Social marketing tip #4: How to achieve your business goals with social media

bysmartketeer

6.8K followers

Updated 6 years ago

According to Ironpaper 93% (!) of shoppers' buying decisions are influenced by social media.

And this is why having a powerful and sustainable social marketing plan is literally crucial if you want to succeed with your digital marketing. But, what the hack is a social media marketing plan? Well, it is what it sounds like: a clear and detailed plan for how you’ll use your different social media accounts to achieve your business goals.

Unfortunately, many people who are just starting out with social marketing believe that having some sort of previous experience with their individual accounts is enough to create a profitable and sustainable social media marketing strategy for their business. Wrong! Just because you know a few basic things about Facebook or Twitter, you are not a natural born social marketer who will be able to craft and to run outstanding, cohesive social media campaigns across multiple channels. Social media marketing requires a deeper, well-grounded knowledge base and … strong planning.

Every single post, status, tweet, image, etc, should aim to deliver the very same powerful and coherent message across all social media platforms and this is why social media marketing is challenging and time-intensive. The most difficult part of creating a truly efficient social media marketing plan is defining realistic and achievable platform-specific goals for each channel. More than that, you’ll have to keep your style and voice consistent across all of them, while each platform requires different content types and analytical methods. You are going to need a solid, consistent process and of course, some handy tools that will help you to get the job done. Sounds a bit scary? Don’t worry! As you’ll see, is definitely not rocket science …

Now let’s see the 6 most important steps that will help you to outline a successful social media marketing strategy:

1. Defining your ideal target audience

Defining your customers and your main target audience is presumably not a new concept for you. If you are planning to create a social media marketing strategy in order to achieve certain business objectives, you probably already went through the same process in the earlier stages of shaping and setting up your business. In other words, you should already know a lot of things about your customers and your potential prospects. If you haven’t already, you’ll have to get a really clear idea about their social media habits too … Knowing that is extremely important because will help you to choose the right social platforms, to create the right kind of content for your main target audience and as a result you’ll be able to increase the conversions around your products or services.

Producing generic content to a broad, general audience won’t help you. This is why I strongly recommend you to define your user or customer personas by creating semi-fictional representations of your ideal target groups. Consider including relevant demographics (age, gender, location, ethnicity, industry, education level, income, marital status, etc), motivational factors, behavior and buying patterns, hobbies, fears, priorities, etc. Believe me, these semi-fictional characters are extremely important for the success of your social marketing strategy. According to Cintell persona-based content can increase customer engagement up to six-fold and 71% of companies who exceed lead and revenue goals have documented personas.

The more specific you are about who they are and what are they needs, the deeper an emotional connection your customers will have with your business and the easier it will be to convince them to take the desire action.

2. Assessing the competition

You probably already know who your main competitors are. Go and take a closer look at their social profiles and social media habits. What type of content they are using in their social media marketing strategy? How often they are posting? What about their tone? Which campaigns or posts do their followers engage with the most? Which social media platforms are more important for them? Are they using any ways to connect with your audience that you haven’t tried yet? This will help you to see how you stack up against your competition and more importantly, to understand what your current – and potential – fans and followers expect from you.

3. Defining your goals

Evidently, the very first step in creating any plan is to define what exactly it is that you want to accomplish. So, ask yourself what do you want to achieve with your social media presence? Do you want to:

• build long-term relationships?

• establish or increase brand awareness?

• engage or re-engage with your current customers?

• increase retention and customer loyalty?

• find and attract new customers?

• increase your follower count?

• generate subscribers?

• promote products, services or events?

• find new investors or partnerships?

As you can see, social media can efficiently serve a very wide variety of objectives and purposes. Obviously, you can – and you should – have more than just one goal, but always keep in mind that if you are pursuing too many goals, you are not going to accomplish anything. So, don’t spread yourself too thin and try to set realistic goals for your social media campaigns. Any realistic goal has 5 equally important characteristics:

• Attainable; the line between challenging and unrealistic, impossible goals sometimes can be very thin. Even if you want to, you won’t be able to craft 50 social media posts every single day. On the other hand, creating 5 posts per day sounds completely achievable.

• Relevant; also, crafting 5 social media posts per day is a planned task not a goal. The goal accomplished with 5 daily posts should be for example, an increased follower count.

• Specific; aiming for 5 posts per day it’s a good starting point, but planning 2 Facebook posts to make a few new sales and 3 tweets to get some new followers or subscribers is even better. Planning ahead even the publishing time for each post is much more better; and so on ….

• Measurable; planning 2 Facebook posts per day to get a few new sales is relevant, specific and probably attainable, but isn’t measurable. Aiming for 2 new sales generated with those 2 Facebook posts is something different and … measurable.

• Time-oriented; if you want to stay on track you are going to need a clear deadlines. If you are planning to publish those two Facebook posts at 4 PM, they should be ready at least by 3 PM. Without clear deadlines you won’t be able to efficiently monitor your results.

Basically, every efficient social media strategy or campaign can be summarized in one concise and very straightforward sentence. If you are going to define your goals with the above five characteristics in your mind, you’ll be always able to summarize your social media marketing goals in one simple sentence using the following format:

“This social campaign will increase my GOAL by PERCENTAGE over TIMEFRAME”.

Let’s see an example: “this Facebook campaign will increase my SALES by 10% over 3 MONTHS”.

It’s relevant, specific, measurable, time-oriented and … hopefully attainable.

4. Choosing the social platforms that suit your business objectives

Defining your goals and planning or creating your content isn’t possible without knowing which social media platforms are you going to use. Deciding where to focus your social marketing efforts and framing your decisions about where, when and how to engage your audience sometimes can be a confusing process and a daunting task, especially if you are new in social media marketing. Relax, I am going to share with you some useful tips and thoughts that can help you to choose the right platforms for your business.

First of all, let’s make a clean breast of three main media categories:

• Owned media; it’s a channel literally owned and fully controlled by you; blog, forum, website, etc.

• Rented media; you are managing your social presence occupying a page or a portion of a given channel with the permission of the actual owner; Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter, etc.

• Occupied media; there is no ownership of any kind and you have no control at all. For example the employees of a company may participate in forums or online communities – in either an unofficial or official capacity -, but always on behalf of the company.

Needless to say, consumer conversations can – and will – take place across all three of these traditional or social channel categories and you’ll have to decide which are important and/or accessible for your own business. Once you know what media categories are you going to use, you’ll have to choose the perfect channels within the given category. Here are some useful tips for you …

As a first step you should narrow your focus. The idea of being present everywhere can be really tempting, but it would be a great mistake especially for new businesses or social marketers. Building and nurturing an engaged and loyal fan base will require a lot of effort and time even for one or two social media platforms. It’s far more efficient to focus on just one – or maximum two – social media channel(s) and grow from there. You should start narrowing down your options by asking yourself the following questions:

• What behavior am I trying to drive?

• Who are my most important prospects and customers and what do I know about their social media habits?

• Which social channels can be easily aligned with my business objectives?

• Which types and channels lend themselves to the specific products or services I offer?

• Which social channel requires less engagement efforts from me in order to produce the desired outcome?

Once you have already narrowed down your options, you’ll have to actually decide which particular social media channel(s) will make the most sense for your social marketing efforts. Just try to define and to carefully balance those factors which are really important for your business:

• Do your customers and potential prospects really spend time on the given platform?

• Are there any demographic issues that can influence your results?

• Does it work well for the type of content you are going to create?

• Does it make any sense for the type of your business?

• Are your main competitors present on the given channel?

• Are there any affordable paid advertisement solutions?

• Are there reliable and easy-to-use analytical tools?

Once you have made your choice(s) you’ll have to create your business account(s). What I am trying to say here: don’t use your personal social media accounts for business purposes! Even if you already have three individual Facebook accounts, you are going to need a brand new Facebook business profile and probably a Facebook business page too in order to start building a solid fan base for your business. Whether or not to attempt multiple – or corporate – accounts on a given social platform is a very common question in this phase and for some reasons many business owners instinctively tend to segment their accounts by various factors, such as product category, audience group, geographical area, etc. My recommendation: don’t do it! If you are not a giant corporation with a complex organization chart and dozens of stores all over the world, just forget the whole multiple-account-mania; managing multiple or segmented accounts is even more challenging, and a poorly managed or abandoned social business account can easily ruin all your social marketing efforts.

5. Outlining your content strategy

In order to outline an efficient content creation process for your social media strategy you’ll have to focus on four essential issues:

• Choosing the right type, format and structure for your content; at this point your options are almost endless and is very important to find the perfect type and format for each campaign or social channel you are going to use.

• Using a consistent and aesthetic color scheme and visual style; the point is to keep everything consistent throughout all your visual assets. All you images, videos, graphical elements, infographics, etc should revolve around the same well-chosen color scheme which is perfectly compatible with your main brand colors. Nowadays many marketers are using so-called color-coded campaign content to see which content belong to which campaign, but I don’t really recommend it, because it’s a practice that has nothing to do with consistency and as a result will damage your unique and consistent visual style.

• Delivering value; no matter what content types or formats are you going to choose, the most important rule is to deliver real value and helpful information to your followers. Try to create a content bank filled with ideas and topics that your audience will love.

• Establishing a realistic and sustainable publishing frequency; consistency is extremely important for the success of your social media strategy. Creating enough content for two mostly text-based Facebook posts every day it’s completely achievable, but if you are focusing on Pinterest and long, visually enhanced infographics you probably won’t be able to create two astonishing graphical masterpieces every single day.

6. Crafting a scheduling plan

Once you know what social platforms are you going to use, what type of content are you going to create and how many content are you going to produce in a given time period, you should outline a simple, transparent scheduling plan that will help you to easily stay on track without forgetting or delaying the next upcoming publishing date or time, and more importantly, without oversaturating your social channels. Additionally, you can also use it to lay out a clear purpose for each piece of content throughout your campaign(s)

Finding the perfect publishing frequency and crafting a truly efficient scheduling plan can be quite challenging especially if is your first attempt, but basically, everything revolves around two major questions: how often to post on social media and what are the best times to post? These are highly debated issues and there is a ton of – often confusing and controversial – material out there regarding these questions. In my opinion there are no magic recipes or generally applicable rules for this matter, so I am going to give you my usual advice: check out the available guidelines, make some choices to create an initial scheduling plan and make your own tests over time to adapt your original plan to the existing realities of your own business and situation.

Here are some research-based and data-driven recommendations that can help you to outline your initial scheduling plan …

• How often to post or publish on social media every day?

Facebook: is widely used at work and at home both on desktop and mobile; max 2 times per day. Posting more than two times per day will dramatically decrease the engagement. Focus on creating one or two truly unique and visually enhanced posts every day.

Twitter: the typical tweet is something to read during breaks, commutes, etc; 3-10 times per day. The engagement might decrease slightly after the third tweet, but the timeline is moving fast and tweeting around 4-5 times per day is an efficient way to hit different time zones with the very same content piece. In fact you can tweet up to 10-15 times every day and still have a positive impact on engagement.

LinkedIn: once per (week)day; evidently, you’ll have to make that singular post count! More than that, LinkedIn is a professional network, so you should invest time and effort in creating unique and valuable content.

Google Plus: is for a more tech-savvy audience; 2-3 times per day. In theory, the more often you post the more engagement you will get, but posting more than 3 times per day is considered to bee too aggressive, therefore is not recommended.

Pinterest: it’s definitely an evening sport; 3-5 pins per day. It’s OK to share up to five different pins per day assuming that you have enough quality content.

• What are the best times to post?

Facebook: the best days are Thursday and Friday, but any weekday is OK. The optimal time is early afternoon between 1 P.M. and 3 P.M.; 1 P.M. Usually will result in more shares, while 3 P.M. will probably get you more clicks.

Twitter: for some reasons Wednesday seems to bee a peak-day for Twitter users, otherwise any day is a “usual day”. The best times are 6 P.M. and 12 P.M.; 5 P.M. Will get you more re-tweets, but 12 P.M. Usually will result in a higher CTR. Also, the weekdays are performing better in the B2B segment and the weekends are more efficient for B2C marketers.

LinkedIn: it’s a professional network, therefore you will have to focus on workdays. The best days are Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. The best time is between 8 A.M. and 5 P.M. and the peak is Tuesday 10 A.M..

Google Plus: any weekday is OK, but you can forget the weekends. The best time is between 9 A.M. and 11 A.M.

Pinterest: the best day is Saturday. The best times are between 8 P.M. and 11 P.M.

As I said, these are recommendations, nothing more. Use them to create an initial scheduling plan, then track your results and use the gathered data to improve your original approach. Each major social platform has its own “native” analytical solutions and if you are ready to invest some time to learn how these platform-specific tools are working, you’ll be able to efficiently refine your scheduling plan over time.

Wrapping it up

The above 6 steps are vital if you want to create a well-grounded social media marketing strategy. Social media is an incredibly complex and constantly changing, evolving medium and if you don’t have a solid, well-balanced marketing strategy you won’t be able to meet and to nurture the needs of your followers.

Fact is: many marketers and businesses struggle to understand it, and sadly, there are many who failed to produce a real quantifiable success in their social marketing efforts. Usually the failure is caused by an inappropriate approach or a superficial understanding of the concept of social media. If you want to unleash the real power of the social beast in order to increase your sales and to constantly acquire more new customers, you’ll have to carefully plan and craft the messages you want to convey and also, you’ll have to abide and respect the unwritten governing rules.