Why businesses need to focus on having robust social media marketing plans

By Amitek Sinha

Many companies are aware of the power of social media in terms of marketing, yet very few know the tricks to leverage social media as a tool to strategically market their brand and products. Too many businesses end up going into social media marketing without having a strategy in place. They know that social media is a powerful means to connect with their consumers. Still, it’s an area of marketing that is not paid attention to. Some companies just give access to their social accounts to their junior employees – assuming that since they are young, they will be adept at social media promotions.

However, now is the time when businesses need to focus on having robust social media marketing plans in place. They need to have their official social accounts handled in a more measured and thoughtful way. To put things in perspective, a succinct social strategy will ensure that the brand is able to fulfil its goals and objectives successfully.

Steps for planning a strong strategy

For companies, it’s a challenge to maintain brand consistency across various marketing touch points, let alone every social network. Here are a few ways that will ensure a consistent brand building across multiple social media channels for businesses:

Set goals relevant to business and targets

Businesses need to set relevant and realistic goals for social media marketing. The social platforms enable companies to set objectives for their campaigns. Besides, it’s important that the social campaigns are planned keeping in mind the short-term and long-term goals for the brand, which could be driving traffic to the website for conversions, generating app installs, increasing ROI among others.

Research the target audience

Marketers can now build audience personas based on their likes and dislikes, interests, behaviours and demographics of the people they wish to target. They can now easily know about the life events of their audience such as whether users are newly engaged, newly married, new parents, just started a new job among others which serve as a great way to structure the marketing campaigns. In addition, businesses should keep their audience mutually exclusive so that they can understand the performance of different ads among different sets of audiences. This is useful for knowing if particular ads should be run across a particular section of the audience. Also, companies should avoid being too granular with their target audience as that will make the targeting base too small in size.

Establish important metrics and KPIs

Businesses should use data and analytics to review and assess the performance of their ads. The key performance indicators (KPIs) should be decided beforehand so that they can be tracked to gain useful insights. Analytics tools like Google AdWords and Ads Manager can be leveraged to quickly check the campaign performance.

Focus on ad copies and creatives

The social media marketing strategies hinge on content, that needs to be captivating and engaging. This is what will attract the user’s attention which is why it needs to be kept top-notch. Businesses should customise their social creatives and ad copies for different platforms like Facebook and Instagram (both posts and stories), LinkedIn, Twitter, Google among others. In addition, it’s essential that the ads look good on a host of different devices.

Remarketing

Social media is a great tool for targeting users who have already interacted with the brand or the product in the past. This could include those who have visited the company website, or those who visited the webpages of e-commerce brands, or those who have added products to their cart but not purchased them yet.

Engage with the Audience

Interacting with potential customers is important to retain them for the long term. Simply posting won’t suffice; it’s essential to keep the conversation going. There are two ways of doing this: firstly, by posting interesting content like contests, quizzes, guess the answers, among others, and secondly, by proactively responding to customer queries and concerns.

Summing Up

Marketing has always proven to be a game-changer for enterprises and in today’s time, social media marketing is a part of that. As people shift towards social media for their basic and advanced interests, promotions on these networks have become paramount for attracting audience to a brand. Smart social media strategies and tactful implementations will ensure brands continue to build their audience base which in turn will render a better presence of the brand in the market.

The author is COO, ET Medialabs Pvt. Ltd.

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