How to Create a Social Media Marketing Strategy
Creating your social media marketing strategy can be easy. Learn how to get started in 8 effective steps.
The secret is out: social media is here to stay. Business owners and decision-makers everywhere are realizing the value of using social media platforms for digital marketing.
Importantly: this means the arena of social media marketing is becoming more competitive every day. It’s estimated that the market cap of the digital advertising market will increase by more than 200% within the next 3 years.
Simply put – competition will skyrocket, and soon, creating and implementing a successful social media marketing strategy will be a requirement, not an option.
The good news? If you’re reading this, you’re early, and Marketini Media can help you learn how to create a social media marketing strategy today.
In this post, we’re laying out a checklist for how to create a social media marketing strategy today that’s personalized for your business model.
How to Create a Social Media Marketing Strategy
Tip 1 - Investigate the Social Media Marketing Strategy of your Competitors
Tip 2 - Plan and Schedule All of your Social Media Content
Tip 3 - Growth Marketing: Provide a Service with your Content
Tip 4 - Use the Best Social Media Marketing Tools
Tip 5 - Develop the Social Media Marketing Strategy that’s Right for You
Tip 6 - Invest in your Education Intelligently (Money & Time)
Tip 7 - Commit to Data Analysis: KPIs, CRO, SEO, & more.
Tip 8 - Adapt your Social Media Marketing Strategy
Investigate your Competitors
The easiest way for beginners to create a social media marketing strategy is to spend a few hours conducting competitor research and data analysis. Ask yourself two important questions about the digital presence of the competition in your niche:
What are the competitors in your own backyard doing?
What are the biggest in the industry doing in terms of social media marketing?
Investigating how your competitors use social media will save you time and money.
When you set out to create a successful social media marketing strategy, it’s important. In two hours of focused research, you can use free software like the Facebook Ads library and Google search engine results page (SERP) to immediately understand what you should do to get more leads and more sales online in 2022.
Remember these questions when conducting your competitor research:
What keywords do your competitors rank for?
How has your competition Conversion-Rate Optimized their website’s landing pages?
Which keywords are your competitors targeting with their Google Search Ads?
Are your competitors using the Facebook Pixel?
Is your competition running Facebook ads?
How have your competitors optimized their Google My Business profile?
What posts get the highest engagement?
Keeping these questions in mind will help you take action. Your goal should be to create and implement a social media marketing strategy as quickly as possible so that you can start split-testing growth marketing variables.
Plan and Schedule All of your Social Media Content
Scheduling your organic social media posts is a must.
Planning your social media posts in advance will save you time, and it will allow you to better execute a long-term social media marketing strategy - like a product rollout or a seasonal deal.
Scheduling your posts is the only way you can guarantee that you’re posting to social media at the same time your audience is most engaged.
Optimal posting times are also no secret in the industry of social media marketing – the point is this: the value of preparing your posts ahead of time will compound when sustained across time strategically.
Here are instructions for scheduling posts to the most popular social media platforms:
Growth Marketing: Provide a Service with your Content
Before you post anything, it’s important to remind yourself that nobody likes feeling “sold to” when they’re using social media – this is why you should work to provide a service with your content.
A successful social media marketing strategy needs to incorporate content that offers viewers more than just the promotion of a paid product or service.
It starts with having a long-term mindset. Growth doesn’t happen overnight. Maybe you aren’t happy with your online numbers or sales right – that’s ok, so long as you don’t expect things to change overnight. Unrealistic expectations are why many social media managers fail to execute their plans.
Remember this: to create a successful social media marketing strategy you must be aware of a variety of factors including A/B variable testing, identifying patterns, digital sales funnel development, and customer paint points.
All of these factors and more are things you should be aware of when trying to create and implement your social media marketing strategy.
Use the Best Social Media Marketing Tools
As we mentioned, creating a successful social media marketing strategy depends on identifying whether selling your product and service depends solely on active intent, or a combination of active and passive intent.
If you don’t know how you need to engage with your ideal customer on social media to get them to convert, you won’t be able to pick the marketing tools that are most likely to help you succeed.
Below you’ll find a list of our favorite tools for getting more sales and conversions online.
Google Analytics: this is literally the most powerful tool for creating a social media marketing strategy across time.
Ahrefs / SEMrush: don’t sleep on these SEO tools. Do you want to learn how to rank higher on Google’s results page? Do you want to know how to optimize your website? It starts with these tools. They aren’t the cheapest, but once you have a few low-competition keywords to target, you can start effectively implementing your social media marketing strategy.
Google Ads: This is – hands down – the single most powerful advertising platform in human history. Building a Google Ads campaign goes hand-in-hand with creating a successful social media marketing strategy. Understand: Google Ads boils down to understanding your Ideal Customer’s search intent. The more research you do, the more time you dedicate to keyword research, the better the results of your social media marketing strategy will be.
Facebook Ads: Everybody loves to criticize Facebook (and for good reason), but if you’re trying to create and implement a social media marketing strategy, you should learn about Facebook ads. Why are Facebook ads important? Because they allow you to target users based on their location, demographic, and profile information. Don’t waste time and money guessing. Learn Facebook ads and start promoting your products and services to people who fit your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP).
Here are a few more tools to consider researching: the Facebook Pixel, TikTok ads, ConvertKit, YouTube ads, WordPress, Shopify, ClickCease, and Canva.
Develop the Social Media Marketing Strategy that’s Right for You
Social Media Marketing Strategies aren’t one-size-fits-all. What works for dentists won’t work for e-commerce.
Whether or not you think that’s a groundbreaking idea, the point is this: to develop a high-ROI social media marketing strategy, you need to know how to frame what you’re selling.
Consider these questions:
Is the product (or service) you’re trying to advertise online a high or low-ticket item?
Additionally, is this product or service likely to be an impulse buy?
Does your product or service likely require active intent or can you count on passive intent purchases?
Your answers to each of these questions will give you important insights into how to optimally frame your product or services in your ads.
Even more importantly, your answers will help you know what social media platforms you’ll want to advertise on when creating and implementing your social media marketing strategy… which brings us to our next tip.
Invest in your Education Intelligently (Money & Time)
Efficiency is an art. You should strive to be efficient whenever possible. This applies as much to your education as it does to your business.
Digital markets are always changing. Especially today. Decision makers are always developing and implementing cutting-edge strategies. If you haven’t made a habit of acquiring new skills, you’re falling behind.
But we get it: learning takes time. That’s why we opened with “The Art of Efficiency.”
If you want to invest intelligently in your education, we recommend a monthly Udemy subscription. We aren’t sponsored. We just use it and it works.
Everybody loves to promote YouTube — and for good reason, you can learn just about anything on YouTube. But when it comes to creating a social media marketing strategy, the #1 thing you need is a great mechanism.
That’s where Udemy comes in.
Commit to Data Analysis: KPIs, CRO, SEO, & more.
If you really want to create a social media marketing strategy, you need to dedicate yourself to data analysis and tracking as early as possible.
Familiarize yourself with software like Google Analytics and Facebook Ads Manager and start using your digital conversion rate to measure your success.
What are your key performance indicators (KPIs)? Are you split-testing high-ticket-item landing pages for conversion rate optimization (CRO)? In what ways is your content search engine optimized (SEO)?
Data analysis isn’t always fun, but successful social media marketing strategies depend upon it for one big reason: numbers don’t lie.
Install Google Analytics and the Facebook Pixel on your website. Once a week, analyze your data. We recommend building a report once a month to review the performance of your social media marketing strategy.
By paying consistent attention to your numbers, you’ll get a better idea of what is and isn’t working.
Adapt your Social Media Marketing Strategy
Finally, if you’re serious about creating a social media marketing strategy, you need to be willing to adapt your strategy as time goes on.
Let’s say you’ve done your competitor research, you’re consistently planning your content, you're using the best social media marketing tools, you’re analyzing your data – you’re doing everything right… at the end of all of this, you will discover that your social media marketing strategy needs to be adjusted. Those are the rules of the game.
Remember, social media is a multifaceted tool for your business. It’s a great way to connect with your audience and ideal customers, as well as promote your products, services, and brand.
Building a social media marketing strategy isn’t easy (for reasons we’ve hopefully made clear by this point).
For questions about social media marketing, contact a Marketini Media expert today. Our team is ready to help you build a successful social media marketing strategy, and the first meeting is always free.
