Web & Social Analytics

Building your Social Media Marketing Strategy for 2022 and beyond

When over half the world uses social media every day, it becomes one of the most crucial channels for business growth in the current era of digital marketing. This allows businesses to not only create awareness about their brand but also strengthen relationships with their customers, thereby improving revenue. While it seems like a straightforward task, it is usually arduous. Most organisations fail in their attempt to make social media marketing (SMM) work.

What is social media marketing?

Social media platforms enable and encourage interaction and make it possible to create and share information, pictures, videos, and other forms of content with virtual communities and networks. Leveraging these social media platforms to promote a product, service, or brand is social media marketing. It is essentially reaching out to your target audience and customers through those channels that they use daily to interact among themselves. Social media marketing involves networking and connecting* with customers to motivate their interaction, participation, and, most importantly, their purchase decisions over time.

The benefits of social media marketing

The following are the most prominent benefits of social media marketing.

• Improved brand awareness: Allows businesses to expose their brand in front of a lot of people
• Lead generation: Helps generate more leads and provides an opportunity to acquire new customers
• Enhanced customer support: Establishes a strong relationship with existing customers
• Cost-effectiveness: Provides the cheapest way to target customers
• Improved traffic to websites: Makes it easy for people to visit the website.

A guide to building your social media marketing strategy

It is essential to create a strategy that will guide any business towards success. However, using the same strategy that previously worked is as good as not having one. These strategies need to be revised according to the constantly changing social media platforms. Here is a simple SMM strategy guide that can be followed in 2022 and beyond.

1. SMART goals: The final goal you want to achieve is probably the best place to begin. Knowing the desired outcome helps break it down into smaller SMART goals: specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound. The smarter the goals, the greater the chances of achieving them.
2. Define your audience: Research your target audience. Categorise them based on demographics and psychographics to understand who your customers are and why they need the offered service.
3. Understand social media platforms: Every social media platform is unique. Being aware of how each one works helps to know which platforms are the best fit for specific target audiences.
• Facebook – Generally caters to millennials. All types of content can be published.
• Instagram – Mostly used by Gen Z. It only allows photos or video content to be shared.
• Twitter – The majority of Twitter users are middle-aged men. The best platform to circulate memes.
• LinkedIn – Used by professionals. A good place for lengthy content.
4. Competitor analysis: To measure our performance, we need to know who our competitors are. We must investigate our competitors’ social media presence to get tonnes of useful insights.
5. Creative content: We have heard the age-old phrase "Content is King". It is the backbone of any SMM strategy. Having a clear strategy on the type and style of content defines the brand's value. Every brand is associated with the unique characteristics of its content in each social platform. Choosing the type of content is equally important in building a successful strategy.
6. Content calendar: Having good content does not guarantee success if we don’t know when to post it. A simple content calendar must have details of exact dates, times, and types, as well as platforms to post on. This helps to avoid indecision regarding social media posts. By maintaining a content calendar, we could observe and identify the "best times" for a post that becomes useful for future strategies.
7. Brand guidelines: A set of rules and standards that communicate how a brand should be represented needs to be defined. By defining the colour, font, style, logo, taglines, etc., we ensure not only consistency in social media messages but also quick brand recognition by customers.
8. Usage of hashtags: Hashtags are used to connect social media content to a specific event, topic, theme, or conversation. It helps in discovering posts and content that revolve around a specific topic. Hashtags allow users to search for a particular topic on social media and get an aggregate of all posts that mention the tag.
9. Data-driven approach: It is usually futile to make decisions based on assumptions. Social media platforms collect a gargantuan amount of user data which can be used for informed decision-making and creating smart strategies.
   With a clear strategy, social media marketing becomes a cakewalk. By following the above-mentioned guide, a business can easily stand out among its competitors.

*For organizations on the digital transformation journey, agility is key in responding to a rapidly changing technology and business landscape. Now more than ever, it is crucial to deliver and exceed on organizational expectations with a robust digital mindset backed by innovation. Enabling businesses to sense, learn, respond, and evolve like a living organism, will be imperative for business excellence going forward. A comprehensive, yet modular suite of services is doing exactly that. Equipping organizations with intuitive decision-making automatically at scale, actionable insights based on real-time solutions, anytime/anywhere experience, and in-depth data visibility across functions leading to hyper-productivity, Live Enterprise is building connected organizations that are innovating collaboratively for the future.