How to Create a Powerful Social Media Marketing Strategy in 2019
Social media’s ability to drive revenue grows stronger every year.
In 2019, marketers are expected to generate a whopping $39B in revenue through social media — that’s over $12B more compared to just 2016.
If you want a piece of that global ROI cake for yourself, you need a solid social media marketing strategy that will help you achieve your business objectives.
Here’s how to create one in six easy steps.
Create a Powerful Social Media Marketing Strategy in 2019
1. Define your target audience
The very first step to creating a social media marketing strategy is defining who exactly you want to promote your business to.
It’s likely that you already have a target customer group you want to reach — say, 30-year-old men interested in sports.
Now, you may either want to reach exactly the same customer segment on social media or aim to get your brand in front of completely new people.
If you’re going for the latter, you need to ask yourself the following questions:
- What are the demographics of the user group I’d like to reach? How old are they, where are they located, what language do they speak?
- What are their interests and affinities?
- What are their goals — both personal and professional?
- What are their frustrations? What might they be lacking from the products or services offered by your competitors?
- What brands and social media influencers do they follow on social media?
- What social media platforms do they use on a daily basis?
Answering these questions will help you define your target audience persona, which is critical to building a tailored social media marketing strategy.
If you need help mapping out your audience persona, check out this free persona template from Socialbakers:
2. Outline your objectives and KPIs
Social media is a very universal marketing channel that can help you achieve all sorts of objectives.
It is important, though, that these objectives are aligned with your company goals and values.
For example, let’s say your key goal for 2019 is increasing sales in your online store.
Social media can definitely help you get there, which means boosting sales is a sound social media marketing objective, correlating to your bigger business goals.
On the flipside, if you want to increase your online store sales, but center your social media marketing strategy around, say, employer branding, you’ll end up losing money.
That’s because in this particular case, social media won’t be a functioning part of your marketing funnel and will fail to nurture users towards converting.
Once you line up your social media marketing and broader business goals, it’s time to think of key performance indicators (KPIs).
These will help you measure just how effectively you’re completing your social media marketing goals.
Depending on your objectives, you’re going to measure different KPIs:
- Objective: increasing brand awareness; KPIs: reach, follower growth, the volume of website traffic and brand mentions
- Objective: increasing audience engagement; KPIs: volume of likes, comments, and shares
- Objective: increasing conversions; KPIs: volume of conversions from social media
As you can see, KPIs need to be aligned with your social media marketing objectives which, in turn, need to be in tune with your company goals and values.
It’s critical that you map out these correlations at the very beginning. After all, they are the foundation of your social media marketing strategy, helping you make tactical decisions and measure your progress.
3. Choose the right platform
Many companies make the mistake of jumping in at the deep end and trying to build a presence across all social media platforms.
The key to success, however, isn’t trying to be everywhere. It’s strategically choosing a platform with the biggest potential to drive your business objectives.
So, how do you pick the right social media channel?
Start off by learning about the unique features of each platform — it will make creating a social media strategy a much easier process.
Here’s a quick rundown of the biggest advantages of leveraging different social media channels:
- Facebook: you’re able to target very precise audience segments with your ads, which helps to increase conversion rate
- Instagram: you can tap into the platform’s visual-centric character and present your products or services in a visually appealing way
- Twitter: you can include links in your tweets, which helps to improve website traffic
- LinkedIn: you can build valuable connections with fellow professionals, improve credibility, and position your company as a thought-leader
- Pinterest: you can easily convert users into buyers, as the platform is known for having an exceptionally high conversion rate
- Snapchat: you can reach a massive, highly engaged audience of Millennials
As you can see, each social media channel will help you meet slightly different goals.
That’s why it’s so important that you take time to think of which platform will be best for your business. As a result, you will be able to give a clear direction to your social media marketing strategy and invest your resources where it makes the most sense.
