Top 6 Steps To Effective Social Media Marketing

Start a Successful Social Media Campaign

Running social media pages is one of the most cost-effective ways to increase brand awareness, enhance customer experience, and boost sales. No matter how big or small your company is, social media marketing can help you achieve your digital marketing goals. 

As digital marketing experts, businesses often ask us for tips on how to improve their social media pages. Read on for six steps to effective social media marketing. 

Step 1: Clearly Define Your Target Market 

This advice is straight out of basic marketing classes, but many business owners forget about this step. We highly recommend clearly defining your target market before attempting to run several social media sites. 

Defining the target market involves knowing your potential customers’ age, location, gender, interests, and digital habits. Here are some interesting facts about how Americans’ age affects their social media preferences:

• Sixty-nine percent of American adults have a Facebook account, and 75% of them visit the site once a day. 
• Seventy-three percent of American adults use YouTube. 
• Thirty-seven percent of American adults have an Instagram account. 
• Smaller percentages of adults use  Pinterest, Snapchat, TikTok, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Whatsapp. 
• The top social media site for American teens is YouTube, with an 85% usage rate. 
• Instagram and Snapchat are the top two and three social media sites for teens, with 72% and 69% usage rate. 
• Fifty percent of American teens still use Facebook. 

Choosing social media platforms for your business entails knowing your target market. As you can see in the numbers above, markets have different digital marketing habits. If you are targeting adults, use Facebook, YouTube, or Instagram instead of Snapchat or TikTok. 

Additionally, Facebook Custom Audience settings can help you target your potential clients based on where they are in the sales funnel. You can create distinct ads for top, middle, and bottom-funnel clients. Using this feature is a powerful tool that lets you customize your strategies to fit your customers’ preferences. 

Step 2: Set Goals

The next step in boosting your digital presence is setting social media goals. Set SMART objectives — specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and time-bound. We suggest using similar social media goals:

• Increase Instagram followers by 1,000 per month for the year. 
• Grow monthly site traffic from social media by 20%.
• Generate 50 new leads per week. 
• Increase sales from Facebook by 10% versus last year. 

Another goal you can have is to optimize your social media pages to strengthen your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts. It’s not easy to measure, but surveys reveal that half of the companies failing at their SEO attempts don’t integrate their SEO and social media efforts. 

Once you’ve set goals, you can adjust your budgets and techniques accordingly. 

Step 3: Analyze Your Competition

The third step on our list of social media tips is creating a competitive analysis of your rivals’ social media efforts. 

Employ the best practices you observe, and find their weaknesses. Through your competitive social analysis, you should observe the following:

• Preferred platforms
• Posting frequency
• Effective campaigns
• Consumer feedback

Use your research to make your social media sites stand out. 

Step 4: Practice Content Marketing

The dictionary definition of content marketing is creating and sharing online material such as videos and blogs intended to stimulate interest in products or services. Content marketing suggests using high-quality posts that don’t always explicitly promote your products or services. 

Using quality content can help you attract and retain visitors that you can eventually turn into customers. However, 60% of companies have difficulty consistently creating content, and 65% struggle to produce engaging content. 

Lego uses content marketing well. Its YouTube Channel has over 11.4 million subscribers, and they gain access to Lego creations, campaigns, fan features, and more. Lego shares the YouTube videos in its Facebook and Instagram channels, with a combined 20.7 million followers. These videos often get tens of thousands of social media views and shares. 

Of course, it takes a while to build a digital presence as relevant as Lego’s. The point is, your content should bring value to your page. Instead of always posting about your products or services, you can post about recipes, fun facts, beauty hacks, infographics, and other compelling content. 

Step 5: Create a Social Media Plan

Step number five is creating a social media plan with goals, a content plan, and a calendar. We’ve already discussed goals and ideal content, so let’s talk about your calendar. Your weekly calendar should always be a combination of functional, thematic, and valuable posts. 

Here’s a guide on how often to post on social media sites. To summarize:

• At a minimum, businesses should post on their Facebook pages three times per week. Anything more than once per day is too much for this platform. We recommend posting between 1–4 PM. 
• For Twitter, you can post anywhere between 3–30 times per day. The most popular Twitter accounts tweet around 23 times a day. 
• For Instagram, once a day is ideal. Three times per week is acceptable. Remember to choose the ideal Instagram sizes and use appropriate hashtags. Avoid posting photos or videos on your home page in quick succession.

Step 6: Measure and Analyze Your Results 

The last step in creating an effective social media plan is to measure and analyze your results and compare them to your objectives. Here are some things you can measure:

• Volume: Find out how many people are talking about your brand. You can count brand mentions, hashtags, and tags. 
• Reach: Measure how many people have seen your content. Doing so can help you determine your potential audience size. Reach has three classifications. 
  • Organic reach is the number of people who saw your post in their feed. 
  • Viral reach is the number of people who saw your post from social sharing.
  • Paid reach is the number of people who saw your post through a paid social media ad. 
• Engagement: Measure how many actions your post received. This measure includes comments, likes, and shares on Facebook. On Twitter, this translates to replies and retweets. 

Enhance Your Social Media Presence

Enhancing your social media presence is one of the most cost-effective methods you can use to boost your digital presence. Work on your social media presence to unlock your company’s full earning potential. Contact us at SEO Locale if you’re looking for an agency to help your business grow digitally.