Social media is a basic marketing tactic for almost every company, which helps brands create awareness, share and interact with customers and prospects, and create important points of contact in the changing journey of the customer. The common question a few years ago, “why organization should use social networks?” Is now replaced by “how can business grow with social media marketing?”.

I am not here to scare your company in the world of social networks. Instead, we want to provide your marketing team with the successful steps you need to take towards an appropriate social media strategy so that your brand does not stay in the dust. In this Article, you will learn the five steps your company must follow to create an effective social media marketing strategy.

#1 Create Social Media Marketing Goals

Why You Need to Set Social Media Goals? Social media goals can help determine voice, content, and the channels you use. They can also help determine the time, money, and effort you spend on those channels. As a social media consultant, you will need goals and analysis to show your client that your work is creating the results you want. The most important aspect of any social media marketing strategy is to establish the objectives of S.M.A.R.T.

Use the S.M.A.R.T. goal framework

• Specific
• Measureable
• Achievable
• Realistic
• Timely

Specific– Is your goal well-defined? Your goals should be clear, simple and defined. By having clear, specific objectives and not open to exposition, you will save time and effort and approach your final destination. By having clear and specific objectives you will save time and effort and reach your final destination.

Measureable – The average person spends nearly two hours on social media every day, and therefore social media is one of the best places to grab consumers’ attention. Each social media activity should accomplish a measurable task to ensure you are making progress. How do you know how well it’s working?

Your social media goals should be measured by Potential metrics

• Followers count
• Reach of your social media posts
• Mentions, shares, and RTs

If you cannot measure what you hope to achieve, your goal is not specific enough and is probably not really contributing to your business. For example, you will measure the impact of Twitter on the conscience in a different way than it would measure the impact of Facebook, so this differentiation must be accounted for with the establishment of goals.

Achievable- Another way of putting this is “realistic.” Is it possible to achieve the goal you’ve set for yourself? Take an inventory of your basic knowledge, skills and resources to ensure that you can achieve your goals. You must be able to activate or protect social media resources to help you write and publish all this content to help you increase your company’s knowledge.

Realistic– Is this goal relevant to what your company is trying to achieve? Your social media goals should measure outcomes and not activities. For instance, you don’t want your goals to be to send out 15 tweets daily.

Timely– Every goal needs a time frame, whether it’s one year or several months.

These can be an excellent guideline for creating goals that work for your company because it is easy to understand, to act on, and to follow up with.

#2 Identifying Customer

How to Understand Your Customer Needs Through Social Media? To optimize your marketing efforts in social networks, it is important to know who your customers are and in what social networks they spend their time. Identify your target audience before you can search your audience, you must identify them. For example, the social media strategy used by an automobile company like Mercedes Benz, which caters mainly to middle aged people of middle to high incomes, will be very different from that of a sports company such as Adidas, which is based on younger people. By researching your competitor’s customer base, as well as your current clients, that list can be made even more specific until you finally have a target audience that can be served on social networks.

#3 Engage With Your Audience

Social network engagement is essentially like a long-term relationship. When we think about the participation of social networks, it is about how you use social networks to build a good experience with customers. The biggest difference between social media marketing and traditional marketing is that you can instantly interact and communicate with followers.

Social media engagement isn’t all about likes, comments and shares. Clicks are another form of engagement. Social media marketing is ineffective without engagement. To get your audience commenting, liking, sharing and clicking on your posts, you need to entertain them with good updates.

How do you feel when people comment on your posts on social networks?

Awesome, right?

A comment or a form of commitment is usually a sign that people love their social media content. And it is important to correspond and respond to these interactions.

Effective social media engagement means a happily ever after customer relations. The social media engagement tactics to improve and increase engagement with your followers, thereby strengthening your brand’s identity as well as growing the number of subscribers to your various social media profiles.

#4 Track, Analyze, Optimize

Any good marketer knows that this is the magic formula for optimizing social media marketing performance. If your campaign is successful, you are bound to have an increase in your following, reach and engagement. These will show any significant growth in awareness about your brand. Without analyzing your efforts, you will never know how one campaign did about another. However, you’ll get better insights if you go into your social media analytics and look at the graph for follower growth.

Real-time data analysis provides the opportunity to make informed decisions and to evaluate and adjust a social campaign to optimize your spending. Discover which channels are driving business results and which ones respond best to different content and campaigns, to make investments based on where you will generate the most conversions and revenues.

#5 Identify Key Success Metrics

After determining the objectives of your marketing strategy in social networks, you must identify the key indicators of success to measure their effectiveness. While each element has its own value, and the importance of each will be relative to your commercial campaign and your business, here are six key social media metrics to measure.
A few metrics to consider measuring are:

• Conversion Rate
• Time Spent on Website
• Reach
• Brand Mentions
• Sentiment
• Total Shares

All of these metrics will be not useful for your marketing plan in social networks; you must choose the metrics that are aligned with your overall social marketing goals. Monitoring your brand’s online performance is important, but keeping a close eye on your audience metrics is even more crucial. It’s the best way to create targeted, customized content to improve engagement with your audience.

Monitoring your brand’s online performance is important, but keeping a close eye on the metrics of your audience is even more crucial. These are the best ways to create customized and personalized content to improve engagement with your audience.

Social media is a valuable tool for establishing personal relationships with your audience, but it can also be a very useful factor in increasing your income, your reach and your overall ROI. Are you finding it difficult to formulate a social media marketing plan? Follow these steps, you create a strategy and start optimizing it as you continue to grow and learn more about your business and your audience will help you get ahead of your competitors.
By

I am Brown Hill, Content Marketer at AverickMedia a leading provider of business mailing lists and data services.