If you’re new to social media marketing, you may feel like you’re trying to fit in with a younger audience — much like Steve Buscemi’s famous “30 Rock” character saying, “How do you do, fellow kids?”
It may feel daunting or awkward at first. But social media marketing is critical for growth because it offers an opportunity for brand discovery that can’t be achieved anywhere else.
Salsify’s “2023 Consumer Research” report offers a consolidated view of its surveyed countries and lists social media as the top method for discovering new products.
While creating the right social media marketing strategy can be challenging, it’s crucial for successfully connecting with your audience.
Learn more about choosing the right platforms for your business, creating a killer strategy for social media marketing, and some basics of social media influencer marketing.
Social media marketing is the use of social media platforms such as TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and others to promote your products, services, or brand.
Here are some examples of social media marketing:
With the right social media marketing strategy, you can improve brand awareness and reputation, drive conversions, and have a little fun.
A social media marketing strategy is a set of actionable steps and measurable insights to help you achieve your business goals.
A social media marketing strategy typically includes multiple parts, such as:
These combined actions will help you create a social media presence that stands out to your followers and outperforms your competitors.
Building a well-executed social media presence allows brands to connect with their consumers in a unique, rewarding way.
Brands can review metrics to learn what types of content perform well according to audiences. They can also receive immediate feedback from comments on new products as well as improve their reputation by directly responding to complaints or inquiries.
The crux is that each platform calls for a different persona and messaging. Achieving this persona while remaining consistent across platforms and staying true to your brand voice is difficult, especially if you don’t have the right tools and strategy in place.
This is where a social media marketing strategy comes into play.
Here are seven steps for building an effective strategy for social media marketing that will help you identify your target audience, analyze your competition, choose the right platforms, and more.
Identifying your target audience plays a significant role in a successful social media marketing campaign.
You can cast a wide net with social media marketing, but that doesn’t mean you’ll attract the most fish (or consumers) that way. If an ad, campaign, or post doesn’t appeal to the people you’re reaching, your numbers will suffer.
Ask yourself the following questions when identifying your target audience:
Discovering where your audience spends their time will help you decide where your energy will best be spent.
If you already have a social media presence, take a critical look at the content you’ve produced so far by conducting an audit.
You’ll gain a better understanding of your foundational content, how you can build on it, and identify gaps you need to address. If something doesn’t match your current vision or messaging, you can archive it.
Creating content guidelines for each platform is a great way to ensure that consistency is enforced going forward.
Be conscious of your business goals when creating your strategy. Ask the following questions to determine the right goals for your social media strategy.
Are you trying to:
Map out how your social media presence will drive your business goals and objectives.
How can you emulate and improve your competitors’ strategies? Evaluating your competitors’ social media approach will allow you to analyze their strengths and weaknesses and see which platforms they perform best on. This will also give you a sense of how your content will perform on these platforms.
Here are some questions to ask when choosing the right social media platforms for your business:
Cookware brand Le Creuset is a perfect example of a brand that knows how to tailor its content to match the predominant persona of each social media platform.
For example, the brand recently released a new product colorway named “Shallot,” and they’re not only actively promoting it on their social media accounts, but also changing the content format to match the personalities found on the platforms.
The brand’s TikTok account has a variety of videos that promote how to use the new product as well as create hype for the new color (equipped with viral sounds and video trends relevant to frequent TikTokers).
Video Source: Le Creuset TikTok
The brand’s Instagram account showcases reels of recipes, tips on how to use the products, and beautiful, shoppable images. The tone of their captions is more sophisticated to match the lifestyle images by using words like elegant, soft, and neutral.
Image Source: Le Creuset Instagram
Le Creuset’s Pinterest account offers recipe ideas as well as product images for users to “pin” to their personal boards and use as inspiration.
Image Source: Le Creuset’s Pinterest
Establishing a social media publishing calendar allows you to create, schedule, and publish content across all of your desired platforms while improving team bandwidth, cross-functionality, and content quality.
For example, with a content calendar, you can plan your winter holiday content in the summer months, which will give you peace of mind when the cold weather rolls in.
According to Salsify’s “2023 Consumer Research,” 55% of surveyed consumers say that the online shopping experience is what keeps them loyal to brands, and 39% say it’s the in-store shopping experience.
Regardless of where they shop, consumers expect their favorite brands to offer them seamless omnichannel shopping experiences.
The product description is especially important.
Sixty-two percent of German shoppers, 65% of Australian shoppers, 67% of French shoppers, 68% of shoppers in Great Britain, and 72% of U.S. shoppers surveyed in Salsify’s “2023 Shopper Research,” an interactive country-by-country breakdown of its annual global consumer research, ranked product descriptions as the top product page feature that helps them determine what to buy.
Building and maintaining excellent product pages can be difficult, but a product experience management (PXM) solution enables you to efficiently manage product information and data and create best-in-class product experiences.
Brands that fail to use social media will miss out on more than 4.26 billion users worldwide, an impressive number that’s expected to increase to almost 6 billion by 2027 (Statista).
With the right strategy, tools, and collaborations, however, you can thrive in the digital marketing world and gain a competitive advantage.