will help you determine what types of content to post and where you should publish them.
For example, if you’re a travel lifestyle brand, your prospects surely love to read about travel guides and tips. You can share such content on channels like Facebook and Instagram to engage them.
Building marketing personas is one way to figure out who you must attract. First, go through your followers, past clients, or competitors. Then, look for their similarities in age, salary, location, gender, purchasing behavior, and interests. List them down and share everything with the team. You can use it on your current strategy or for future reference.
3. Establish your metrics
Your social media strategy should be filled with data. In other words, you must focus on all the metrics that matter for your business. Dig into data that aligns to your objectives, instead of concentrating on vanity metrics.
Here are some of the most important metrics to take note of:
- Reach
- Clicks
- Organic and paid likes
- Engagement
- Sentiment
- Hashtag performance
Always remember, an effective marketing plan depends in numbers. Hence, those numbers should be put into a context that directly aligns to your social media objectives.
4. Plan your content
The success of your social media marketing strategy hinges on your content. That’s why you need to also plan your content. At this point, you might already have an idea of what’s the best content to publish based on your brand identity, target audience, and goals. So, this step will be easier for you.
To help you further, here are some tips:
- Stick to content themes. This will enable you to become more consistent on what to post across social.
- Keep up with the trends. Some of the most popular content types today include Stories and short-from videos.
- Publish posts that show your human side. Make sure that your target audience relates to your content.
5. Assess the results
It is important to have continuous effort in analyzing results. If you don’t assess the performance of your content often, you won’t be able to determine how one campaign did over another. Hence, you must track all your social media activities, look at your top-performing content, and adjust your campaigns accordingly.
Social media is a matter of trial and error. So, assessing the metrics behind your campaigns continuously will allow you to make small tweaks to your strategy instead of time-consuming changes.
Final Thoughts
Now that you know the different steps on how to build a results-driven social media strategy, it will be easier for you to get started. Check our other blogs today – you might find something that can help you reach social media success.
