The social media marketing services is not to be taken lightly: this ultra-powerful digital marketing channel can propel your business to success and increase your visibility exponentially.

However, it is also a very complex area that requires a lot of planning, analysis, creativity, and coordination. If you want to achieve your growth goals on social media, you MUST have a plan of action.

This plan is your social media strategy: it is a blueprint for everything to do with community management, content creation, and advertising design on your social networks.

In short: your social media strategy is the key to coordinating and maximizing your social media marketing efforts.

Method to develop an excellent social media strategy?

Here’s how to design your social media strategy in 6 steps:

Identify your goals
Identify your target audiences
Select the right platforms
Master algorithms
Adopt the right content strategy
Monitor and improve your performance

1. Identify your goals

Social media is a promotional channel and not an end in itself. The social media strategy is part of a much broader context: your web marketing strategy.

To be effective, your strategic social media plan must be aligned with your small and long-term growth goals for your business.

That’s why the first step in any social media strategy is figuring out what you hope to get out of your efforts. see how union complex do social media marketing for their site.

What are your strategic goals?

Would you like to market your business to people who have never heard of it? Or inspire your current customers to do business with you again?

When it comes to web marketing, your prospective customers can be captured at the different stages of their purchasing process:

Awareness / Exploration
Interest / Consideration
Conversion
Loyalty

Thus, your strategic objectives will largely depend on the stage at which you want to reach your prospects:

How to use social media to achieve these goals?

Whatever stage of the sales process you want to target, you will be able to use your social media strategy to achieve your goals:

Develop your brand awareness: Social media advertising allows you to target the individuals most likely to be interested in your business to present your brand to them.
Convince your prospects: the strategic use of hashtags on social media and the optimization of your video SEO on youtube allow you to capture your opportunities when they are actively looking for your products and services.
Generate sales: the integration of a Facebook store or Instagram Shopping allows you to convert your subscribers into customers without even having to leave the platform.
Retain your customers: Thanks to social networks, you can continue to engage with your customers after their purchase and even target them with remarketing campaigns on Facebook Ads

In short: once your objectives have been defined, you will be able to identify the actions to be taken to achieve them and thus maximize your efforts.

What are your performance indicators?

A goal will never be attainable if it is not quantifiable or measurable. Here are some examples of KPIs that you can define in your social media strategy to guide its execution:

Performance indicators for your organic efforts:

Size of your community
Scope of your publications
Commitment
Clicks
Messages / Calls

Performance indicators for your paid advertising:

Click rate
Conversion rate
Cost per engagement (likes, comments, reactions, shares, etc.)
Cost per click
Cost per call
etc.

2. Identify your target audiences

Does your business sell to individuals (B2C) or businesses (B2B)? Are your products or services designed for individuals residing in a specific geographic area?

To answer these questions and more, while always keeping your target audience in mind, we strongly suggest that you define a persona in your social media strategy.

What is a persona?

This is the profile of your typical client and their demographic, psychological, and behavioral characteristics. When you portray your persona, you can include:

His age
His gender
His job
Where he/she lives
His interests
His lifestyle
Her personality
Etc.

This type of description gives you a much more precise idea of the needs and expectations of your prospective customers.

3. Select the right platforms

Now that your persona is identified, you need to determine the best way to reach it. What social media platforms do they use?

You wouldn’t use Instagram, a photo-sharing platform, to sell to the blind, or Snapchat to sell to the elderly. In short: make sure you target your potential customers where they are.

Here is some general information to help you choose your platform, among the seven most popular social networks:

Who uses Facebook?

Number of users: 2 billion
Suitable for B2B and B2C
Demographic characteristics:

56% men / 44% women

65% of users are over 35

Popular in urban AND rural environments

Who uses Youtube?

Number of users: 1.5 billion
Suitable for B2B and B2C
Demographic characteristics:

62% of users are men

61% are between 16-34 years old

Who uses Instagram?

Number of users: 800 million
More suited to B2C
Demographic characteristics:

More popular with women: 38% of women use Instagram, compared to 26% of men.

Popular among 15-30-year-olds

Much more popular with users living in urban areas

Who Uses Twitter?

Number of users: 350 million
Suitable for B2C and B2B
Demographic characteristics:

50-50 Men / Women

Strong press component and influencers/bloggers

Who uses Snapchat?

Number of users: 180 million
Much more suited to B2C
Demographic characteristics:

70% of users are women

70% of users are under 34

Who uses Linkedin?

Number of users: 106 million
Much more suited to B2B
Demographic characteristics:

31% of men and 27% of women use Linkedin

Heavy use of high-income earners

Who uses Pinterest?

Number of users: 100 million
Suitable for B2C and B2B
Demographic characteristics:

70% of users are women

4. Master algorithms

Once your platforms have been identified and your social media pages created and optimized (using our articles on Facebook Company, Instagram Company, and Linkedin Company ), it’s time to feed them!

Before embarking on the production, optimization, and distribution of your content, you must first master your platforms … and more precisely: their algorithms.

These are mathematical formulas that are used each time a post is created to determine if it is worth highlighting on users’ news feeds.

You will understand that mastering the operation of these algorithms is a decisive factor in your ability to have good results. Although not all algorithms are the same, their logic is very similar. For example, here are the criteria on which Edge Rank, Facebook’s algorithm, is based to distribute your organic publications:

Affinity: the propensity of users to engage with the content of your page in the past
Performance: the number of likes, reactions, comments, shares of the post
The type of content: text, image, video …
Recency: the freshness of the content according to its publication date

5. Adopt the right content strategy

Once the algorithm is well understood, you are ready to strategically feed your pages. To do this, you will have to work on three levels: the creation of quality content, the strategic and practical distribution of this content, and, finally, the optimization of the conversations it generates.