What is a Social Media Strategy & Why Do You Need One?

Social media strategy is the map of your master plan for how to target, craft, and post content to engage visitors. It includes crafting content, posting schedules, marketing campaigns, and framing engagement strategies that promote your business brand and generate leads. 

With a well-conceived social media strategy, business owners can set goals, track performance, and tweak benchmarks as time goes on.

Types of Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing strategy is a key theme that every brand wants to focus on. These themes are the foundation and building blocks ensuring consistency and coherence in your brand marketing.

Collaborate with Brands

Amazon & American Express, Allbirds & Adidas, GoPro & Red Bull, or BTS & LEGO partner with your relevant creators. To maintain the success of collaborations, check in regularly, and maintain good communication.

Live Streaming

With live streaming marketing it’s time to push boundaries and share the latest events and activities in real-time with your audience. Leverage live streams to show off new products, answer questions, or audience reviews behind the scenes. 

Storytelling

Humans are drawn to stories. It can also lead people to accept original ideas and encourage them to take action. 

It takes creativity, vision, skill, and practice to tell a story well. Result of this marketing strategy? You’ll get marketing campaigns ready to pull the audience in. 

Influencer Marketing

More than 50% of companies are using influencer marketing and say it's effective. But here’s something interesting that we found, more than 20% of marketers are working with small creators or nano influencers. 

Working with small-scale influencers is affordable, establishes long-term partnerships, and offers a great deal of trust in their audience.   

Now that we’ve defined the basics of social media strategy, let us walk you through how to plan a perfect strategy for social media marketing services.

Start with Clear, Measurable Objectives

As with any other marketing approach, the very first step in crafting an effective social media strategy is to clearly define what you want to accomplish. Start with the ‘Why’. Why you’re diving into the space of social media and how will it benefit you?

Are you looking to increase site traffic? Boost brand awareness? Generate new leads? Or nurture existing customers?  

As you answer these questions, you will have a more clear vision of your business goals.

Identify Your Target Audience

Now is the time to identify and document your buyer persona. Social media strategy allows businesses to drill down and target exactly who they want to sell their services.

These detailed personas will cover everything from their age, location, interests, geographies, type of content consumption, and other relevant factors. While you can find several industry studies and surveys on trends it’s always best to get feedback from your existing followers and analyze the first-hand data.  

Incorporate Ecommerce

It’s a pro tip for all the newly launched startups out there. According to studies, as more and more people are using social media for finding new products they’re also finding it convenient to purchase and place orders. 

More than 50 percent of marketers believe consumers will ultimately buy products directly from within social apps or through third-party resellers. If you sell products, social apps are an integral part of your ecommerce strategy in 2024. 

Focus on a Few Key Social Channels

Most of the startups don’t have the bandwidth to maintain their presence on every social media platform. Simultaneously, it can be overwhelming to learn the rules of multiple networks. 

To get the most out of it, focus on channels that will bring you the highest ROI. A pro tip here is to check where your competitors are most active and what kind of content they’re sharing. This will help you see what works and what doesn’t based on the audience engagement rate.  

Build a Content Calendar

Next up is to build your content strategy calendar, which will be the essence of your social media marketing strategy. Additionally, keep it as simple as possible. Repurpose and use the same content in different places. According to research, 19% of marketers consider repurposing as one of their major strategies when offering social media marketing services.

Plan Your Customer Service

When working on your social media strategy, consider how you’ll use these platforms for customer service. 40% of marketers use customer reps, 38% rely on platform managers, and 10% employ chatbots to offer enhanced customer service on social media platforms. 

Whether you create a separate account or set it up in the existing one, make sure to bring your A-game to customer service. Furthermore, let your customers know the expected response time and clearly state your working hours.

Measure Your Results

Regularly assess how your content and ideas are performing. Social media platforms offer analytics for business accounts, to check the metrics including reach, likes, impressions, engagement rate, open rates, and more. 

You can use Facebook’s Page Insights, Instagram’s Account Insights, or LinkedIn’s Visitor Analytics to look for trendy topics and keywords generating the most interest. 

Furthermore, consider incorporating interactive elements into your social media marketing services. Encourage user-generated content, respond promptly, run contests, and more with consistent efforts. 

As the APPNWEB team believes, success lies in the perfect blend of creativity and analytics. Stay versatile, understand your audience preference, adapt to changes, and let your strategy evolve. Use social media as a canvas to paint your brand as a masterpiece in the industry. 

So go on, paint your masterpiece online, connect authentically, and watch your business brand grow.