Creating your social media marketing strategy for your online business helps you stand out from competitors in a crowded marketplace. Social media marketing has become one of the most popular marketing channels for businesses of all sizes to reach prospects and customers.

Whether you plan to build your brand through social media or grow as a social media marketer, developing a social media marketing strategy is essential. According to one report, in 2021, more than 4.26 billion people were using social media worldwide, a number that is expected to grow to nearly six billion by 2027.

But the key to successful social media marketing is to have a strategy. You need to know your goals, your target audience, and their needs, but also understand how each social media platform works and how people leverage them to get results on social media.

In this article, you’ll see how to build a seven-step social media marketing strategy for your online business. 

But first, let’s start by knowing what social media marketing is. 

What Is Social Media Marketing?

Social media marketing uses popular social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Etc. to sell or promote a brand, product, or service. Social media offers excellent opportunities to reach your target audience and customers.

Social media marketing covers every marketing strategy that uses social media platforms for advertising and selling products, building customer relationships, and creating brand awareness. You can run social media campaigns to build your brand, increase brand awareness, generate more sales and drive traffic to your website.

Why is Social Media Marketing Important to Your Business?

Because of its virtually unparalleled ability to reach customers organically, social media marketing makes it an essential element for marketers. People spend much time on social media, and that time continues to grow.  That means you have a vast potential audience. 

According to the latest social media statistics, a typical user spends an average of two hours daily on social media. With such widespread use and versatility, social media is one of the most effective free channels to market your business today.  Here are some of the specific benefits of social media marketing:

– Build your brand awareness:

Since so many people interact with social media, you’ll get to put your products in front of a broad audience, and improving brand awareness means better results for all your other campaigns.

– Generate traffic :

Social media is a prime channel to drive traffic to your website through the link in your profile, links in your blog posts, and ads, where you can convert visitors into customers.

– Increase sales:

Above all, social media marketing will help you increase your sales, which can happen quite quickly. One survey found that over 50% of businesses that used social media marketing for two years reported increased sales.

– Develop relationships:

Social media is also great for nurturing relationships with customers. The platforms open up direct and indirect lines of communication with your followers, allowing you to network, gather feedback, hold discussions and reach out to people directly. The larger and more engaged your audience is on social media networks, the easier it will be to achieve your marketing goals.

– Humanize your business: 

Social media allows you to make your business an engaged participant in your marketplace. Your profile, posts, and social media interactions create an accessible persona that your audience can relate to, engage with, and trust.

What is a Social Media Marketing Strategy?

A social media marketing strategy is a document that describes your measurable social media goals, the tactics you will use to reach them, and the metrics you will track to measure your success. Your social media marketing strategy should also include a list of all your existing and planned social media accounts and goals specific to each active platform. 

How to Create a Social Media Marketing Strategy in 7 Steps for Your Online Business?

 The steps detailed below will help you create your social media marketing strategy for your online business.

Step 1: Choose Business Social Media Marketing Goals

The first step in creating your winning social media marketing strategy is to define your objectives and goals. Whether you want to build a larger audience or a more active community, taking the time to define your social goals is the first step to achieving them. Without goals, you have no way to measure success and return on investment (ROI).

The key is to set measurable, achievable, relevant, time-bound goals that align with your overall marketing objectives. Some examples of goals that companies of all shapes and sizes can pursue are: 

• Increase brand awareness. 

Building awareness of your brand is the ultimate goal. To create authentic and lasting brand awareness, avoid posting only promotional messages. Instead, focus on content that highlights your personality and values.

• Generate leads and sales. 

In this case, email subscriptions and sign-ups should make sense to track. Grow your brand’s audience. Attracting new followers means finding ways to introduce your brand to people who haven’t heard of it yet. Building your audience also means discovering the most important conversations around your business and industry.  It would help you target specific keywords, phrases, or hashtags to achieve this goal.

• Increase customer loyalty 

It means experimenting with messaging and content.  Even something as simple as asking a question can increase your engagement rate. 

• Drive traffic to your site. 

If your objective is to drive leads or traffic to your website, social media can help you, whether it’s through promotional posts or social ads.  Once you’ve developed marketing goals that align with your business objectives, it’s time to take the next step in your social media marketing strategy.

Step 2: Create Audience Personas

Knowing who your audience is and what they want to see on social media is essential. When it comes to creating audience personas, you need to know the following to understand when and what type of content you can provide them:

– age

– location

– why they are interested in your content 

– How they consume content 

– their education and professional background 

– their industry 

– their professional role or title

– the tools they use to accomplish specific tasks 

– the social network they participate in

– average income

– Etc.

Once you have identified the above points, you need to organize the information you have gathered about the persona properly. This way, you will know who your audience is and how to engage them with your content on social media so that they like, comment, and share, which will result in more conversions.

With the right tool, marketers can quickly research their audience.  In addition to current social media demographics, many other valuable audience data sources supplement your social media information, such as Google Analytics and your CRM. 

This data will ultimately influence everything from your marketing message to how you approach customer service or social commerce.

Step 3. Choose the Right Social Media Network

The next step in your social media marketing strategy is to determine your social media platforms for sharing your content. The best social media marketing platforms for businesses are Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, TikTok, and Snapchat. 

You can always start with one and add more as you get the hang of them. Not every social media site is suitable for every business. Each social media platform requires different approaches, lends itself well to certain types of content, and caters to a specific demographic. 

Choose platforms based on your target audience and popularity in your industry. You can also have a strategy for each of your social media channels that all lead to your overall social media marketing strategy. The choice of the platform comes down to the content formats and the audience you want to reach.

Let’s take a closer look at the characteristics of each of these social media networks.

Facebook 

Facebook is currently the largest social media network, with over 2 billion users, which makes it an extremely effective platform for social media marketing. Facebook allows you to create custom and like-minded audiences to precisely target your demographic.

Facebook is one of the best platforms for video, mainly due to its Facebook Live feature that allows you to easily broadcast live video content for product demos, interviews, Q&A sessions, and more.

The free Facebook Business Suite tool offers many options for promoting business services. You can select a goal, such as increasing traffic to your website or getting more conversions, and Facebook offers many options for creating your target audience. 

Creating a Facebook Group for your brand is a great way to share exclusive content and connect with your audience personally.  You can make your group public if you want to get your brand out there or close to give members a feeling of exclusivity.

Organic reach on Facebook tends to be limited, so if you want to generate leads or find new audiences, Facebook advertising is your best option. You can choose from many ad formats and optimize each ad for traffic, leads, engagement, purchase goals, Etc. 

Instagram 

According to a Statista report, Instagram in December 2021, reached a new milestone with 2 billion active users worldwide, making it one of the largest social media sites in the world. Instagram focuses primarily on photos and videos and has a high engagement rate. 

Currently, Instagram supports videos between 3 and 60 seconds in length. You can also use Instagram stories with GIFs & filters to keep your audience engaged.  But Instagram Stories also supports videos, maximum of 15 seconds per Story clip. If your video is longer than 15 seconds, it will be divided into several 15-second fragments.

With IGTV, you can create long-form videos of up to an hour in length. Instagram also offers “Reel”, an exciting feature you can use to increase engagement and reach more audiences.  A solid Instagram marketing strategy is essential to your overall social media marketing success. 

Create your Instagram bio, then use it for social shopping, company culture, influencer marketing, or user-generated content. You can always use hashtags to gain new followers. The key is using niche-specific hashtags (up to 30 per post) to attract an audience. Instagram ads are great for reaching new audiences and spreading the word about products, events, announcements, and more.

Instagram ads, just like Facebook, are native, so you see them when you naturally scroll through your feed. One of the main reasons to consider Instagram ads is that you can place easy-to-click links directly into your ad, which is impossible in regular posts. So, your users can easily shop on Instagram and spend time interacting with your brand.

Thanks to its algorithm, Instagram is also the platform of choice for influencer marketing.  Once you feel you have built your audience, you can explore influencer marketing on Instagram. By partnering with influencers, you can increase social media engagement and bring your brand to new audiences. 

Read More: 

10 Steps to Successfully Promote Your Blog on Instagram

Twitter 

Twitter is a vast social network that currently has 330 million active users. It is based on short, text-based messages and emphasizes interactive communication, valuable information, and lively discussions. To succeed on Twitter, it is therefore essential to participate in conversations.

Not only does this increase your organic engagement, but it also maintains relationships with your followers, making you available for customer service and FAQs.

Among the best ways to increase engagement on Twitter is to use eye-catching images.  Twitter isn’t video-centric like YouTube or even Instagram, but you can post videos to promote your brand with calls to action at the end so people can go directly to your website.

The Pinned Tweet feature allows you to pin a Tweet to the top of your feed, so when people click on your profile, it’s often the first thing they see. By regularly editing your pinned Tweet, you can ensure that you’re constantly posting the latest and most relevant content. It’s also a good idea to insert an attention-grabbing image into your Pinned Tweet.

Pinterest 

Pinterest is a global visual platform with 433 million monthly active users (MAUs) that people turn to for an image. Pins are Pinterest’s standard ad format, images in a continuous vertical display appearing in the user’s feed. Having exciting and engaging images is essential for the success of your ads. 

Similarly, you can create a promoted carousel, which allows you to showcase multiple images instead of just one. Pinterest is a search engine crossed with a social media network.  Like Google, Pinterest relies on keywords and suggestions to sort its content.  So ensure you use relevant keywords in your text descriptions.

Building your audience on Pinterest can take time, but you may also want to invest in paid advertising on Pinterest.

YouTube

YouTube is a great social media platform for sharing long-form video content. You can post videos to your channel without sophisticated editing tools, share, comment, and like other videos, and follow other accounts you like. Tutorials, how-to’s, and explainer videos are some of the most-watched types of videos on YouTube.  You can also use YouTube ads to promote your product or service.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a social media platform for people and companies who want to connect for professional reasons and learn what’s new in their industry. You can use LinkedIn to network and express your company’s culture, find prospects, and share industry information. 

Creating content that helps people manage their work effectively and grow their business gives you more traction on the platform.  You can leverage LinkedIn Groups and paid advertising to promote your business. The LinkedIn company page offers you plenty of features that you can take advantage of.

Before choosing any of these social networks, consider what type of content should fit your brand. If your content is heavily video-oriented, go for YouTube and Facebook.  On the other hand, if you are more text or photo-oriented, choose LinkedIn, Instagram, or Twitter marketing.

Step 4. Conduct a Competitive Analysis

Your social media marketing strategy won’t meet your objectives until you have a good idea of what your competitors are doing. Conducting a competitive analysis allows you to understand who your competitors are and what works for them on social media and tailor them to your marketing efforts. Follow your competitors to get ideas that you can customize to your right strategy and identify gaps that you can fill.

Social listening is another way to keep tabs on your competitors. To get an overview of their performance, find out how many followers your competitors have, how often and at what time of day they post, what their relevant keywords are, what others are saying about them on their different social networks, what kind of content they post, Etc., You can also turn to third-party competitive analysis tools to dig deeper into your competitors’ numbers. 

Read More: 

Top 20 Competitive Analysis Tools You Need to Know

Step 5. Develop a Content Marketing Strategy

Your social media marketing strategy, as well as your overall marketing strategy, stands on your content. Content marketing refers to creating and distributing written, visual or other content aimed at your target persona, such as blog posts, white papers, eBooks, videos, webinars, podcasts, FAQs, case studies, and buying guides.

The right content strategy is essential to growth on social media. Keep your content aligned with the purpose of each network.  Generate types of content that feed your audience, attract new followers, and promote your products or services while being tailored to the network and the goal you have set for that network.

When it comes to trends to consider on social media, think about Stories that are particularly helpful to take your followers behind the scenes and make your social feed more personal, as well as posts that remind your followers of the humans behind your posts.

Step 6. Create a Social Media Content Calendar

Another critical element of your social media marketing strategy is creating a content calendar to keep you organized when preparing content. A content calendar for social media needs to determine the dates, type of content, and platforms to share content for maximum impact.

To understand what time of day and days of the week you want to post, consider the behaviors of your target audience. Doing so helps you find the most engagement-friendly times to post on social media.  Your social media content calendar needs to consider posting all of your activities on different social networks at the best times, whether blog posts or videos, images, link sharing, user-generated content sharing, and the time you spend interacting with the audience. 

Ensure you place different posts in your content calendar to maintain the right balance. According to Blog2Social, the best practice for scheduling your social media posts is to post up to 3 times a day on Twitter, 2 times a day on Facebook,1 time a day on Instagram, and 5 times a day on Pinterest.

Publishing automation tools like Blog2Social, Hootsuite, Buffer, and CoSchedule help you plan your social media content calendar.

Step 7: Measure the Performance of Your Social Media Campaigns

The final step in your social media marketing strategy is to analyze the performance of your campaigns to ensure that you realize your social media marketing goals. Most social media platforms offer incredibly detailed targeting capabilities to help you start tracking.

You can also use tools to track your performance and generate reports for analysis and correction. Google Analytics is a great tool to help you track your social media metrics and compare yourself to industry benchmarks. Ensure that you track meaningful performance metrics, focusing on social media metrics that are directly relevant to your goals rather than vanity metrics.

Metrics like followers and likes are vanity metrics. Because it’s hard to prove their real value, whereas tracking the right social media metrics like engagement, clicks and conversion, ROI, and media advertising costs can determine if your marketing efforts are on track or need attention. 

When you have different goals for different social media networks, measure the key performance indicators that correspond to the goals set for each platform separately.  That way, you can identify how well your brand is performing on each social media platform, which channels are most effective, and which types of posts have produced the best results. 

Tracking the metrics of your campaigns allows you to identify and then expand on what works or make small changes to your underperforming social media marketing strategy. 

Conclusion

Social media marketing is one of the most potent forms of marketing you can do nowadays. Social media has many advantages, such as direct access to your target audience and engaging with them daily. Creating a social media marketing strategy by setting achievable goals and addressing the above steps gives you a competitive edge.

Tracking your social media marketing efforts allows you to understand how to measure the effectiveness of your campaigns, what social media metrics you should follow, how to increase engagement on social media, and much more. Remember to constantly analyze and make changes to your social media marketing strategy to fit the evolution of social media and your new objectives.