How to create an effective social media marketing strategy in 2020

Social media marketing strategy has become an integral part of corporate communication.

The role of social media is essential to create a direct relationship with customers, increase brand awareness and bring customers to your website.
For this reason, it is necessary to know the best social media marketing strategies.

If you use social media, you know how engaging, interesting, fun and useful they are.

The numbers are constantly growing and companies have noticed it.

However, it often happens to come across unprofessional pages, with intermittently published content, amateur and low-quality photos.

In fact, many people think they can manage their social networks alone, without the need for a true professional.

Unfortunately, this is not the case and it is very easy to recognize a profile managed in an amateur way.

To manage social media pages professionally, you need preparation, study and skills.

It is not enough to know how to create a page on Facebook, a profile on Instagram, or insert a hashtag on Twitter.

Each social network has its tools, its specific language, its own way of presenting data.

Do you already have any social pages?

Facebook and Instagram are the most used social networks in the world, and if you are reading this article, you probably want to make the most of them.

Have you already created any social pages or do you manage one?
Social networks are able to explain to you how to create new profiles and manage the ones you have.

They explain how to use the tools, invite you to interact and publish, guide you to enter all the necessary information.

But have you ever heard of strategy?

On social platforms, you have many tools available. But nowhere is there any talk of publication frequency, editorial plan, integrated communication.

How are you using your social networks? How often do you post? How do you integrate social media into your digital marketing strategy?

How to manage the pages and get results?

Managing social media without previous training can give intermittent and fluctuating results.

When you start working on a project you need to establish a strategy, have clear and measurable objectives, know your target audience, know what their tastes are and what motivations they might have to start following you.

Before creating your page, you need to reflect on these aspects, and not work on improvisation by simply relying on a daily inspiration.

The lack of planning and a good strategy leads to publishing in an unsystematic way, not taking into account the tastes of your target.

Knowing your target audience can help you understand what to publish, what tone of voice to use.

Understanding the metrics is necessary to analyze the results of your page, understand how often to publish, decide how to invest.

Do not think that since you are a small company, the intervention of a professional is not necessary.

Social media represent your brand’s showcase and poorly managed profiles do nothing but put your business in a bad light.

What can you do to improve the situation?

What do we mean when we talk about social media marketing

Let’s define social media marketing better.
Social media marketing is a set of digital marketing tools that allow companies to communicate with consumers and vice versa.

It deals with the planning, management and control of any marketing and communication activity that takes place through social media.

Its function is to give the company the opportunity to involve users and potential customers, create communities, build a relationship of trust with people.

Social media, therefore, constitute a non-invasive tool to get in touch with users.

Their potential is enormous and exploiting them in an unprofessional way is like throwing an opportunity away.

Adopt the right social media marketing strategy

As anticipated, using social media without having the right strategy is like building a house without a foundation.

After some time, the first cracks will begin to appear and soon the building will collapse.

To reach the right target and obtain results it is necessary to put into practice the right social media marketing activities and make the best use of the tools available.

Market analysis

Our goal is that you can build relationships with your target and your customers.

Expanding your business possibilities is certainly cutting-edge reasoning. To do this, the best way is to connect with your audience in a genuine way.

This will bring the people you have impressed on your website and increase the likelihood that they will be able to buy.

Social media is one of the best channels to get new customers and to keep real ones.

Did you know that 73% of people buy products or services thanks to the influence of social media?

In any marketing strategy, social media are effective and powerful communication channels.

In fact, they give the opportunity to interact with their customers and hire new ones like no other tool would be able to do.

How can you connect with your audience?

Replying to chat messages, retweeting on Twitter, interacting in Facebook groups with a target audience similar to yours, replying to comments on the Facebook business page and Instagram photos.

Audit your social pages

Once you understand your goals, you will need to study your audience and know who your buyer personas are. Identify their needs and desires in order to develop an adequate social media marketing strategy.

Such as:

You need to carefully understand your audience to better understand their needs.

Interactivity is also important: participate in conversations on forums where your audience is present, reply to comments on your blog (if you have one) and on others that have the same target audience.

Also answer any questions users ask on your social channels.

Then collect user feedback with the many tools available. Hotjar, Qualaroo, Typeform, UserEcho and Drift are some of the tools we use for marketing analytics.

Analysis of your competitors

A really smart move, before you start creating content, is to investigate the competition.

Often you find a different point of view by studying the posts of competitors who have been very successful.

Stealing the ideas of others is unethical and does not help your image, but analyzing the strengths of the competition and finding ideas to create original content is useful.

The first step is to identify who the competitors in your market niche are.

Set SMART goals

After having defined your target and analyzed the competition, it is time to establish what are the objectives of your company.

It has been proven that you are 30% more likely to be successful if you are clear about the results you want to achieve. Some studies claim that the percentage is even 40%.

You need to break down your goals into small achievable activities.

Your goals must have 5 main characteristics and be SMART:

Specific-specific: the objectives must be clear and precise. Only in this way can progress be monitored.

Measurable- measurable: the objectives must have a “metric”, ie be measurable so that it is possible to evaluate the improvements.

Attainable-achievable: Goals should not be abstract but absolutely achievable.
Relevant-relevant: they must be in line with the company strategy and benefit the business.

Time-bound-having deadlines: to be able to be measured, assessed and possibly corrected.
Without objectives, it is not possible to measure the return on investment.

Based on this scheme you will be able to define achievable marketing objectives, able to give real results to your business.

Optimize profiles

Each social network has its own characteristics and functionality. For this reason it is necessary to define a strategy for each channel.

I’ll give you an example.

For makeup tutorials among the best channels are Instagram Stories and Snapchat Stories.

A customer service, on the other hand, needs a faster and more structured social network, like Twitter.

With this I want to make you understand that each social account has a specific mission that must be defined before building the editorial plan.

Once you have defined the use of each social network, start building new profiles and working on existing ones to bring them in line with your social media marketing strategy.

The basic steps for optimizing profiles are:

• filling in all the fields of the profile;
• the use of specific keywords for your business;
• the choice of images with the right size for each social network.

Remember that “less is better than more”. What does it mean?

That it doesn’t matter to have a profile on all existing social networks. The important thing is that the channels you choose are set up and used in the best possible way.

Create an editorial calendar

In addition to sharing quality content, it is important to have an editorial plan.

Imagine the editorial plan as if it were a calendar.

It’s the perfect tool to plan all your social media activities and add images, links, videos and everything else you need to create your content.

So you will have everything at your fingertips and an overview of the timing of publication.

You can decide if the timing and content are appropriate or if not, change the calendar.

Take care of the contents

When posting your content on social media, do it in a reasonable manner and in line with the particular social media.

Depending on the social network on which you want to publish, take into account the various potential of the communication channels.

Let’s take a look at the main social platforms:

Linkedin: is a perfect professional network for the B2B audience. It includes Linkedin Pulse, a platform for publishing and distributing content.

Facebook: is company pages on the social network are difficult to make known, groups can be an excellent opportunity to connect with your ideal target audience.

Instagram: it’s social of photos, it’s for you if your content is mainly visual. Short images and videos perform very well and are often effective in growing your Instagram page.

Twitter: the instant social network par excellence. The news passes first on Twitter and then on other social networks.

You can use it to check your brand’s online reputation and offer real-time support.

Of course there are other social networks and others will appear. The important thing is to evaluate each time the potential they have and what benefits they can give to their business.

Once you understand the usefulness of the different social networks, choose the ones that you think are most suitable for the type of business you want to propose and the results you want to achieve.

A key factor in having an effective social media strategy is the use of the right words. For each channel, choose a precise tone of voice so as to convey your brand message in a suitable way.

But let’s get to the heart of the matter.

How to create engaging content on social media?

Use innovative copywriting and storytelling techniques. Writing on social networks requires a particular method to capture the attention of users. Make sure you reach out to your audience directly:

Using catchy phrases that can be intriguing;
Using tools that make conversation active;
Talking about what your target audience really cares about.

Once we have optimized the content you will find that you have higher engagement rates, more leads, followers and consequently more sales.

In recent years, videos have become powerful communication tools, particularly on social media.

It thinks that by 2021 approximately 82% of all social media traffic will come from video content.

Do you still have any doubts about the potential of this communication channel?

There are many ways to use video content in your social media marketing strategy. Live videos, such as Facebook broadcasts, for example, are hugely trendy these days.

The instantaneity that characterizes live shows allows you to get in touch with people in an authentic way.

During the live shows, those who follow you can ask you questions and you have the opportunity to prove that you are not a faceless company.

Interaction with users during and after the video reinforces the idea that you are human and take your customers into consideration.

According to Facebook, with a live video you increase user interaction by 6 times.

However, the ideal solution involves the use of additional videos. To entice more people to follow you, the best option is a combination of live videos and videos already recorded previously and saved in your archive. And be original.

For this reason, you need to create video content that can arouse attention from the very first seconds and entertain the user.

Grow your page with sponsored ads

You can have the most amazing quality content on the web but if nobody is watching it, what good is it?

This is where content promotion comes into play.

Of course the content must be exceptional and different from all the others, quality is essential. However, avoid the mistake that many bloggers or corporate social media managers make, namely neglecting the promotion process.

But what can you do to get more views?

Promote content to match each other across all your social channels;
Collaborate with influencers in your industry;

Create social media contests that encourage your users to follow you;
Use your contacts to invite them to follow you on the social channels you use;

When creating content use an SEO-oriented approach, while when publishing it follows all relevant steps (for example, consistent hashtags on Instagram or popular keywords in titles or descriptions on Youtube).

Remember, however, that clicking on “highlight” or “promote your post” is not enough. To have concrete results from sponsorships, it is necessary to know the dynamics of advertising.

Before setting up your social media campaigns, a true marketer studies the motivations of their target, their demographics, their needs and tastes. Optimizing a campaign is not child’s play and to have a good ROI you need to rely on real professionals.

Plus, always stay up to date on the latest trends and changes.

As you already know, social platforms and algorithms are constantly updated, sometimes without official announcements from social networks.

Do you want to know what are the latest trends that are going strong?

As we said earlier, video content, especially live, performs very well and is constantly growing.

Stories on Instagram are having a lot of success and represent a great opportunity for companies.

We are in the era of influencers, marketing carried out with the help of an authoritative spokesperson is on the crest of the wave.

Obviously these are the trends of today, tomorrow they could disappear. The social media field is very fickle and what was important today is no longer important.

Optimize Your Social media marketing strategy

Once you start getting some good results, you have to use them to monitor the progress of the marketing strategy.

In fact, one of the fundamental rules of marketing is to test, test and test!

In fact, the tests allow us to understand what works and what doesn’t, which adjustments to make to the initial strategy and which ones to exclude.

To evaluate the impact of your social media marketing strategy, make use of survey tools.

Thanks to email or direct feedback with followers, you can understand what customer needs are and what content we can offer to satisfy them.

By interacting with your customers, followers and prospects, you will have more insight on what interest them more and how to continuously serve them the right content.

keep everluating your results and develing the right content to your customers.

Conclusions

We have seen that social media is a necessary tool to create direct contact with your customers and increase your brand awareness.

To exploit their potential, however, it is not enough to have a profile or create a page. Social media are rich and varied tools and must be used competently.

Before starting to publish, you need to define your goals, create a strategy, analyze your target and understand how your competitors are moving.

Each social network has its own characteristics and must be used with a precise mission.

Applying a social media marketing strategy can be complex and requires commitment, but not if you let yourself be supported by an agency specializing in the growth of social pages.