Building your social media marketing strategy for 2022
According to the 2021 Sprout Social Index™, the most common goals for social are increasing brand awareness (58%) and increasing community engagement (41%). Whether you want to build a larger following or a more active community, taking the time to define your social goals is the first step to reaching them.
Sample social media goals for 2022 and beyond
Increase brand awareness. This means getting your name out there. To create authentic and lasting brand awareness, avoid solely publishing promotional messages. Instead, focus on content that emphasizes your personality and values first.
Generate leads and sales. Whether online, in-store or directly through your social profiles, followers don’t make purchases by accident. For example, are you about alerting customers about new products and promos? Are you integrating your product catalog into your social profiles? Are you running exclusive deals for followers?
Growing your audience also means discovering conversations around your business and industry that matter the most. Digging through your social channels is nearly impossible without monitoring or listening for specific keywords, phrases or hashtags. Having a pulse on these conversations helps you expand your core audience (and reach adjacent audiences) much faster.
Boost community engagement. Index data shows that 46% of consumers think brands that engage their audience are best in class on social, so it pays to explore new ways to grab the attention of your current followers. This means experimenting with messaging and content. For example, does your brand promote user-generated content and hashtags?
Drive traffic to your site. Simple enough. If you’re laser-focused on generating leads or traffic to your website, social media can make it happen. Whether through promotional posts or social ads, keeping an eye on conversions and URL clicks can help you better determine your ROI from social media.
Any combination of these goals is fair game and can help you better understand which networks to tackle, too. When in doubt, keep your social media marketing strategy simple rather than complicating it with too many objectives that might distract you. Pick one or two and rally your team around them.
2. Take time to research your target audience
Only 55% of marketers use social data to better understand their target audience, making it a huge opportunity for both leaders and practitioners. Much of what you need to know about your audience to influence your social media marketing strategy is already available. You just have to know where to look.
Remember: different platforms attract different audiences
Take today’s social media demographics, for example. These numbers speak directly to which networks your brand should approach and what types of content to publish. Here are some key takeaways for your 2022 social media marketing strategy:
Do your homework on your existing social media audience
Although the demographic data above gives you insight into each channel, what about your own customers? Further analysis needs to be done before you can determine what your real-world social customers actually look like.
There’s plenty of other sources of valuable audience data to supplement your social media insights. This includes your Google and email analytics, your CRM, your customer service platform or even your best-selling products.
5 Benefits Of Social Media Marketing
You can have a social media marketing strategy in place to achieve a broad range of benefits from creating two-way conversations with potential customers to expand the reach of whatever you’re selling. I am going to mention the top 5 benefits of social media marketing:
1. SMM Consistently Warms Up A New Audience For Your Business
Facebook and other social platforms allow you to use content to connect with the potential audience and warm them up. While it’s hard to get people’s attention, you can easily break through the noise with engaging content.
2. SMM Builds Stronger Relationships With Customers
3. SMM Generates More Leads & Conversions
4. SMM Gives You A Leg Up On Competitors
For example, if paid Facebook ads are generating good results for your competitors, you should try it too. However, you shouldn’t copy your competition in a way that could hurt your reputation. Make sure to stand out.
5. SMM Is Cost-Effective
It doesn’t cost anything to create a profile on most social networking sites. In case you want to run a paid campaign to boost your content, the cost is relatively low as compared to other advertising platforms.
When done well, your chances of producing greater returns on your investment are higher. If paid advertising is a part of your social media marketing strategy, be sure to start small and work your way up as you become more comfortable.
There’s always something you can do to improve your digital advertising results. One of the benefits of social media marketing is that it allows you to track your performance and fine-tune your strategy using real-time data.
The Application Of #R3MAT Method In Social Media Marketing
Today, digital marketers have to create personalized experiences across channels. While growth possibilities are endless, you have to consistently deliver the right message to the right audience at the right time (#R3MAT).
To be more relevant and effective, you need to make sure the context is clear. In other words, you need to understand the psychology of what people do when they use a particular platform. People use different social media channels with a different mindset.
Be sure to take into account the context when creating content, and don’t interrupt the user experience. Reach people at the right time and with the right message in a way that adds value to their overall experience.
Creating your social media marketing plan
Now that you know the essentials of a social media marketing strategy, it’s time to put it into action. Your social media marketing plan is the roadmap to carrying out your strategy. It puts structure around your efforts so you can measure your success and make sure you’re spending your resources wisely. Here’s how to create your social media marketing plan:
- Choose your platforms: Choose based on your target audience, platforms popular for your industry, as well as your bandwidth. Only take on the number of platforms you can actively keep up with. You can always start with one and then add on more slowly as you get the hang of them.
- Set goals and objectives: These should be simple and task-like to start, like post once a day for a month, get your profiles set up, or do a competitive analysis. Once you get into a rhythm and gather insights, you’ll be able to set more specific and strategic goals like increase your following by X% or publish X [content types you’ve found your audience likes] per month.
- Report and adjust regularly: Use each platform’s analytics to identify which posts generate the most engagement, whether you’re getting more followers, and to see your audience demographics. Harness and scale up what works and nix what doesn’t.
A Quick Overview of Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing first started with publishing. Businesses were sharing their content on social media to generate traffic to their websites and, hopefully, sales. But social media has matured far beyond being just a place to broadcast content.
Nowadays, businesses use social media in a myriad of different ways. For example, a business that is concerned about what people are saying about its brand would monitor social media conversations and response to relevant mentions (social media listening and engagement). A business that wants to understand how it’s performing on social media would analyze its reach, engagement, and sales on social media with an analytics tool (social media analytics). A business that wants to reach a specific set of audience at scale would run highly-targeted social media ads (social media advertising).
Resources:
https://sproutsocial.com/insights/social-media-marketing-strategy/
https://www.digitalmarketing.org/blog/what-is-social-media-marketing
https://www.wordstream.com/social-media-marketing
https://buffer.com/social-media-marketing
https://www.digitalmarketing.org/blog/the-importance-of-social-media-marketing