The world of social media marketing can be overwhelming, but worry not! We are here to share 5 steps to develop an effective social media marketing plan that’ll help you identify your goals, engage with your target audience and optimize your strategy for great results.

Conduct a social media audit

It is important to analyze your social media metrics to evaluate the effectiveness of the existing strategies and to formulate new ones. You need to assess what’s working and what isn’t, improvements required, the audience you are engaging with, the most successful platform, and how your social media account is performing compared to the competitors. The audit should reflect a clear picture of the purpose your social accounts serve. If the purpose of an account isn’t clear, think about whether it’s worth keeping. You also need to keep an eye out for imposter accounts that use your business or product name.

Set important metrics and KPIs

A social media strategy should always be data-driven. Brands should be invested in digging into data that resonates with their goals. The success of social media strategy is rooted in numbers that circles back to your goals. This data mainly falls into the below categories:

• Reach: The number of unique users who have visited the site to know how far your content has reached
• Clicks: The number of clicks on your content or account will show what drives curiosity or encourage people to make buying decisions.
• Engagement: This shows the audience’s willingness to interact with your site and is obtained by dividing the total number of social interactions by the number of impressions.
• Hashtag performance: Analysing the most-used and relevant hashtags.
• Organic and paid likes: Measuring the differences can help in budgeting both the ad spend and the effort invested in different formats.
• Sentiment: Measurement of how users perceive your content, brand, or hashtag.

Set up Timelines for posting content

For maximum impact, you need to figure out the most optimal time to post. Using a social media calendar, map out your content to support your goals, seize opportunities, and easily make changes. The analytics found in the social media management tools can help you in finding the time your audiences are most active. By scheduling your posts accordingly, you will get maximum reach and engagement.

Establish an Influencer strategy

By marketing through the right influencers, you increase your chance to reach a new audience who will develop an interest in your brand and its products. Influencers have mastered the social media platforms and know what works with the audience. They have a large number of keen followers who could be directed to your social sites through natural-looking paid content. It is important to select influencers who align with your brand so that their followers would match your target audience. By providing quality content to the audience that the influencers direct your way, you have a probability to increase your social followers too.

Create Engaging content

Valuable and engaging content is the most fundamental aspect of any successful marketing strategy. Create valuable content that connects with your social media strategy to help elicit the correct response from your audience. Same content format or theme with consistency in filters to captions and beyond will increase the aesthetics of your site. Stories and time-sensitive posts can make your feed more personal and fresher. Both long-form and short-form videos continue to dominate all platforms because of their high engagement rates. Digital marketing agencies can help you in developing high-quality content that can increase your social media reach. Conducting competitive analysis and social listening will help your content stand out and should be included in your social media strategy.

AUTHOR BIO:

Eliza is a passionate blogger and frequent traveler who loves to write about digital marketing, seo, social media marketing, and more. She is currently working with Arcane Marketing, one of the leading social media marketing agencies serving in and around Idaho.