HOW TO: Plan An Effective Social Media Strategy

Becki Chester, CEO, Digicrab – a former journalist, Becki wrote for four national magazines before joining a leading digital marketing agency. She has extensive experience in managing SEO, PPC and social media campaigns.

Digital Marketing Services is an essential part of the expansion of all businesses in the current climate. However, of all digital marketing services, social media seems to be the most widely used, due in part to the huge amount of traffic that social networking sites receive, and the ease to which a social media can be used to promote a brand. But in order to maximize the effectiveness of such a strategy, you have to take a structured and conscious approach, otherwise, your project will be lost in the tidal wave of other media on these platforms.

So here are my five general steps for a comprehensive social media strategy.

Step 1: Understand your customer

This is your first port-of-call. Who are the customers you want to interact with on social media? What do they like? Brainstorm around five ‘hot topics’ which your customers might be interested in, and remember to keep them in mind whilst constructing content: because with content marketing you promote your brand by sharing similar interests with your customer.  These topics should come from an understanding of the psychographics, the influencing factors and the behavior of the types of people you’re after. The more specific you are about this ‘marketing persona’, the easier it will be to construct content for them.

Step 2: Set a Goal

First of all: what’s the point? What are you hoping to achieve with this? Try and base your goal on the number of leads generated over a period of time, or a certain number of ‘shares’. Achievable and measurable goals are a must. Also, make sure you only have one area for your objective. Most digital marketing services plan to achieve one of the following aims:

  • Attracting new customers; This is probably the most common use of social media. Because of the sheer number of people on social networking platforms, one objective could be using your page to direct traffic to your company website.
  • Building your brand; Give your customers a reason to talk about your brand. Word-of-mouth advertising is the most sought-after type of marketing and is often difficult to achieve. If you have a product that could work well in a social media context, use that advantage and get your customers to begin having a conversation about your brand.
  • Engaging with your customers; By creating a dialogue with your customers, you have the potential to create loyalty. A repeat customer is the foundation of almost all successful companies, so if you want to make your brand one that is interactive, and bring people in that way, then social media is a useful tool.
  • Supporting sales; Similar to the above, supporting sales is about creating content that feeds into your products. If people have queries about your products, you can answer them on social media, by supplementing your products with other information.

Step 3: Put It into Practice

To put your ideas into practice, create an editorial calendar that works alongside your promotional calendar; planning content and thereby keywords based on promotional offers. By doing this, you make the next aspect much easier.

By creating content keywords, and a calendar, all you need is to assign an individual (or team, depending on the size of your digital marketing services) to keep the sites up-to-date. Now you’re up-and-running!

Step 4: Evaluate

This is a hugely important step. Once you’ve started, make sure you are well-versed in the huge variety of social media. Select your success metrics well, and keep an eye on them, as the instantaneous nature of social media marketing feedback is one of the major advantages of the format.

There are plenty of online monitoring tools, such as Klout or Edge Rank, that you can use. Google Alerts is also useful in this regard, as it can help keep you aware of your brand keywords, and what people are saying about your brand.

Step 5: Repeat!

With any marketing strategy, it is important to keep it up-to-date, and that you react to your market and how well previous strategies have gone. So, once you’ve evaluated the metrics that are available, go through the cycle again. Make sure you keep building on what you learn, reacting to fresh assessments by laying out new plans with new objectives.