7 Ingenious Ways to Develop an Effective Social Media Marketing Strategy (A Hands-on Guide)

The only thing that mattered was your presence on the social media platforms which assured that you were doing more than your competitors.

Moving down to today things have changed drastically.

The entire equation has changed with the emergence of Millennials.

It has been researched and found that approximately 30% Millennials engage with a brand on social media networks at least once on a monthly basis.

This goes to show that today merely being present on social media networks is not enough.

Companies have to totally be dedicated to their social media marketing strategies and concentrate on engaging with the customers.

Wait…

If you are not able to do this, chances are your customer will move to your competitors which can have a drastic effect on your bottom line.

You are about to see in the below sections the different ways to develop an effective social media marketing for generating quality leads in limited time span and increase your business by manifolds.

You just need to devote some time to learn these ways given below to develop an effective social media marketing strategy and you are set to rise in your business.

Set practical social media marketing goals that can be achieved in a specified time frame

The very first step while developing an effective social media marketing strategy is to understand what you want to achieve from social media marketing.

Always remember that social media planning requires lots of hard work and dedication. It is not a one day job.

Moreover, you will have to set those goals that are attainable.

If you set a goal of achieving one million Facebook followers by the end of 2018 it would not be practical. This way you will stick to your original plan and continue to take on new challenges as you move to the next set of targets.

Always opt for social media networks that meet your brand’s objective. Remember, simplicity is the key. Also, document your social media marketing goals. This will give you the impetus to achieve them sooner.

If you do not set your social marketing goals yet or are finding it difficult to set social media marketing goals we will help you out.

Here is how.
Some of the social media marketing goals that you can consider include:

Increasing brand awareness by posting meaningful content and depicting a strong brand personality through social media channels.
Using social media channels effectively to reach the target audience quickly through specific keywords and hashtags.
Promoting your brand on social media channels by giving rewards to those who regularly comment on your social media posts.
Creating a loyal fan base to build a positive brand persona on social media platforms.

In the coming sections, you will get to learn about the different ways to evaluate a social media marketing campaign, do a competitor analysis and engage your target audience for a longer period of time. Are you ready? Let us dive into the details.

Understand your target audience to dish out the things that they love to see on social media networks

Once you have determined the social media marketing goals the next step is to understand your target audience in a better way.

The best way to do that: Research on the facts like who buys your product, what income levels determine the returning customers and which age group is the toughest to sell.

You need to understand the demographics of your target audience on different social media platforms. Then search for those social media networks that correlate with your overall social media marketing goal.

For example; Did you know?

Facebook is used by 88% of the Australian population between the age group of 18 to 29. With such statistics, you can determine the best social media platform to achieve your social media marketing goal.

Pursue your most important metrics to evaluate the engagement level of the target audience

It is great to get relevant information about your target audience.

Here’s the truth.

If you are not able to evaluate the follower count and likes the entire purpose of developing an effective social media marketing strategy will go in vain.

Some of the other important metrics that will help you evaluate the engagement level of your target audience include:

Grow your organic traffic by calculating the reach of your social media marketing strategy

This metric will help you to know about the number of unique users who saw your post.

The end result?

It will help you to find the amount of traction generated by each post and whether it is actually reaching your target audience’s feeds.

Learn about the curiosity levels of your target audience by calculating the total number of clicks

It shows the number of clicks received on your social media posts, company name or logo. Through this metric, it is possible to find out what drives the target audience towards curiosity of your brand or encourages them to buy.

Learn about the engagement levels of your target audience to improve your website traffic

Engagement can be computed by dividing the total number of social interactions with the number of impressions.

What can you find from it?

It helps you to know what your target audience perceives about your brand and whether they are willing to interact with you.

Learn about the hashtag performance and determine which ones performed better to engage the target audience

It highlights the total number of hashtags used on your post. The hashtags associated with your brand and which ones led to the engagement

Conduct sentiment analysis to learn about the perceptions of your brand in the minds of the target audience

This metric helps you to gauge how well users reacted to your content, brand or hashtag. What kind of sentiments do they hold for your campaign hashtag?

The ultimate objective it serves: It helps you to dig deeper and find out what your target audience is saying.

Evaluate the performance of your organic and paid likes to drive home the advantage of getting more visibility

This might look surprising…

But for social media platforms like Facebook, it is much more difficult to get organic engagement. This is where companies turn to Facebook Ads.

But, earning organic likes on Instagram is not a difficult task. This metric helps you to calculate how your organic and paid likes are performing. It helps you to adjudge whether they are able to create more traffic on your social media platforms.

Know what your competitors are doing and learn positive things to get more engagement

It is always a smart idea to study the competitors before you start writing content for your social media marketing campaign. You can always learn and grow from their success and failure.

The very first thing to do is to find out who are your competitors?

You can do this easily using Google search. Search with suitable keywords, phrases and industry terms and see what comes up.

For example:

If you are selling customised suits to big delegates search with the keywords “Tailor-made suits”.

Once you find your competitors, search for their profile on social media. After finding quite a few competitors conduct a social media competitive analysis to track their content on different social media networks like Facebook and Instagram.

In the next sections, you will learn about how to generate quality leads from your social media marketing campaign through engaging content and how to track the results for maximum benefits. Let us dive into the details.

Develop an engaging social media content to generate quality traffic

You need to create social media content in sync with your overall social media marketing objective. It should fit your brand’s identity.

You may not want to read this, but here we go…

If try to over-promote on social media networks it can sometimes turn into a curse by killing the enthusiasm of your target audience and they will not think twice before moving to one of your competitors.

The next thing is to develop engaging videos from a good video production company as it brings in more engagement amongst people. You can use Instagram Stories, Facebook Live and other in-the-moment media to publish video content.

Market the content that you create on a regular basis. Remember, your target audience waits for your posts once you have already engaged them.

The black truth…

If you do not publish the content regularly they will disconnect with you and move to your competitors.

Never ignore your target audience at any cost if you want to generate quality leads from your social media marketing strategy

It takes quite a lot of effort to drive engagement on social media channels. You do not want to squander away the advantage after putting in so much of an effort.

This might look startling to you…

There are certain companies that are guilty of not responding back to their audience on a timely basis after receiving a comment on their posts. Never make such a mistake.

Designate the task of responding to the comments received to a dedicated individual and you will see an increase in the engagement level amongst your target audience.

Track the results and evaluate the performance that can be used to improve your performance in the next social media marketing assignment

The ultimate objective of conducting this exercise is to evaluate how well did you go on your social media marketing strategy. This is a very critical thing as it will help you to gauge where you lacked and what needs to be done in the near future. Track the number of email sign-ups, new followers, sales or for that matter any other objective that you had decided to accomplish.

Conclusion

Once you follow these steps it will make you move to an altogether different direction as a result of your new social media marketing strategy.

Maybe you will continue with your hashtag campaign and even add more budget.

Remember, the key is to always stress on the “social” in the social media by staying engaged in the conversation. The strategy will take its own course of action accordingly.

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