Start With a Plan - Before we begin creating social media marketing campaigns, consider your business’s goals. Starting a social media marketing campaign without a social strategy in mind is like wandering around a forest without a map—you might have fun, but you'll probably get lost.

Here are some questions to ask when defining your social media marketing goals:

  • What are you hoping to achieve through social media marketing?
  • Who is your target audience?
  • Where would your target audience hang out and how would they use social media?
  • What message do you want to send to your audience with social media marketing?

Social media marketing can help with a number of goals, such as:

  • Increasing website traffic
  • Building conversions
  • Raising brand awareness
  • Creating a brand identity and positive brand association
  • Improving communication and interaction with key audiences

The bigger and more engaged your audience is on social media networks, the easier it will be for you to achieve every other marketing goal on your list!

Social media strategy:

A major strategy used in social media marketing is to develop messages and content that individual users will share with their family, friends and coworkers. This strategy relies on word of mouth and provides several benefits.

  • First, it increases the message’s reach to networks and users that a social media manager may not have been able to access otherwise.
  • Second, shared content carries an implicit endorsement when sent by someone who the recipient knows and trusts.

While social media marketing can provide benefits, it also can create obstacles that companies may not have had to deal with otherwise. For example, a viral video claiming that a company’s product causes consumers to become ill must be addressed by the company, regardless of whether the claim is true or false. Even if a company is able to set the message straight, consumers may be less likely to purchase from the company in the future.

Social Media Marketing Suggestions:

Here are a few social media marketing tips to kick off your social media campaigns.

  • Social Media Content Planning — building a social media marketing plan is essential. Consider keyword research and competitive research to help brainstorm content ideas that will interest your target audience.
  • Great Social Content — Consistent with other areas of online marketing, content reigns supreme when it comes to social media marketing. Make sure you post regularly and offer truly valuable information that your ideal customers will find helpful and interesting. The content that you share on your social networks can include social media images, videos, infographics, how-to guides and more.
  • A Consistent Brand Image — Using social media for marketing enables your business to project your brand image across a variety of different social media platforms. While each platform has its own unique environment and voice, your business’s core identity, whether it's friendly, fun, or trustworthy, should stay consistent.
  • Social Media for Content Promotion — Social media marketing is a perfect channel for sharing your best site and blog content with readers. Once you build a loyal following on social media, you'll be able to post all your new content and make sure your readers can find new stuff right away. Plus, great blog content will help you build more followers. It's a surprising way that content marketing and social media marketing benefit each other.
  • Sharing Curated Links — While using social media for marketing is a great way to leverage your own unique, original content to gain followers, fans, and devotees, it’s also an opportunity to link to outside articles as If other sources provide great, valuable information you think your target audience will enjoy, don’t be shy about linking to them. Curating and linking to outside sources improves trust and reliability, and you may even get some links in return.
  • Tracking Competitors — It’s always important to keep an eye on competitors—they can provide valuable data for keyword research and other social media marketing insight. If your competitors are using a certain social media marketing channel or technique that seems to be working for them, considering doing the same thing, but do it better!
  • Measuring Success with Analytics —You can’t determine the success of your social media marketing strategies without tracking data. Google Analytics can be used as a great social media marketing tool that will help you measure your most triumphant social media marketing techniques, as well as determine which strategies are better off abandoned. Attach tracking tags to your social media marketing campaigns so that you can properly monitor And be sure to use the analytics within each social platform for even more insight into which of your social content is performing best with your audience.

Social Media Marketing Plan:

Here are few steps to follow in Social Media Marketing Plan of Action.

Step 1: Create Social Media Marketing Goals That Solve Your Biggest Challenges

  • The first step to any strategy is to understand what you want out of your efforts. Social media marketing isn’t about flipping a switch and calling it a day. Instead, social media planning should be looked at like cooking your favorite dish.
  • That’s why creating goals is so critical to the first part of your social media strategy. At the same time, it’s best to set goals that you know are attainable. Asking for 1 million new Instagram followers in 2018 is unrealistic. With achievable goals, you’re more likely to stick to the original plan and continue to take on new hurdles as you complete old ones.
  • This is the same reason why brands should never take on every social media channel possible in their current marketing strategy. Try to choose the channels that have the most importance based on your brand’s goals. Avoid over complicating a strategy with too many targets and objectives. Simplicity can take you a long way.
  • And also, don’t forget to document your social media goals. Not only is it important to help you benchmark where you are, but it also improves your chances of achieving them.

Social Media Goals to Consider in 20th Century:

Goal setting is a staple of all marketing and business strategies. Social media is no exception. Of course, with a range of social capabilities, it can be difficult to determine exactly what your objectives should be. For guidance, here are some common social media goals to consider:

  • Increase brand awareness: To create authentic and lasting brand awareness, avoid a slew of promotional messages. Instead, focus on meaningful content and a strong brand personality through your social channels.
  • Higher quality of sales: Digging through your social channels is nearly impossible without monitoring or listening to specific keywords, phrases or Through more efficient social media targeting, you reach your core audience much faster.
  • Drive in-person sales: Some retailers rely on social media marketing efforts to drive in- store sales. Is your brand promoting enough on social to reward those who come to you? What about alerting customers to what’s going on in your stores?
  • Improve ROI: There’s not a brand on social media that doesn’t want to increase its return on But on social, this goal is specific to performing a thorough audit of your channels and ensuring cost of labor, advertisements and design stay on track.
  • Create a loyal fanbase: Does your brand promote user-generated content? Do your followers react positively without any initiation? Getting to this point takes time and effort with creating a positive brand persona on social.
  • Better pulse on the industry: What are your competitors doing that seems to be working? What strategies are they using to drive engagement or sales? Having a pulse on the industry could simply help you improve your efforts and take some tips from those doing well.

Step 2: Research Your Social Media Audience

Approximately 79% of adults use Facebook–but are your customers actively engaging with your brand there? Understanding your audience is necessary to learn things like who buys your products, what age group is the toughest to sell and what income level makes up the most of your returning customers? As for social media, it’s just as critical to know your audience.

First, your brand should look into the demographics of your most valuable social channels. Like we mentioned before, you should have a goal in mind for your social media marketing strategy. This is why you need to research the channels that correlate the most with your goals.

To help you find your focus channels: let’s take a quick look at the essential demographics data for each major network:

Facebook’s most popular demographics include:

  • Women users (89%)
  • 18-29 year olds (88%)
  • Urban- and rural-located users (81% each)
  • Those earning less than $30,000 (84%)
  • Users with some college experience (82%)

Instagram’s most popular demographics include:

  • Women users (38%)
  • 18-29 year olds (59%),
  • Urban-located users (39%)
  • Those earning less than $30,000 (38%)
  • Users with some college experience (37%)

Twitter’s most popular demographics include:

  • Women users (25%)
  • 18-29 year olds (36%)
  • Urban-located users (26%)
  • Those earning $50,000-$74,999 (28%)
  • Users with college experience or more (29%)

LinkedIn’s most popular demographics include:

  • Men users (31%)
  • 18-29 year olds (34%)
  • Urban-located users (34%)
  • Those earning $75,000 or more (45%)
  • Users with college experience or more (50%)

Snapchat and other auto-delete app’s most popular demographics include:

  • Men users (24%)
  • 18-29 year olds (56%)
  • Those earning less than $50,000 (27%)
  • Users with some college experience (27%)

Identifying Customer Demographics

While the demographics data above gives you insight into each channel, what about your own customers? Further analysis has to be completed before you can truly know your customer demographics on social media.

That’s why many brands use a social media dashboard that can provide an overview of who’s following you and how they interact with you on each channel. Most brands today are using at least some sort of dashboard. However, does your dashboard address your specific goals?

Whether you’re an agency providing insights for your clients or an enterprise company discovering your own demographics, an all-in-one dashboard solution is critical.

Sprout Social prides itself on the in-depth and essential demographics data for your social networks to help you identify your customers. Learn more with a free 30-day trial to uncover crucial data with Sprout! 

Step 3: Establish Your Most Important Metrics

While your targeted social media metrics might be the most important step of a strategy, it’s often the spot most veer off the path. We often get wrapped up in viewing followers and likes as the truth to a campaign, but it’s smart to take a step back and evaluate the social metrics associated with your overall goals.

Large audiences and likable content is absolutely great, but here are some other metrics you might want to pursue in 2018:

  • Reach: Post reach is the number of unique users who saw your How far is your content spreading across social? Is it actually reaching user’s feeds?
  • Clicks: This is the amount of clicks on your content, company name or logo. Link clicks are critical toward understanding how users move through your marketing Tracking clicks per campaign is essential to understand what drives curiosity or encourages people to buy.
  • Engagement: The total number of social interactions divided by number of impressions. For engagement, it’s about seeing who interacted and if it was a good ratio out of your total This sheds light on how well your audience perceives you and their willingness to interact.
  • Hashtag performance: What were your most used hashtags on your own side? Which hashtags were most associated with your brand? Or what hashtags created the most engagement?

  • Sentiment: This is the measurement of how users reacted to your content, brand or Did customers find your recent campaign offensive? What type of sentiment are people associating with your campaign hashtag? It’s always better to dig deeper and find what people are saying.
  • Organic and paid likes: More than just standard Likes, these likes are defined from paid or organic content. For channels like Facebook, organic engagement is much harder to gain traction, which is why many brands turn to Facebook Ads. However, earning organic likes on Instagram isn’t quite as

Step 4: Research Your Social Competitive Landscape

Before you start creating content (we promise we’re almost there!), it’s really smart to investigate your competitors. We put this before the content creation process because you often find new ways to look at content by analyzing what’s making your competitors successful.

Again, we’ll always believe you shouldn’t steal your competitors’ ideas, but instead learn and grow from their success and failures. So how do you find that information? The first step is to find out who’s your competition in the first place.

The simplest way to find competitors is through a simple Google search. Look up your most valuable keywords, phrases and industry terms to see who shows up.

Here you can see post break downs of text, images and video to see what your competitors are doing to drive the most engagement. Once you dig through the competitive analysis, you’ll have a better idea of what your potential customers want.

Step 5: Build & Curate Engaging Social Media Content

Did someone say content? It’s no lie–social media content is extremely important to your marketing strategy. However, it’s best to follow the previous steps before planning out content (we caught you, blog skippers!) so you can start building more effective themes.

For starters, we recommend creating content that fits to your brand’s identity. This means you should avoid things like reaching out to your unpopular demographics without a complete strategy in place.

It’s necessary to find the perfect balance between target content and being overly promotional as well. In fact, 46% of users say they’ll unfollow a brand if there’s too many promotional messages. Additionally, 41% of users say they’d unfollow a brand that shared too much irrelevant content.

Video Content or Bust

How important is video to your social media marketing strategy? Extremely–approximately 90% of online shoppers believe product videos help them make a purchasing decision. Additionally, the average online video is completely watched end to end by 37% of viewers.

These type of stats should only enforce your reasoning to invest in social media video content. Brands can reach users through Instagram Stories, Facebook Live and other in-the-moment media.

Build Content Themes

One of the toughest challenges to visual content is creating it on a day-to-day basis. A Venngage infographic showed 36.7% of marketers said their No.1 struggle with creating visual content was doing so consistently.

This truly shows how important highly-visual content is to marketers and the people they want to reach. That’s why building content themes is a great approach to sectioning out your content. Instagram is one your premier channels to work off visual themes.

Step 6: Engage With Your Audience & Don’t Ignore

Social media channels are built as networks. This means their main purpose is to be a space to converse, discuss topics and share content. Your brand can’t forget these core elements of “networking” and it takes effort to ensure conversations or engagement opportunities aren’t left unattended.

Through social media, you gain respect as a brand by just being present and talking to your audience. That’s why social customer care is so important to brands wanting to increase audience awareness. It’s all about engagement.

Designating teams to specific tasks can help your staff run like a well-oiled social media team, whether you’re a group of one or 100.

Post at the Best Times to Engage 

When is your brand available to engage and interact with customers? You might see some recommending times to post late in the evening. But if your brand isn’t there to communicate, what’s the point of posting at the preferred time?

Instead, try to ensure your social media or community managers are available and ready to answer any product questions or concerns when you tweet or post. It’s smart to learn the best times to post on social media, but it’s just as critical to engage after posting.

According to our Index, a brand’s average response time is around 10 hours. But did you know that most users believe brands should respond to social media messages within four hours?

With all the updated algorithms, organic content has a tough time reaching the majority of your audience. The last thing you want to do is ignore those who engage and lose out on sending more down your marketing funnel.

Step 7: Track Your Efforts & Always Improve

So, how well did you do on your social media marketing strategy? Without continuously analyzing your efforts, you’ll never know how one campaign did over another. Having a bird’s- eye-view of your social media activity helps put things into perspective.

You’ve got down your most important goals, network preferences and metrics–now it’s time to make sure you made the right decisions. Knowing you’ve made the right choices is still a difficult task in social media.

In fact, 46% of B2B marketers are unsure if their social strategy actually created revenue for their brand. But marketers are always trying and looking for the perfect connection. That’s why the most commonly used metric (80%) for marketers is engagement.

If you work at building lasting relationships, there’s a lot less room for failure with your social media marketing strategy.

Use a Tool to Track Success

Sprout Social was created with social media marketing in mind. Our social media tools offer a full suite of analytics and reporting features to help you pinpoint exactly which posts, messages and hashtags perform the best.

It’s easy to connect other critical tools to our dashboard like Google Analytics, which helps you see which posts drove the most traffic, conversions and overall revenue.