Social media marketing (SMM) is a crucial aspect of digital outreach campaigns. To fuel your SMM strategy, you need consistent and fresh content to share on social media platforms. These platforms are quite different from regular blogs because they are live and have constantly changing trends.
That makes it a bit challenging creating effective content. You may be wondering, what is the best strategy of SMM for business success? Here are tips to creating a simple but very effective SMM content:
Determine why you want to use social media
When planning a content strategy, the first important question to ask yourself is why you are keen on starting social media marketing. There might be various reasons; for example, some businesses use social media to gain more popularity.
Whereas, others might be using these social channels on their sales funnel. Identifying the reason why you’re tapping into SMM will help you when structuring the entire strategy. You will know exactly what kind of content to post and it will be much easier to set KPIs to measure and keep track of.
Identify the target audience
Next up, you need to identify your customer personas to determine what channels are most effective. Also, identifying their demographic information and personal preferences will help structure the content you will create. For example, if you are catering to millennials and generation Zs using humorous content can be quite effective.
Using memes or other comical fun can help draw them closer and follow your page for more. It is very important to know what kind of audience you’re catering for. Identifying the target audience is key to creating personalized content that is appealing to your potential customers.
Repurposing content
As part of your SMM content strategy, you will have to identify when to repurpose blog posts, infographics, and other social media posts. Repurposing content can help you avoid running dry from social media posts to make. In your strategy, ensure that you include a pragmatic method of repurposing different pieces of content.
A digital marketing provides us a valuable hack here. Detail how written content can be converted to short videos that can be posted on social media channels. Alternatively, outline how a video can be converted to an infographic that will benefit the target audience. All of these small details are very important when creating an SMM content strategy.
Have your fingers in different pies
Social media has a great variety of content; there are videos, carousel ads, written posts, images, native advertising on social media and infographics. Within your targeted audience, not all of them like the same kind of content. That is why you must have your fingers in different pies.
Create videos, images, and other types of content that will appease different kinds of individuals. Diversifying content in this way can also improve your credibility amongst customers. You do not even have to invest large amounts of cash in adiversified SMM content strategy. For example, creating a video can be done with any smartphone with a brilliant camera, lighting, and an editing app.
Timing is everything
With SMM, timing is everything and that is why you need to establish a content calendar earlier on the process. When creating this calendar, take into account when the targeted audience is available. For example, if targeted individuals are out and about on weekends, it might be prudent to post when they are back using their phones.
You should also consider the time of day when posting content. A post reaches peak engagement within hours so each post needs to be done when customers are using their phones. Failure to do so might bury that post under a lot of other social media content.
Use social listening
When creating an SMM content strategy, do not forget social listening because this can gauge how you are performing on these channels. If customers are unhappy and do not recommend your service, there might be something you are doing wrong. That might call for a restructured SMM content strategy focusing on remedying that situation.
You need to be adaptable and keep in mind that the initial strategy might need to be readjusted. Social listening will let you know when this should be done due to customer complaints, so include this aspect of SMM when drafting the content strategy.
Periodically do a social media audit
A social media audit can help you introspect how your SMM strategy is performing from a human standpoint. For example, during this social media audit, you will ask yourself very important questions such as “are we reaching our goal? What can we do to manage this page better” and others?
During that social media audit, you will also compare the page with competitor pages to see where you’re lacking. Above that, you will also check if any cat fishing pages are ruining the professional reputation you’ve built on social media. Conduct a social media audit periodically to ensure everything is above board.
Track how the SMM content strategy is performing
Above conducting social media audits, you need to download and set up tools to monitor each piece of content. Try to identify how it is performing and if it fulfilled its purpose. You can also assess social media channels you’re using to determine their efficacy. If there are inefficiencies, try to isolate that problem and then solve it.
Perhaps you might be posting irrelevant content on a particular channel. Using monitoring tools can help pick this up automatically. You can also see if KPIs are being met and if not, the problem can be investigated, isolated, and resolved.
The bottom line
Creating a social media content strategy can be a bit challenging but once you are done, it is all worth it. Do not have the mentality that it is set on stone but be adaptable to changes as time goes on. If you identify an inefficiency, try to resolve in the best time possible to remove any bottlenecks hindering your profit margins.
