One famous quote that explains the importance of building a marketing strategy is: “A Goal without setting a strategy and a plan is just a wish."
Some businesses randomly create and publish online posts on their social media platforms, then complain about not getting profitable results!
Following the best social media marketing strategy in 2022 is very important for achieving your marketing goals, which we will discuss in this article. So bring your coffee, relax, and read carefully.
What is a social media marketing strategy?
You can consider the social media strategy an integral part of your overall marketing strategy. A social media marketing strategy resembles documenting your marketing goals, how you will achieve them in detail, and what KPIs you should measure. When creating the Best Social Media Marketing Strategy, you should list all related information regarding your activity on social media.
In addition, you should consider who will implement the social media marketing efforts mentioned in the best social media marketing strategy and identify the roles and responsibilities of each one.
How to create the best social media marketing strategy for 2022?
One of the best ways to create a strategy is to follow the “5 Ws and 1 H" technique. This technique considers asking yourself (or your team) 6 questions; five of them start with the letter “W," and the final one begins with “H" as follows:
- Who is involved in this strategy? And who is the target audience?
- What will you do exactly?
- When will you do it?
- Where will it happen?
- Why are you exerting social media marketing efforts?
- How will you implement this strategy?
After answering these questions, everything should be clear for you to start creating your social media marketing strategy in detail.
Steps for the best social media marketing strategy in 2022
Follow the following steps to create your social media marketing strategy, and you will be surprised by the results:
1- Set your social media marketing goals
Identifying your goals is the key to success. Without establishing clear objectives, you won’t be able to measure the results of your marketing campaigns. You should set SMART goals. SMART indicates:
- S: Specific.
- M: Measurable.
- A: Achievable or attainable.
- R: Relevant.
- T: Time-based.
There are three main social media objectives that most businesses have:
- To increase brand awareness: Your target audience must be able to identify your company/agency/store/organization. You should avoid too much promotional content to achieve this goal, like sending scam messages. Instead, it would help to publish pieces of content that reflect your brand personality and show your business values.
- To Increase service/product awareness: You should consider publishing educational posts showing features of your products/services. These posts are better not to be “selling your products/services" all the time. For example, if you sell milk bottles, you can publish a post titled: “How to make delicious chocolate at home?". Don’t forget to mention your brand.
- To generate leads and boost sales: Most business owners consider increasing sales their main marketing goal. However, most consultants and experts recommend achieving this goal in parallel with the last two objectives. Lead generation requires creating direct sales posts.
2- Identify your target audience in detail
Identifying your target audience seems to be abused in too many posts you may have seen, but actually, it’s a critical step to consider. You should understand your target customers and learn their exact needs. Your social media marketing strategy can help you achieve this goal by:
Creating buyer personas
A buyer persona is to create fictional characters resembling your potential customers to understand how they are thinking. It would help if you considered every single characteristic of your clients, such as:
- Age.
- Gender.
- Location.
- Socioeconomics.
- Job title.
- Industry.
- Interests.
- Activities.
You can create one or more personas according to what you provide.
Collecting audience data
You can use some tools that help you collect your audience data. Facebook, for example, provides a tool named “Audience insights" that offers the most relevant data regarding people following your page.
3- Understand your competitors
A competitor is another business that provides the same products/services you provide or at least one of them. Conducting a competitive analysis is vital to identify how they work and promote their businesses. It will also help determine your target audience’s needs besides identifying the updates of your industry.
For example, you might find one competitor who is very active on Facebook but not active on Instagram; this information may guide you to be active on both platforms so that you would gain customers through both channels. On the other hand, you may find it unnecessary to target them using Instagram as your potential customers are not present within this channel.
4- Identity your KPIs
After identifying your social media marketing objectives, audience, and competitors, you should now select the most relevant metrics for your marketing goals while developing your social media marketing strategy. Some of the most common KPIs are:
- Reach: A “reach" is the number of unique people who saw your piece of content.
- Impression: Impression is another number that indicates the number viewing every single post on your audience’s news feed. The difference between reach and impression is that reach shows unique users who viewed your published post, while impression tells how many times all users view the posts; this means that impressions may include people who saw your posts more than once. For example, if you published a post and gained 1000 reach, you have reached 1000 unique users, but if you get 1000 impressions, that would indicate viewing your content 1000 times by all users; some of these users may have viewed your content 2-3 times.
- Engagement: The number of interactions on your post, including reactions, comments, and shares.
- Video views: The number of views of a single video post.
- Clicks: The number of clicks per post. It is an insight that tells you how many users are interested in your post.
5- Audit your social media content
Now, you should audit your social accounts. Auditing will help you identify pieces of content most relevant to your audience and re-use them. Here are some recommended steps:
- Check your social media content and identify what’s working and what’s not.
- Try to re-publish your successful content in different formats. For example, you can convert one successful long post into a video or infographics.
- Re-publish your content on different platforms using suitable formats.
It’s time now to think about developing your social media accounts.
6- Social media accounts optimization
You should log in to every account and optimize it. For example, you must fill in the about section on your Facebook page. It includes your business data such as your website, telephone numbers, emails, locations, and a short description. Here are some other tips to optimize your Facebook page:
- Add a profile image that shows your logo.
- Add an attractive cover photo that describes what you provide.
- Link your Facebook page with other social media accounts such as Instagram and Twitter.
- Edit your page setting.
- Rearrange your page tabs.
- Add your shop (if you have a store or an e-commerce website).
Make sure to follow the previous steps in your other social media accounts. It’s essential to know every platform’s image size to ensure its clarity. And at last, have a final look at your accounts to guarantee that they are relevant to your target audience regarding content and visuals.
7- Build a content plan
Here are some content tips to consider while setting your social media marketing strategy in 2022:
Find out the right time to publish your posts.
Posting times may vary for different audiences on different platforms. Use insights to determine when your fans are online (Peak time).
Get inspired and create relevant content.
Please remember that social media marketing considers building partnerships with your target audience. Everybody knows that it’s crucial to post high-quality posts that increase reach and engagement rates. However, some businesses make a mistake by posting too much promotional content, including discounts and offers, which prevents building trust and strong connections with their audience.
There are several methods for posting your content. You can determine the content mix using one of these methods and modify it according to your objectives. Here are some of them:
- 80/20 rule: 80% of your content should be educational, inspirational, and engaging for your audience, while 20% can be promotional.
- Three-thirds (⅓ – ⅓ – ⅓): This rule means dividing your content posts into three thirds: The first presents promotional content, the second considers sharing ideas & industry-related content, and the final third offers engaging content to your audience.
- 7-3 rule: It indicates assigning 70% of content to educational, inspirational, & engagement purposes, while the remaining 30% considers writing direct sales & promotional content.
There are many other rules for a content mix that every business can use to publish its content according to its marketing objectives.
Know the daily number of posts to be published on each platform
Posting too much may bother your fans. It’s essential to know the recommended number of posts that you can publish daily on each social media platform which are:
- Facebook: One to two pieces of content daily.
- Twitter: One to five tweets daily.
- Instagram feed: Three to seven photos per week.
- Linkedin: as Twitter.
You can publish more or fewer content pieces according to the number of posts you decide to post within the month. Make sure that the quality comes over the quantity. Never ignore visual content such as images and videos.
Create a content calendar
Don’t post randomly. You should create a content calendar and determine the timing of each post.
Create different content types
The following are some examples of content that you can post on different social media platforms:
- Images with captions.
- Videos.
- Infographics.
- Posts.
- Reels and stories.
- Live videos.
- E-books.
8- Create an ads plan
While developing your ads plan within the social media marketing strategy, you should:
- Determine the goal of your ads, such as increasing followers, engagement, messages, conversions, website traffic, or lead generation.
- Identify your target audience as mentioned above.
- Select your platforms.
- Determine your ad budget.
- Identify the duration of each ad.
- Identify your metrics.
- Publish the ad and optimize.
9- Measure your metrics
Setting metrics related to your social media marketing goals lets you track the progress of your campaigns and adjust your resources. We build plans to test them; it is crucial to expect the need to modify your strategy in the short run according to the metrics you receive. Hence, you need to identify these metrics before implementing your social media marketing activities.
Several online tools measure your KPIs. Social media platforms provide vital tools that guide you throughout the digital marketing process, including Facebook Insights and Twitter analytics.
Social media moderation importance
Many businesses may consider creating an excellent social media marketing strategy without paying attention to community management and moderation, ignoring their importance.
Imagine publishing the perfect content that drives high engagement, but you are not communicating with your audience and not answering their inquiries professionally; this may backfire.
Social media accounts moderation helps you to:
- Improve your online presence: You have to engage with comments and messages once publishing your content. Engaging with customers can increase your brand awareness and create partnerships with your customers.
- Protect your page from spam and offensive comments written by some people. You can delete these comments once posted.
- Boost traffic to your website: When you reply to your audience’s inquiries, you may target them to visit relevant pages within your website.
- Increase sales: Providing the customer with all needed details about the product/service shortens their decision-making process.
Do you realize now the importance of not ignoring moderation while developing the best social media marketing strategy? We agree that it may be stressful for you, especially when there is no moderator specialized for this task. You can collaborate with a professional social media marketing agency in Egypt that includes a professional community management team to take charge of this task.
Developing the best social media marketing strategy in 2022 is necessary for every business to have steady steps toward achieving its marketing goals.
So you can read more about : Facebook Business Page – Best Ways to Use Facebook for Marketing
