How to build an effective social media marketing strategy for 2022

Introduction

We’ll discuss social media marketing strategy in this article. Then we’ll go over a step-by-step process for creating a social media marketing strategy from the ground up.

So, what exactly is a social media marketing strategy? A social media marketing strategy, in simple terms, is a synopsis of everything you aspire to accomplish and achieve on social media. It will direct your activities and allow you to assess whether you are achieving or failing in them. A basic, concise, and well-crafted social media strategy is required before you start with social media marketing.

However, how should it be designed? I’ll show you how to craft a simple social media marketing approach. Then, using a few instances, I’ll go over each of these steps one by one.

Selection of social media marketing tools relevant to your business, creation of a buyer persona for your business, analysis of your competitors, conducting a social media audit, creating social media accounts and improving profiles, learning from others, preparing a social media content calendar, and evaluation of your existing social media marketing strategy are the steps of social media marketing strategy. Let us now go over each of these topics one by one.

The following are the steps of a social media marketing strategy:

What are your goals for social media marketing?

What do you aim to accomplish with social media marketing? Whatever your social media marketing goals are, keep in mind that different organisations may have different goals for social media marketing, such as brand awareness, increased sales, maximum conversions, lead generation, website traffic, and so on. Setting a goal will allow you to track your progress precisely.

While developing your goals, use the S.M.A.R.T framework

You might wonder if there are any specific guidelines or frameworks that can assist you in creating your goals on social media at this point. Definitely stick to the S.M.A.R.T framework while creating your goals. According to the S.M.A.R.T framework, each goal should be Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bound.

Each goal should be Specific

The goal of just increasing Facebook page followers, for example, is imprecise and non-specific. On the other hand, the very specific goal of gaining 1,000 new followers on the Facebook page throughout this month will assist you in keeping track of your progress.

The goal should be Measurable

You should be able to measure your goal with the help of some metrics when you set it. The goal of increasing page engagement, for example, is a good idea, but it won’t be your goal unless you identify how to quantify it. Your social media engagement can be measured by the number of likes, shares, comments, and other actions taken.

The goal should be Attainable

Any goal you set for yourself should be attainable. You set the goal, taking into account your budget, resources, and time constraints.

Your goal should be Relevant

The goal should be relevant and align with your business’s broader goals. If your objective is to acquire 100 new subscribers for your YouTube channel, for example, you need to be clear about how this would benefit your organization.

The goal should be time bound

You should have a defined timeframe for achieving your goals. It will tell you when to measure your goal’s success.

How to create a buyer persona

Understand your customer’s pain points

To understand your customer’s pain points, you must first create a buyer persona for your target audience. Your buyer must have pain points or difficulties that you can help them solve with your product or service. Identify your clients’ pain points and include them in your buyer persona. It will aid you in the building of a loyal audience for your product or services.

Identify your customer’s goals

The identification of your customer’s goals is one of the important phases in the buyer persona creation process. Your potential consumers aren’t looking for an instant solution to their problem when they come to your website. Rather, they may be seeking your product or services to help them accomplish a certain goal. These objectives will help you better understand your customer, and you can target them by offering strategies to help them achieve their goals.

Use your collected information to create a buyer persona

Create a buyer persona when you have a lot of information about your potential customers. To give your buyer persona a name, designation, demographics, and other features, you must describe them as a real person. Make sure you’ve addressed the persona’s pain points and goals. There may not be anyone in your client database with this name. It’s simply a description of a person who represents a particular segment of your clientele. Similarly, not everyone in your client group has to be a perfect match for a single buyer persona. This buyer persona will enable you to consider your potential clients in terms of the defined attributes.

An example of a buyer persona

Customer: Mr. James

Attribute	Description
Designations	CFO, CEO, Managing Directors, Senior Level Managers
Location	North America, Canada, Europe, South Korea, Japan, China, UAE
Background	Excellent Educational Background, A target-oriented person, Acclaimed family life.
Gender	Males make up the majority
Age	45+
Language	Not Specific.
Annual Income	Approx. 30+ Lakhs INR
Interests	Interactions with well-known and high-priced brands on social media, Travelling, learning new cultures, Socializing, music
Motivation	Increasing profit margins for their businesses
Search Terms	<market_name> market research reports, <market_name> industry analysis, global market size of <market_name>, <market_name> growth
Other relevant traits	It’s really tough to make contact and schedule time for communication on social media.
Favorite social networks	Twitter, LinkedIn
Least favorite social networks	TikTok
Buying behavior	To find products or services, prospects mainly use LinkedIn. Contact for a sales letter and, after weighing the pros and cons of various service providers, make a decision.
Spending power	High
Challenges	Prospects seek exact assumptions/forecasts based on industry data and complex decision-making rationale.
Goals	They search for markets having strong growth potential.
How we (business, product, or service) can help?	We can provide analysed information and the latest market research intelligence on industry trends and growth opportunities.
Purchasing barrier?	Mainly budget
Messaging	We can demonstrate how we obtain critical data and provide actionable insights to our clients. We will provide sample reports so that they become confident in our abilities. We can also show them a list of customers who have purchased our reports and have left positive comments.
Preferred content type	PDF Sample Reports, Excel Datasheets, Textual content, Graphical Representation of data.

Take into account the social media strategy of your competitors

Analyzing your social media competition is a key step in developing a social media marketing strategy. 

But the important question is, how can we figure out who our competitors are? What kind of information should be gathered about them? And, more specifically, on which social media network are they? In the marketing paradigm, this is known as “competition analysis,” and it entails determining your opponent’s strengths and flaws.

In social media marketing, competitor analysis will help you identify who your competitors are on social media, which platforms they use, and how they use social media platforms. It will also help you set your benchmark against your competitors and determine how well their social media strategy is working. As a result, you can identify the weaknesses in your own social media marketing strategies.

In social media competition analysis, there are four steps. So, let’s go over each step one by one.

Who are your competitors?

The first step is to figure out who your competitors are. You may already be aware of your competition in general, but it’s critical to know who your competitors are on social media. For this purpose, we’ll take the help of a few tools and platforms.

Make a list of important keywords that you anticipate your customers will use to find your business on the Google search engine. Buy market research reports online, best market research reports, market research companies near me, and market research report prices are examples of good keywords for the term market research reports. Assume you have a list of keywords, say 20. Does this imply that your customers use all of these terms you’ve found on a regular basis? No, that is not the case. We will use a very famous and free tool called Google Keyword Planner to check out these keywords and see which keywords are used by consumers to find you online.

Based on average monthly searches, this tool can assist you in narrowing down the list of terms. Insert and analyse each term from your primary list one at a time, noting the average monthly searches. Now, take the top 15 keywords based on average monthly searches and type them in one by one in the Google search bar. In each case, go to all of the websites that appear on the first page of Google and write down their names and inspect their websites to see if they are competitors or not. Therefore, you will obtain the names of various brands that you think are your competitors. Visit their websites and look in the header and footer sections for links to their social media pages.

You already have information on your competition, all you have to do now is analyse it and conduct a SWOT analysis of your business. Simply said, it involves identifying your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. When comparing your brand to your competitors, keep in mind that your brand’s strengths and weaknesses are internal to your business, which means you can control them. Your goal is to mention a few metrics that indicate you are better than your competition, such as the number of subscribers, the frequency of posts, the quality of the posts, and so on. Similarly, make a list of a few metrics in which you lag behind your competition. It might be the number of likes on your post, the sharing of your content, or something else. External threats and opportunities also exist for your brand. Identify a few opportunities that you can take advantage of.

An example format for analysing a competitor’s social media account

What I liked about the specific elements of the competitor’s social media page

Home	It includes their new report’s details, photos, and shopping and message-sending options.
Call to Action (CTA)	A messaging-related CTA has been created.
Photos	On this Facebook page, the majority of the important images they’ve made so far for their published reports are displayed.
Posts	Shows all the posts they have made so far, on this page.

Suggestions

The Cover Image	The cover image isn’t really appealing. It does, however, share important contact information. It can be improved.
Page Updates	The content on this page is old. The last post was made a long time ago.
How The logo is designed?	The page’s logo is not easily recognisable. It doesn’t communicate any kind of message. The logo could be better.
Reviews	The reviews on this page are very old. The last review was made a long time ago. No recent engagement has been discovered.
Videos	No videos to show. This is something that should be considered.
Community	The page shows a low number of likes and shares.
Integration with other platforms	Not shared
Complain and response	Such a feature is completely missing. It demonstrates a poor level of visitor engagement. The potential buyers aren’t being appropriately targeted.
Events	There’s no such information shared.
Strategy Formulation	They lack a social media marketing strategy. Posts were mechanically made without appropriate targeting. A small number of hashtags are used often. They should concentrate more on social media marketing.

 Conduct a social media audit

We’ve identified our competitors and their social media activities. We’re now ready to move on to the next stage of our social media marketing strategy. Here, you’ll need to do a social media audit. If you’re already on social media, you should assess your social media marketing activities.

What do we mean by social media audit?

A social media audit is a self-evaluation of your social media efforts to determine what is and is not working. Are there any imposter accounts, or ones that use your name but aren’t yours? Is it necessary to update your social media profiles? Is there any way to expand your social media presence? Let’s go over the various steps of a social media audit in a little more detail.

Step#1: Trace out your all social media accounts

The first step in conducting a social media audit is to identify all of your social media accounts. You ask a few simple questions here. Consider the following questions.

Are you actively using all your social media accounts created by you in the past?

Are you sure that imposters haven’t created any fake account of your brand?

To find the answers to these questions, go to the web and type in the name of your brand or company, then look for social media accounts associated with it. Don’t be surprised if you come across a few accounts with the same name as your brand that you aren’t using or didn’t create. There’s a chance you’ve made a few accounts in the past that you haven’t used. Make a list of these accounts and begin the process of deleting them. Additionally, there may be a few accounts created by imposters.

Step#2: Check whether account is complete

Check whether your social media accounts are complete or not. Focus on all these accounts and make sure they’re complete from every angle. Check it first for your profile and cover image, as well as your profile bio, call to action, pinned post, and handle count verification.

Step#3: Identify your best post

The next step is to determine which of your posts is most effective. It’s critical to identify at least three of your top posts from each of your social media sites, using various metrics such as likes, shares, and comments. Look for a pattern of engagement in these posts and try to figure it out. For example, when do people share your content the most? Whether it’s a video or an image?

Step#4: Understand your audience from each network

Analyzing your audience from each network is the next step in the social media audit process. It’s important to know who you’re reaching out to through each of the channels in this phase of the social media audit. For simplicity’s sake, you can begin with demographics. Instagram users, for example, are younger than  Facebook users. LinkedIn users have a higher income than those who use social media. You can also look at the performance of each network you’re using to determine the channel’s return on investment (ROI).

Create accounts and improve profiles

If you already use social media, the social media audit step of strategy formulation is simply relevant. If you’re a beginner, setting up a new account and filling out your profile is crucial. You must choose which network or networks to utilise and create a profile on those networks. There are several social media platforms, and your potential consumers are unlikely to use just one. They typically use a variety of platforms. As a result, you need to be visible on multiple platforms and develop separate strategies for each network. You may use Facebook solely for sharing the latest news or Twitter solely for customer service. For example, LinkedIn can be used to share and promote your work atmosphere.

Learn from others

There are many successful brands on social media, and you should always learn from them. There are a variety of sources where you can learn about successful brands on social media, such as official websites or social media platforms, where you can find social media success stories.

Prepare social media content calendar

On a social media content calendar, the date and time that you will publish your content on each social media channel are listed. Having a good video content planner in place has numerous benefits, including the ability to save you a significant amount of time. You will be able to post consistently because you have already arranged your posts for future distribution. Because you are working ahead of time, it will assist you in detecting any typing mistakes.

Review your strategy

Now that everything is in order, you can proceed with your plans. However, there is no guarantee that everything will go as planned. It’s possible that something does not work as you expected. Monitor your results and take corrective actions on a regular basis to address any issues that may occur during execution. You’ll realise how critical it is to begin a marketing strategy. Evaluate your strategy based on the information you’ve gathered. It assists you in determining what works and what does not. This will allow you to further improve your marketing strategy.