Social Media has been by far the easiest and most inexpensive tool for marketers and business owners to generate brand awareness. A few also believe that by consistently posting relevant information and by responding to comments on social media, their job of getting the best out of social media is done.
But there is more to just posting different content and responding to comments. By just following these few easy steps on a consistent basis, you can increase your social media campaign effectiveness.
So, what are these 6 steps?
- Setting SMART Goals
- Defining your Target Audience
- Analyzing Competition
- Social Media Audit
- Revising Social Media Plan
- Measuring success via Analytics
Let’s start, shall we?
Step 1: Setting SMART Marketing Goals
One thing that we marketers can’t get enough of is to plan and set marketing goals. According to research by Coschedule, marketers or businesses who set SMART goals are most likely to succeed in accomplishing them.
Now, what are SMART marketing goals?
SMART is an abbreviation for- Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Relevant and Timeliness.
Specific would mean for a goal to be very definitive. Ask the purpose of using social media marketing for your brand or exactly what is it that you are trying to achieve on a specific platform. Some specific goal ideas would be to either-
- Increase your website traffic through social media using a contest
- Increase followers by x% on a platform on a weekly or monthly basis
- Increase email conversions through an e-book or free opt-in
Measurable would mean to choose a metric to measure against the specific goal that has been set. Ask this question- how to measure the specific goal or how can you understand what was accomplished to succeed. The usual metrics that many social media platforms use are Volume, Engagement and Traffic.
Actionable means setting benchmarks with references to the past history of similar goals and analyzing results with comparison to your current availability of resources.
Relevant would mean if a marketing goal is relevant to your current business goal. For instance, using Instagram stories to build a relationship with your tribe is more ideal than using instagram for promoting your website URL.
Timeline would mean to set a time limit on when these SMART goals are to be accomplished and by when should they be measured.
Step 2: Defining your Target Audience or Personas
Very often your target audience will let you know what they would want to learn about you on social media. But I hate to break it to you that NOT all followers on social media are your target audience.
Yes, you read it right. Not all followers.
So what do we really mean by a Target Audience?
A target audience is a group of people with similar interests or characteristics to whom your business or services helps solve a problem.
Why is it important to identify and define a target audience?
Because this gives your business a deep perspective on which group of people are most likely to benefit from your offerings or services. Which, if you coe to think of it, eventually makes targeting the right segment easier.
A very common and popular way of segmenting a broad group of people is on the basis of factors such as demographics, lifestyle, tastes, marital status, preferences and education.
While these are very important to classify your audience, it is also important to consider other factors such as cultures, subcultures, needs, attitude or personalities to understand the buying behavior of your audience.
How can you define your target audience on social media?
- Create a fictional character or persona that is an ideal customer for your product or business. Just draw up or sketch a profile for your ideal customer.
- Look around on FB groups or other social communities and examine your customer interactions.
- Look up your competition and follow their audience. See how they interact and analyze what you could do to improvise.
- Based on the above three steps now build your target audience or a gist of it.
- Monitor and analyze how your content is performing on social media. This will give you an idea whether you are spot on with your messaging and if your audience ever cared for what type of content.
- Ask for opinions or suggestions from your followers/audience. Polls, surveys, posts, comments etc should help you seek out valuable insights on how you can help your potential clients.
Step 3: Analyzing Competition
Competition analysis is simple yet requires an in depth analysis. On social media, your competitor could be far ahead of the curve or may be behind. What you need to seek is a SWOT against your competitor (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats).
By doing so you get an exact understanding of benchmarking your results and to improvise on strategies that are clearly not working, if at all there is any room for improvement.
Why do you need to analyze your competition?
- It would help you identify your actual competitors on social media
- You will know which social platforms they’re on and how they are using platforms.
- You will understand how well their social strategy is working and identify any scope of improvements or gaps that your strategy may have.
- You would identify social threats to your business
Now onto the next step.
Step 4: Identifying Gaps with Social Media Audit
A social media audit is a series of identifying, assessing, evaluating and understanding the gaps in one’s business social media profiles with respect to the competition. It also involves getting to know what platforms or content had worked in the past, why did they work and what failed.
Lets just say this is an exercise to keep you abreast of your social performance. An audit can be done when your business has some social media presence already.
Since the social media landscape is always changing, it is best to keep a pulse on how your business is doing in the digital world through an audit.
Here is a checklist of what your audit should comprise of.
- Date of the Audit so that you can always look back and compare.
2. Comparative timeline of what months you are looking to compare or do an audit for. A good idea is to compare at least 3-6 months to audit.
3. Social media goals short and long-term goals for the timeline that you are to audit.
4. Social media platforms that are being audited. Take into account the following items under each platform –
- The number of followers
- Posts that received the highest engagement ( reach or views)
- Best performing Ad campaigns and budget
- Analysis of ad campaigns and returns on investment ( no. of clicks, which Call to action worked better, did the campaigns help in gaining website traffic)
- Online Community (how many new followers/members)
- Earned Mentions, Likes or Shares
5. List of actions the competition took under the same platform such as-
- What did they do to get better traffic, viewers, more product sale etc which ever metric you’d like ot measure? Contest/polls/live events??
- Did they get a better reach/view by doing so?
- Did you try the same and failed? What would you improvise?
6. Conclusions drawn on the basis of performance against competition.
7. New social media goals going forward and if possible, anticipations of new campaigns.
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Step 5: Revising or defining your Social Media Marketing Plan
Planning is crucial for any business and to plan things effectively for social media marketing, a documented social media marketing plan is an inevitable tool. Once an audit is done, you can formulate strategies here in this document to go to the next level.
What is a Social Media Marketing plan?
It is a document that states your promotional goals, identifies the gaps in the achievements towards those goals and how to go about fulfilling those gaps with new strategies. So in other words, it is a document that helps you out to formulate a strategy to accomplish your social media goals.
Related Article: What is social media marketing and how to start marketing on social media?
A comprehensive social media marketing plan comprises of these elements-
- Goals
Having done your audit, now is the time to set the long-term and short-term goals for your social media profiles going forward. Whether you want to increase your engagement or followers, get more email sign-ups, or increase your local reach, an audit can clearly help you decide what goals can be planned next.
- Platforms
Identify which of the social media platforms worked for your business the most and why. Having a dozen business profiles on all social platforms won’t do any good, besides it only makes it difficult to keep a track and measure your performance. The idea is to keep a few social platforms and analyze which ones are working well for your business. Ask questions such as – Is your target audience hanging out there the most? Or was it the paid ad campaign that did the trick?
- Content strategy
A brief outline on what content should be posted, the types (videos, ebooks, tutorials, informative posts etc), frequency of posts, whether the content matches the brand voice of your business should be stated clearly and precisely.
- Paid ad campaigns and Budget
Analyze which campaigns were cost effective by identifying your key metrics and set budget for campaigns going forward. Your budget should also include any other expenses that you may be having on resources and tools.
- Online community
Since your business is socializing on social media, the ultimate goal is to build a tribe that connects with a common purpose of solving a problem. While building this online community focus and declare your ‘Why’ of existence in your content and reiterate your messaging in a way that resonates with your audience. Also deep dive into what type of content is actually helping you connect more with your audience.
- Automated tools
Your social media marketing plan should lay out which automated tools and resources will be employed to help accomplish your goals. Tools such as Social Pilot, Hootsuite, Hubspot, Coschedule etc are great for scheduling your social media content.
- Influencer Engagement
Identifying influencers in your industry and reaching out to them to build a tribe is a very creative way of brand building and generating awareness. Who is talking about your brand and what kind of impact they have on your audience.
Creating ENGAGEMENT with your audience is the key to leading them towards developing a trustworthy relationship with your brand or product. The conversations with an influencer should be meaningful and relevant to what you have to offer.
- Measurements (Key Metrics)
To measure your performance and progress, a few metrics that can help you understand better are volume, engagement, ROI, Share of Voice, Reach, influence .
- Revisions and Timeliness
Revising your plan every month or quarterly is a good idea to understand where you stand in terms of accomplishing your goals and results. If there are any unforeseen circumstances that were not accounted for in the plan or something unexpected comes in the way that results in slowing down your progress then this makes a good reason for you to update your marketing plan and to keep a close check on how far you have met the expectations on attaining your goals.
Step 6: Measuring your performance via Analytics in set time limits
Analytics are now easily and most effectively available through social media channels for free. Facebook Analytics, for instance, shows everything from how many followers or visitors the business page has got, how many of them carried out a negative action, what posts performed better than others, and so on. Another example is that of Pinterest analytics which shows the type of content your users love the most, how many monthly viewers your business has got, what ad campaigns worked, and what didn’t.
As for paid tools that can help you analyze most of your social media channels there are a few good ones such as BrandWatch, AgoraPulse, KeyHole, Meltwater and so on.
The fact of the matter is how frequently do you analyze your social media data. A general thumb of rule is to analyze your social media channels on a weekly or fortnightly schedule.
Bottomline- Social Media Marketing is a Marathon, Not a Sprint!
Regardless of the industry, your business may be in social media marketing is a complex beast given the evolution of technology and consumer behavior every few weeks. It is always good to know and understand certain key metrics to check your new social media performance or campaign.
Remember it takes sometime before your social media efforts show in. Some experts suggest as good as a few weeks (if you already have some followers) or it may take as long as a couple of months especially if you are starting out before your plan shows its effectiveness.
What other factors should you consider to make your social media campaign effective? Please feel free to drop in your comments.
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