How To Create an Effective Digital Marketing Strategy

Social media is one of the major aspects of our day to day life. That’s why businesses get into social media to connect with their audiences and customers. Actually, they know the importance of social media marketing but they don’t know how to utilize social media marketing for their business.

Most of the company hire young professionals usually the freshers one to handle their social media accounts because they are having the myth that young mind is more aware of social media and they can handle social media accounts better than an experienced digital marketer.

But now a day this strategy is not working for the business where we just post on social media and hope to get the higher engagements. Therefore the need for social media marketing strategy comes into existence. Social media marketing strategy is not a new concept but it is becoming an essential part of every business to get successful over social media.

It helps them to manage their social media account like a professional and measure it as per your KPIs. If you don’t create your social media marketing strategy and follow the same old age school method then it will give your competitor a chance to get more exposure over you.

It has been proven that most of the people would like to recommend the brands to other people if they have a good social media service experience with the brand. With the help of social media marketing strategies, you can also take advantage of influencers marketing.

Influencer marketing will help you to boost your social media marketing efforts. Therefore it should be part of your social media marketing strategy.
Here I am going to explain to you the 8 steps social media marketing strategy to follow in 2019.

Set Realistic Social Media Marketing Goals

Most businesses repeatedly make the same mistake, they don't set relevant and realistic social media marketing goals. They do not spend quality time to set these goals. Therefore, they face problems in measuring the goals according to their business, the KPI. Most of them know that they should be on social media, but they don't know what should happen on social media.

Social media marketing goals should be part of the overall business plan. The business set goals of its strategy to make the business progress in an effective way. Therefore, it is imperative for businesses to define their social media marketing goals that meet their business goals.
MAKE SURE YOUR GOALS ARE SMART
Make sure you're going to make smart goals for your social media marketing strategy. Because these goals will reflect the overall performance of your social media marketing efforts. There you need to make sure your goals are smart:-

• Specific
• Measurable
• Attainable
• Relevant
• Time-bound

Smarter goals are more likely that it helps to achieve your desired results. Social media is fraught with challenges, so you need to set achievable, realistic goals so that you don't get lost on social media.

Also realistic means you want 1 million fallbacks on Instagram. But it is also quite difficult for those who are performing well. So you should set goals that can be achieved by your business within a limited time period. Social media is not expecting more than enough.

In addition, set limits for your social media marketing. We know that every business has its own industry, and not all industries perform well on all social media platforms. So you should keep it in your mind and not try to get success on every social media platform.

Hundreds of social media platforms are available in the world. If you work on all social media platforms, there is always a chance that you are spreading your resources closely.

So you should target a couple of social media networks and perform well on the same social network to spend your valuable time and money. Here are the appropriate goals that a business can set in their social media marketing strategies.

• Increasing brand awareness
• Achieving a set higher quantity of sales
• Improving your ROI
• Driving people to increase in-store sales
• Grow your fan base
• Understand Your Social Media Audience

Do you know that social media is full of different audiences? Not all social media audiences are alike. People use social media for different purposes. For example, people use Instagram to connect with their favourite public figures.

On the other hand, people use LinkedIn only for commercial use. So you should choose the right social media platform where you can find your target audience. Influence marketing also helps you target a large number of people. So you also have to make sure that you can connect with the right presenter, who is with the audience who matches your target audience.

You will not find the same audience on all social media networks. For example, if you want to target middle-aged people, you should give more time on Facebook. On the other hand, if you want to target younger generations, you should spend time on Snapchat and Instagram. But if you still want to target the age group of 25 to 34 years, you should aim at Facebook.

At the beginning of our social media marketing campaign, you should try your social media efforts on all major social media networks. After that, you should measure which social media channel is helping you accomplish the goals you want.

Success on social media is not so easy, you must have a solid understanding of your customer base to succeed on social media. The personality of the buyers will help you understand your customer base.

Determine Your Most Relevant Metrics

Metrics help us to infer whether we are performing well on social media. Most businesses make the same mistake, they create a social presence and spend valuable time and money on social media networks, without seeing whether they are getting success or not.

There is much social media analytics available with each social media platform. But the worst part of these social analyses is that it is not the same for every business. It varies according to the business industry. For this, you need to create metrics that will help you measure your goals according to your industry.

I would not like to advise you to compare your social media efforts based on any other vanity metrics. For example, you should not compare your followers with your competitor's followers. Because now one day the world of social media is full of fake followers. And there is no value as a metric for these followers.

In addition, you have to compare your marketing goals to your own set metrics, this will help you get the answer whether you are meeting your goals or not.

Suppose your goal is brand awareness is, access to posts and post-engagement posts are your relevant statistics. It will help you to find out how many people you have reached on social media and how much you have received.

On the other hand, if you want to run direct sales, you'll have to look at the number of click Metrics. Tracking clicks will help you know how many people are going to buy your products.

Investigate How Your Competitors Approach Social Media

There is not any place where you will not find your competitor. As I’ve mentioned above that social media is full of competition. Therefore there is also your competitor who are also running their own social media strategy.

To beat your competitor over social media, you have to know that what they are doing over social media. You should know that, what is their focus area? What is their targeted audience? What kind of keywords they are using? And so on.

Competitor analysis helps you to get better ideas of your competitor strengths and weaknesses. It will help you get a better understanding of what your potential customers are expecting from your business.

You can also find the weak point of your competitors and exploit this gap with your social media marketing efforts.

For example one of your competitor performing well over Facebook but still struggling with its online presence on Twitter. Note that your target audience is using both of these social media networks. So that you can take advantage of by putting your resources to get a better presence over twitter.

There are lots of tools available in the market that help you to spy on your competitor. So that you can discover what type of content your competitors are sharing? What type of content is working better for them? So that you can produce better content than them and beat them on social media.

You could use a tool like Buzzsumo to spy on your competitors and discover their most successful social pieces of content. Once you know what types of content resound for them on which social networks, you can produce and share similar, but better, material.

Create Suitable Content to Share with Your Followers

Content is always a king whether it be SEO or social media. So to be successful on social media, you need to create high-quality content to share on social media.

Never made the mistake of sharing excessive amounts of promotional material. The main purpose of social media is to be social, it is not a marketplace where you sell or sell your products or services.

It is therefore important that your content should be an ideal blend of informative, entertainment as well as a small number of promotional materials.

Sharing is always to take care of social media, then you have to share other people's content on your social media profile. The influence follows the same approach as they know what kind of content is interesting for their followers. It helps them to regain their impressive position. You should also follow the same approach in order to succeed.

If you've already determined what your goals and what kind of content works for your competitors, you get a reasonable idea of what kind of content will work best for your target audience.

The 4 common questions should ask by yourself when creating the content for social media. 

• What is the optimal character count per social media channel?
• What is the number of hashtags for messages on each social channel?
• Should I be using emoji in my social media messages?
• What is the best content type for each channel?

Pictures and videos play an important role in social media. Visual content is always more likely to be shared on social media than text-based content. The reason behind Instagram's popularity is that it is based on visual content.

Without visual content, you cannot post on Instagram. Video is the best form of visual content. From passing years, video is becoming more popular. It has been proved that people prefer to buy products of goods that they have seen in a promotional video.

Engage With Your Audience

Engagement with your target audience will help you get success on social media. People do not use social media to read or view content. They use social media to interact with other people to get social. Engagement is a secret weapon of many successful businesses on social media.

These businesses engage with their audience regularly.
That's why you'll have to spend more time on the social media network to interact with your target audience.

In addition to posting on all social media networks. You should spend some time on social media networks to connect with your audience.

This will help you create custom hashtags. These custom hashtags will encourage your audience to share your belongings on social media. These hashtags will also help you find posts that refer to your business.

Establish the Best Times to Post and Set up a Content Calendar

Timing plays an important role in social media. Posting randomly on social media will not help you achieve the best results. Most social media networks use the same algorithms based on the excess of your post. That is why it is necessary to post when your target audience is online.

You can use the Social scheduling tool to set up and organize multiple posts at the same time. You should post multiple times on the social media network to find the best time to make busier.

Track Your Results and Adapt

This is not the last but least step in the social media marketing strategy. There is no guarantee that things will work according to your expectations, you have created a solid social media marketing strategy. If you don't track your results, you'll never know you're getting success or failure with your social campaigns.

Tracking of results begins with the process of setting goals and determines the most relevant metrics based on your business. So you have to keep an eye on these metrics to track the progress of your social media.

You should also use the pre-build analytics tools provided by popular social media platforms such as Facebook, insights, Twitter analytics, YouTube analytics, Pinterest Analytics, etc. These analytics will also help you track your performance.

These tools help you see what kind of content works best for you. So that you can make more of that kind of material. Also, note what kind of content does not work for your business on social media. Try to avoid this type of content and concentrate on your followers ' interest content.

Conclusion

These 8 stages of social media marketing strategy will help you get more exposure on social media. Remember that if you create your social media marketing strategy on these 8 steps. That does not mean that you will definitely be successful on social media.

These steps are just the basis of strategy and you have to create and implement a social media marketing strategy. If you find that it does not work for you as you were expecting, you make some changes in order for it to be more effective. In addition, you can also help the social media marketing company to be successful on social media.