The exponential growth of social media over the years has completely changed the world of marketing. The various existing platforms have allowed companies and professionals of all sizes to have access to an impressive amount of potential customers, while also offering the advantage of targeting the recipients of advertising campaigns and monitoring the results precisely.
In this article, I want to help you get started on social media by talking about the three main aspects of setting up a good social media marketing strategy.
1. Define your target and set goals
If you have a newborn company or so far you haven't had time to devote to developing a social media marketing strategy for your business, you will probably need some information to avoid making mistakes.
First of all, I would like to clarify one thing: managing social media at a corporate level is a real job, and as such it requires skills.
Well, if you want to start using social media for marketing, you need to know who you are talking to and why.
Although it is thought that anyone who can become your customer can be addressed to buy your product or service, to structure an effective strategy you need a little more precision or the risk is to rely on chance and waste resources unnecessarily.
Let's start with potential customers: who are these people? Unless you're selling spaceships during a meteor shower, it's unlikely that everyone, really everyone, needs you. To optimize all the communication work that you will have to do, therefore, it is essential to identify your target audience and offer the people who are part of it the solution to their problems.
Secondly, you should understand what your goals are. A marketing strategy can include various campaigns, each of which has different purposes: to those who already know you and have already bought from you, you will be addressed differently than those who do not yet follow you on social networks, therefore before starting any advertising campaign or creating organic posts you must have a clear idea of who you want to intercept and what actions you want to stimulate.
Think of these steps as building the foundation for a house. Once these two aspects are clarified, we can start creating effective content together.
2. Create an editorial calendar to plan social media communication
In a social media marketing strategy, the content is never the result of improvisation but the final result of a series of settings and guidelines studied based on the target and objectives. All these elements are enclosed in a tool called an editorial plan, within which the issues to be addressed in the contents, the tone of voice to be used, the frequency of publication and other theoretical aspects are established.
In the wake of the editorial plan, however, a document is created that sets out in black and white every single content to be created and published on the various platforms used. This document - the editorial calendar - is a real table in which the titles of the contents are defined, the topic they deal with, the purpose for which they are created, the social network for which they are intended and the moment of publication. About this last point, you must know that the day and time in which a post on Facebook, a story on Instagram or a video on YouTube is shared have a substantial impact on the number of interactions and therefore on their success.
In fact, for each social network, there are days and time slots in which engagement is higher, and it is in these moments that it makes sense to publish content. To understand which moments are most suitable for you, I suggest you base yourself on the habits of your audience; to get hold of this information, you just need to take advantage of the analytical tools that each social media makes available to users with business accounts and entrust yourself to an expert figure.
Furthermore, the Analytics sections will also be useful for monitoring the results of your content and understanding if your strategy is in line with the objectives or needs some correction.
3. Use social media management tools
Social media marketing doesn't make much sense if it's only done on one platform. Each social network has a user base that differs from the others not only in terms of objectives and interests but also in terms of age. Therefore, a company would do well to develop a marketing plan that involves more than one social channel. The problem is that managing multiple projects is quite demanding and requires a significant expenditure of mental energy and time.
If you have to take care of managing corporate social media yourself (or even if you entrust the task to a collaborator whose main duties are other) you will have great difficulty doing it well, and at best you will have a nervous breakdown. But since the potential of social media in marketing is enormous, it's not worth giving up due to organizational limitations that can be overcome with the help of the right tools and a figure like a copywriter who can manage your content.
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