How to Develop a Social Media Marketing Strategy 101

A social media marketing strategy is critical to the success of your content reaching the correct target audience and generating sales and conversions. If you’re wondering how you can stand out amongst competitors online, the answer is a clear social media marketing strategy!

In this blog, we’ll guide you through a step-by-step guide on how to develop a successful social media marketing strategy, which aligns with your business goals, attracts your target audience, and increases sales.

So, if you’re a beginner with building a social media marketing strategy or want to identify how to improve your existing strategy, this blog will help guide you through how to maximise the benefits of social media marketing for your business.

Developing A Social Media Marketing Strategy

In this blog, we’ll take you through how to determine your goals, identify your target audience, recognise the potential of different social media platforms, and create engaging content that will generate engagement and sales. 

Setting SMART Goals For Your Social Media Marketing Strategy

One of the most important fundamentals of a successful social media marketing strategy is setting clear, tangible, and achievable goals. Useful criteria to follow when determining your goals is the SMART acronym, which stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Time-bound.

What Are Smart Goals?

Let’s take a look at what the SMART acronym stands for and how this is essential for any social media marketing strategy.

The objectives of the SMART acronym include:

• Specific: Your goals should be clear, concise, and well-defined, leaving no uncertainty about what you want to achieve. This helps you pinpoint exactly what you would like to achieve based on your social media marketing strategy.
• Measurable: You should be able to track the progress and outcomes of your goals. Without measurable goals, you can’t truly know if your strategy is working. This is very useful as measurable goals allow you to recognise if there are any adjustments that need to be made in your social media marketing strategy to get the best results possible.
• Achievable: Your goals should be realistic and attainable. While it’s good to be ambitious, setting goals that may not be achievable based on timing, budget, or resources can result in your social media marketing strategy not being effective.
• Realistic: Your goals should align with your overall business objectives and the needs of your target audience. This is important to consider as your social media marketing strategy should be informed by your overall business goals to generate relevant and useful results for your business.
• Time-bound: Your goals should have a timeline, which creates a sense of urgency and helps you prioritise your tasks. Establishing a timeline is important for businesses of any size as this breaks down tasks according to your work schedule and improves the organisation of social media work.

Why is Goal Setting Important in a Social Media Marketing Strategy?

Setting SMART goals is crucial for your social media marketing strategy as it gives you clear direction and goals that can be easily measured and achieved within a set timeline. It also ensures that every aspect of your social media effort aligns with what you ultimately want to achieve. Without setting clearly defined goals, your social media marketing strategy runs the risk of a lack of direction and purpose when it comes to achieving your business goals.

How Do SMART Goals Work?

Now that you have an understanding of the importance of setting SMART goals, let’s take a look at how this can look for a business owner:

• Increase Brand Awareness: Increase your brand’s follower count on TikTok by 20% in the next six months.
• Drive Website Traffic: Boost referral traffic from Instagram by 10% in the next three months.
• Generate New Leads: Attain 50 new email sign-ups from Twitter ads in the next month.
• Improve Sales: Achieve a 15% increase in online sales from Pinterest traffic in the next four months.

Based on the example above, defining SMART goals helps business owners to set measurable and achievable goals when considering what they wish to achieve with their social media marketing strategy. Defining your SMART goals early ensures that your social media marketing strategy is clear and focused, therefore increasing the success of your marketing efforts.

Identifying Your Target Audience

A well-planned social media marketing strategy should include a deep understanding of your target audience as this will help you create content that your audience would want to see. When social media users discover content that piques their interests and resonates with them, more likely they are to engage with your content and utilise your products and services.

Why Is Identifying Your Target Audience Important?

When developing your social media marketing strategy, identifying your target audience allows you to ask yourself, “If I was my ideal customer, would I want to see this content?”. This is important because user engagement is critical for social media algorithms to measure which content online is resonating with users and therefore determines how content is shared online.

This means that if your content does not encourage people to engage with your social media posts, your posts may not reach your desired audience and may not reach a large number of users.

How To Identify Your Target Audience

So, how can you effectively identify your target audience? Let’s take a look at some useful tips to identify your target audience for your social media marketing strategy:

• Evaluate your current customers or audience: Think about the people who are already purchasing your products or utilising your services. Do they have anything in common? Do they share similar interests or challenges? Note this down as these factors indicate who your target audience is.
• Analyse your competitors’ target audience: Take a look at some of your competitors’ social media pages and evaluate who they are targeting and which customers are engaging with their content. This can help you identify if there are any significant similarities or differences between your business and your competitors when targeting social media users.

• Utilise social media insights: When utilising social media platforms, you can access your insights if your page is set up as a business account. On social media insights on platforms such as Facebook and Instagram, you can receive data which highlights what age groups and locations are finding your content. This will help you over time to understand who your target audience is and where they are located.
• Conduct surveys: A great way to understand your target audience is by asking them who they are! Consider conducting surveys on social media and in person to encourage customers to explain who they are and what they want to see from your business.

Once you have identified your target audience, this will help you develop an informed social media marketing strategy and increase the engagement of social media posts, therefore helping you reach your business goals.

Choosing the Right Social Media Platforms

When planning your social media marketing strategy, it’s important to consider which social media platforms you will utilise to reach your target audience. This is because the social media platforms that you choose will influence the content and approach to your social media marketing strategy. 

So, what are some things to consider when choosing the right social media platforms for your social media marketing strategy? Let’s take a look at some of your options available and how they can be beneficial to your business:

• Facebook: With over 2.8 billion active users, Facebook offers a wide reach for businesses looking to target consumers online. Facebook is a great platform to utilise text, imagery, videos, live videos, and Facebook Shop when communicating with social media users.
• Instagram: Known for its focus on visual content and aesthetics, Instagram has become increasingly popular with users from a wide range of demographics. Instagram is the perfect platform for businesses to reach consumers through aesthetically pleasing imagery, Instagram Reels, and Instagram Stories.
• Twitter: Twitter is a social media platform that is ideal for customer service, news updates, and trending conversations. Twitter is an excellent platform for businesses to engage with their followers through trending conversations for B2C and B2B purposes and utilising hashtags to reach their target audience.
• LinkedIn: LinkedIn is a business and professional networking site, which means that it is the perfect platform for B2B companies to connect with new and existing customers and provides the perfect opportunity to showcase brand awareness.

• TikTok: TikTok has gone from strength to strength over the past few years due to the popularity of watching and engaging with video content. TikTok has become a social media phenomenon for younger demographics through its short and engaging videos. Businesses have recognised TikTok as an opportunity to utilise their creativity when creating social media content and increase their brand awareness and establish the brand’s personality.
• Pinterest: Pinterest is an image-sharing social media platform where users discover new ideas and find inspiration. Pinterest has proven to be particularly effective for businesses and content creators when promoting fashion, interior design, lifestyle tips, and product-based content. Pinterest also allows you to link users to your website to increase traffic and sales.
• YouTube: YouTube has become the leading online video-sharing platform for most social media users, where consumers watch videos that are entertaining, informative, and valuable. YouTube is a fantastic platform to market your business through long forms of video content and YouTube Shorts while increasing your SEO.

How To Choose The Right Social Media Platforms

Now that you know some of the options available when marketing your business on social media, how can you ensure to select the correct platforms? 

Here are some useful tips to help you when deciding which social media platforms can effectively achieve your business goals:

• Understand your target audience: When considering who your target audience is, outline their age, location, and interests. Then, utilise this information to determine the best platforms to attract your audience.
• Outline your content: Consider what type of content you want to produce for your audience. Do you want to focus on long forms or short forms of video content? Do you sell visually appealing products that would photograph nicely for Pinterest? Once you have outlined the types of content you want to produce to align with your social media marketing strategy, this will help guide you towards the best social media platforms for your business.
• Competitor research: Search for keywords related to your business and industry to analyse who your competitors are on each social media platform. When researching competitors, identify if there is a social media platform that has a gap in the market for consumers and consider if your business can fill this gap. 
• Refer back to your SMART goals: Remind yourself about the business goals you want to achieve and your timeline to achieve them. When considering your timeline, ask yourself if you have the time, dedication, and resources to effectively utilise several social media platforms or perhaps only a couple of them. This ensures you can remain on target to reach your SMART goals without feeling overwhelmed by the number of social media platforms to manage.

Once you outline the best social media platforms for your social media marketing strategy, this will help you target the correct audience, achieve your business goals, and increase sales and conversions.

Need more help developing your social media marketing strategy? Contact ProfileTree today to find out how social media marketing can elevate your business!