When social media platforms first emerged as powerful business platforms, all that was required of companies that used social media in order to stay ahead of their competition was that they had a consistent posting schedule. However, things have drastically changed since then, and nowadays, companies need a more targeted approach and a dedicated social media strategy to reach their target audience.

To do that, companies that want to excel in their digital marketing efforts usually delegate the creation of a comprehensive social media marketing strategy to a professional social media marketing agency to do the heavy lifting for them. But even if you don’t have the budget to hire an agency to do the hard work for you, you can easily create a social media marketing strategy on your own if you follow the tried and true steps to gain digital exposure. 

Here are the five steps you need to take to create a winning social media marketing strategy for your business.

Identify And Know Your Goals 

While most companies have an active social media presence, many of them haven’t identified their key goals and objectives. In that regard, you need to identify and know the goals you want to achieve through your social media strategy as setting concrete benchmarks is crucial to measuring your progress. 

And while different companies will certainly have different needs, there are three common social media objectives that apply to most businesses and probably to yours as well:

• Boosting the sales of your products or services. To achieve this, you should regularly post high-quality photos of your offerings and advertise promotions or sales on social media. 
• Increasing brand awareness. If that’s your goal, you should focus your social media efforts on generating informative, relevant content that connects with your clients emotionally. 
• Driving traffic to your official website. If you want to drive more traffic to your website, you should give users a reason to engage with your company and visit your website or shop.

Choose The Right Platforms

Another mistake that many companies make is that they treat all social media platforms and channels the same when this clearly isn’t the most effective approach to anyone’s strategy. Instead of using each available social media channel, you should focus on the ones that are proven to best reach your target audience.

As you’ll dig deeper into the different social media platforms available, you’ll soon realize that all of the biggest social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, and Twitter have different user demographics including age, gender, income, and education level. 

Understanding your target audience’s demographics and matching them up with the proper social media platforms is very important. For example, if your target audience is mainly individuals in their late teens or early twenties, you might want to develop a customized social media strategy to get TikTok followers and later cater to them on your profile with interesting, yet relevant short videos.

Draft A Posting Schedule 

Creating a social media calendar or, in other words, drafting a posting schedule that lists all the content you will publish throughout the day or week encourages consistency. For instance, you may find that photo posts do well on Mondays, while video posts get more clicks during the weekend. The longer you maintain a social media posting schedule and test novel strategies, the more refined it will grow and the more successful your efforts will become. 

The particular time you publish something on social media is equally important. Based on your company or industry, posting at 6 a.m. on a weekday could mean great success—or it might be a total failure.

Constantly Engage With Your Audience

A very important thing to remember: while social media platforms represent a fantastic way to promote your business and the products or services you have to offer, all social media channels were initially designed for people to be social. For that reason, engaging with and carefully listening to your audience on social media is just as important as spreading your brand’s message.

People use social media channels to speak directly to their favorite brands. If they are ignored, studies suggest that they are more likely to visit a competitor and spend with another business. For that reason, always use social media as a genuine place to interact with your clients and focus on building genuine relationships that last.

Track The Right Metrics For Your Business

So, once you know your goals, selected the platforms you’ll utilize in your social media strategy, formed your posting schedule, and started posting, you’ll certainly want to keep track of your social media progress. This can be done by using the analytics systems of the social media channels, or through Google Analytics. Here are the two most common metrics you should start tracking: 

• Reach and impressions. While reach is the number of times your posts have been opened and seen by a unique account, impressions represent the times your posts have been seen. Tracking both will provide you with valuable feedback on things like posting frequency, hashtags, and posting times. 
• Clicks. If your end objective is to get more visitors to your official shop or website, you should measure the number of clicks your posts get and referral traffic. This will provide you with a better understanding of where your audience is most active and how they move through your sales funnel.

The Bottom Line

In the end, you should never forget that the social media landscape is continuously evolving and changing, so new trends are being shaped with each new day. In that context, if you want to grow further, your company needs to adapt to the latest trends and develop strategies in full cohesion with them.