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6 Steps to Build an Effective Social Media Marketing Strategy [Infographic]

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Do you know how to enhance your social media marketing performance using an ambitious yet achievable strategy?

6 Steps to Build an Effective Social Media Marketing Strategy

Actually, this is what the majority of marketers think they know. But the truth is many of them are not successful in marketing and usually get low ROI.

In fact, marketers and brands of all sizes and types don’t use social media to its full capacity.

They consider digital marketing to be posting several pics/clips and advertising their products.

This is what any common social media user can do. So what are the differences?

The greatest mistake they’re making is that they think social media is all about the number of followers.

They sometimes don’t care about the followers’ relevancy and the engagement rates they can bring to their accounts.

In other words, they ignore and avoid building a niche community to make their audience consider them as a leader in the community.

Many of them don’t know anything about “Brand Storytelling” on social media, and the only thing they want is to get more followers.

Many of them even try to acquire existing accounts to gain instant access to thousands of followers.

It is clear that building a niche community is not an easy task, and not all marketers can afford to do it.

A versatile and robust strategy is a must in this regard. Otherwise, you’ll repeat your previous mistakes without knowing the reason it isn’t working.

This is so important that many medium and large companies assign their marketing campaigns on social media to agencies.

How to Build Efficient Social Media Marketing Strategies

The most important thing these agencies do is to build efficient social media marketing strategies.

That would be especially useful during the COVID-19 pandemic when the staff’s physical presence is limited, and the threat of the coronavirus is still with us.

The time of social media usage per capita has globally increased, and this is a unique opportunity to build a social media marketing strategy.

If you can strengthen your brand identity through informative content and targeting organic audiences, you’ll have a brighter future in the aftermath of COVID-19.

Here is a step-by-step guide through which you can build your own company’s marketing strategy on social media.

1.   Analyze your social media performance

First, you have to analyze your current performance to know how well you’re generating leads.

One of the most beneficial aspects of using analytics tools is to recognize your strengths and weaknesses.

Google Analytics is also a great software in this regard.

You can also perform social media A/B testing to know if your ads are of interest to your audience.

2.   Define S.M.A.R.T goals

After analyzing your previous performance and knowing what has performed well and what hasn’t, you can define your next objectives.

They need to be specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and time-bound so that you can be sure you reach them.

You also need to define certain metrics to measure these objectives and optimize your activities.

3.   Know your target audience

Social media marketing is all about reaching out to the most probable customers and encouraging them to buy from you.

So you have to exactly recognize your potential customers to be able to speak with them like them.

Age, gender, location, job, and many other factors can significantly change people’s thinking and buying.

So you can’t have a single strategy for all social media users. Fortunately, there are several useful tools to find and reach out to a niche-relevant audience.

4.   Choose the right channels

When you know your audience characteristics, you can target them on social media platforms.

The question is which social network is the best one for your business.

Of course, top social platforms are being used by billions of people, and you have to consider using them.

But you need to be more specific as any social app has its own audience demographic, and you can’t use a single content strategy for all of them.

For example, Pinterest’s users in the U.S. are mainly women. But on the other hand, LinkedIn is being used by CEOs, job seekers, professionals, etc.

So you need to prioritize your marketing strategies based on these differences.

5.   Generate informative content and post them at the best time

Content is king! You must have heard this sentence thousands of times. But along with generating informative content, you need to put it in the eyes of as many niche audiences as possible.

Try to use social media scheduling tools to post your content at the best time to get maximum exposure.

6.   Constantly survey your industry

Even a strong marketing strategy can fail you if you don’t know the competition well.

If you constantly check out your competitors, you can predict whether  your strategy will be successful or not.

You have to track all their activities, including social channels they’re using, content style, followers, posting schedules, etc.

To understand these steps better, you can look at the infographic below.

Infographic about effective social media marketing strategy

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Tom Siani

Content Manager at Blogwaves
Tom Siani is the Content Manager at Blogwaves.com where he shares his years of experience related to social media marketing, brand marketing, blogging, and search visibility.
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Comments

  5. Really informative post Tom I already know some of the points you mention but truly some strategies I don’t know especially specific timing for posting on different social networks now I also keep in mind about timing of post thanks for sharing such a useful article everyone must follow these strategies to compete with their competitor’s
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  6. Hi Tom, Having goals is key for managing social media. Also, setting up the RIGHT expectations for clients is even more key today.

    Many think because social media is free it will be the end all and it’s not. One has to spend some money on social media ads and/or spend time and money getting influencers to help spread the word across social media.

    Social media has grown so much it’s not as easy as it once was years ago. Thanks for your tips!

    Reply

    • Hi Lisa,

      Great to see you here. Yes, I sure miss the early days on Twitter when any tweet would send 30-60 actual visitors to read and comment on our posts. That was when I had maybe 10,000 followers.

      Today, with well over 100,000 I’m lucky if a tweet gets 1-2 clicks. We definitely need to focus more on building community, reading and commenting on each other’s sites, etc.

      The challenge is with clients being ever more demanding and with scope creep and everything else going on in our lives (like ensuring we have plenty of food stored against the coming shortages and inflation), it is hard to make time to do it consistently.
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  10. You have write an amazing article which is very helpful for me. You have done a proper research and you have took all the point in your article. I has cleared my all questions. Thanks for your article.

    Reply

  14. Power of Social Media – “Social media is not a media. The key is to listen, engage, and build relationships.” Yes, that’s right!. Social media is the fastest-growing trend. In 2020, there are 3.81 billion people actively using social media in the world (Increase 9.2% from last year)

    Very nice comprehensive list, thank you for the efforts. Keep writing!!!
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  18. That is a great blog on Social Media. This is something I’d been thinking about but doing little about. I never know these tips which are you mention in your blog.
    Really thanks for sharing this kind of information.

    Thanks
    Sofia Smith

    Reply

  21. Thank you for this useful post. I have one additional point to make to everyone reading this.

    My experiment show that most consultancy clients starts from search engines not social medias. Now I instructed my team to post more elaborate content in our website and just a summary in social medias. By this we avoid giving too much useful content to social medias while our main source of leads is search engines.
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  22. Very informative article on SMM. It’s good to have a refresher guide to go over the fundamental aspects of creating a good social media marketing plan. Thanks for sharing!

    Reply

  26. Agree with the smart approach strategy. Very informative blog on Social Media Marketing. It is a fact that same mistake was done by me as mentioned above. Engagement is the key.Thanks for the blog.

    Reply

  31. What a fantastic post!
    I was looking for an idea to fix up to the problem then I went through this blog and to some extent, your ideas helped me out to boost the speed up.
    This information is quite helpful and simple for use even to someone with minimal know how. Thanks keep it up.
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  32. Thanks for suggesting us to use the SMART approach which will eventually be achievable.

    Like you have mentioned social media marketing is getting increasingly important and it is vital that we do not overlook this valuable channel or marketing.

    Still we need to be prudent but at the same time bold enough to deploy strategies to allow us to get the results that we want.
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