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Thus, only you can figure out what you wish to accomplish via social media marketing. It is pivotal to the creation of S.M.A.R.T. goals. This means your social media marketing goals should be specific, measurable, actionable, realistic, and time-bound. At the end of the day, whatever your social media marketing goals may be, just remember to keep it simple so that you can attain and measure them.
2. Identify your target audience
As a social media marketer, you have to ensure that your content can resonate well with the right people. But how to know who are the right people for your brand?
This is where research comes into play. You must conduct extensive market and social media research to identify your target audience and, more importantly, what they wish to see on your social media handles. To determine your target customer, you must gather relevant personal demographics, such as:
- Age
- Location
- Average income
- Job title and industry
- Pain points and interests
After you’ve figured this out, you must focus on social media demographics. This data will reveal which social media channels you must leverage and what kind of content you must publish. Here are some social media demographics that you must consider:
- YouTube and Facebook are excellent platforms for adverts, thanks to their high-earning user base.
- LinkedIn has a well-educated user base. Naturally, it harbors and promotes informative, industry-specific content that you will generally not see on other social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter.
- Instagram’s fan following primarily consists of millennials and Gen Z. Hence, it is the perfect platform for promoting bold, fresh, and engaging content.
- Women dominate Pinterest’s user base, which boasts of having the highest average order value for social shoppers.
- Twitter is great for generating buzz in a few words!
3. Identify the core metrics for your business
Like any other digital marketing strategy, your social media content marketing strategy must also be data-driven. The correct data will not only help uncover valuable business insights, but it will also aid in formulating relevant marketing campaigns. The metrics that are crucial for creating a successful social media content marketing strategy include:
- Brand reach – This metric involves the number of users who saw and engaged with your social media posts. It also considers how far across your content is spreading on social media channels.
- Customer engagement – This metric involves finding out how many users interacted with your social media content out of your total target. It shows you how well your content resonates with the target audience and how much they are willing to interact with the same.
- Clicks – Tracking links is pivotal to understand how users are progressing through the marketing funnel. You must find out how many clicks the different content types are bringing through via various social media channels.
- Organic & paid likes – Both organic and paid likes are crucial to understanding the customer-brand engagement on social media platforms. While some channels like Facebook are great for paid ads, others like Instagram help bring more organic likes.
- Sentiment – Customer sentiment refers to how different users react to your content, whether they like, or dislike, or remain neutral to your social media posts. For instance, you must find out which customer segment is associating with your campaign hashtags, which customer segment is happy with a particular marketing campaign, which customer segment finds your campaign offensive, and so on.
With these numbers at hand, you can make more informed content marketing decisions.
4. Evaluate your competitors
When planning a social media content marketing campaign, you cannot afford to remain in a bubble – you must find out what your competitors are up to. One of the best ways to learn more about your potential competitors’ actions and plans is to conduct a competitive analysis.
A competitive analysis reveals industry stats like who are your top competitors, what strategies they are implementing, and whether or not those plans are delivering the expected results. This information will help you better understand the latest content marketing trends, tools, and goals. Thankfully, there are many third-party competitor analysis tools to help uncover in-depth insights about your competitors.
Another excellent approach to learning the secrets of your competition is to study the social media activities of potential competitors. Social media listening lets you search for relevant keywords like company name, account handles, trending hashtags, etc. This helps you understand what your competitors are doing and what people are saying about them.
Also, you can directly figure out what kind of social media posts are working best with users and which type of content is delivering maximum impact. This data will help you understand the focus areas that you need to incorporate in your social media marketing campaigns.
5. Create engaging social media content
Now, you have enough data at hand to create a well-structured social media content strategy. Here’s how to go about it in a stepwise manner:
Choose content themes and follow them consistently.
Content planning, especially the ones that go on your social media handles, is one of the toughest challenges for social media marketers. As a brand, you need to stay in touch with your audience regularly – you need to keep them posted and engaged. You can check out the Instagram feed of your competitors to see the themes they are focusing on. This will give you a fair idea of what your social media calendar should have.
The Instagram feed of Postmates is an excellent example highlighting consistent and engaging content theme – food.
