4 steps to your social media marketing strategy
Social networks are extremely important components of a marketing strategy launched on several communication channels, as Gartner believes in a recent study. Unfortunately, some market leaders have difficulties starting or adapting their strategies to these channels, even for a business-to-business (B2B).
Audience.
In short, instead of developing and executing a results-driven social media strategy, far too many market leaders prioritise growing followers, which at some point can have little impact on business results. This approach reduces the effectiveness of social media marketing, wastes resources, and ultimately presents a financial risk that this important channel can generate. We propose a 5-step formula recommended by Gartner to improve your social media marketing strategy.
Step 1: Build your content strategy.
Marketers who use social media but depend entirely on organic content (basically, content you pass around for free) are having a hard time achieving success. Paid advertising (or "boost posts") has become a must to consistently increase exposure and engagement on social media, especially if you know how to capture your audience's attention with your content. Social media is a conversational environment, so it is important to create a dialogue that will be valued by each person involved. Here are some very important principles to remember:
♦ Take advantage of the instant response to published content and the option to send messages that social networks offer. Assess your brand's ability to respond to customer needs in real time.
♦ Use performance graphs to iterate and optimise content.
♦ Select content (and form) based on the expectations of customers using that social network.
♦ Social media requires a lot of content that is good to be varied. Create a robust publishing system and include both influencers and customer-generated content in this system.
Step 2: Locate customers on social media.
Researching the platforms and sources of information used by your target audience and where they engage in conversations is essential. Customer profiles, map journeys, and data provided by sales teams can be very good sources of information in the initial phase, in addition to online research. You might consider researching mentions of your brand, industry, or direct competitors. With the help of this exhaustive research, you can begin to match the right audience with the types of social networks used to find the optimal mix for your next effort.
Step 3: Defining the right metrics to measure success
Finally, define the right metrics to make the proper evaluation of the results, which will help you to convince yourself that the investment in the marketing strategy has worked. For organic content, the primary outcome will be engagement. Engagement metrics measure how much time a user spends interacting with social media posts. When you add paid promotion, you can also measure other metrics like sales, leads, etc. The main methods of measuring the impact of marketing activities are:
♦ Marketing mix modelling (MMM),
♦ Multi touch attribution (MTA),
♦ Holdout tests;
(d) unified measurement approaches (UMA)
.
Step 4: Define the expected results.
The results can include establishing trust in the business-to-business space by downloading white papers, attending online meetings (webinars), or encouraging customers to click and watch a video about the company's product sustainability. Organic content posted on social media should be geared towards motivating customers to begin the purchase process, encouraging the next action. We recommend asking yourself the question: What would you like your audience to do or think when they interact with your published content? Examples of objectives can be:
♦ Increasing brand awareness
♦ Lead generation or lead conversion (those who find out about the entire portfolio of solutions you offer) sales (directly or indirectly)
♦ Increasing customer loyalty
♦ Gathering the necessary information about the market. You don't need a call to action in every post, but my suggestion is to at least propose a clear outcome from everything you do. and so that each piece of content is correlated with an objective.
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