SMM | Trendy Digital Marketing

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7 Steps in Creating a Winning SMM (Social Media Marketing Strategy) in 2018

With 30% of millennials saying they engage with a brand on social at least once a month, your strategy can not be only about existence. Brands must be fully invested in their SMM (Social Media Marketing) strategies and focus on engagement. Otherwise, you will lose out on real customers, which means serious effects on your bottom line.

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. SMM is not about flipping a switch and calling it a day.

Creating goals is so critical to the first part of your social media strategy. At the same time, it is best to set goals that you know are attainable. 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.

Do not 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. According to some statistics, people who write goals down are 30 times more successful.

Social Media Goals to consider in 2018
Goal setting is a staple of all marketing and business strategies. Social media is no exception. With a range of social capabilities, it can be difficult to determine exactly what your objectives should be. 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.
High quality of sales Digging through your social channels is nearly impossible without monitoring or listening to specific keywords, phrase or hashtags. Through more efficient social media targeting, you can reach 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 is going on in your stores?
Improve ROI There is not a brand on social media that does not want to increase it is return on investment. 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 personal on social.

2. Research Your Social Media Audience

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 SMM strategy. This is why you need to research the channels that correlate the most with your goals.

Take a quick look at the essential demographics data for each major network:

Facebook's most popular demographics include:
1. Women users(89%)
2. 18-29 year olds (88%)
3. Urban and rural located users (81% each)
4. Those earning less that $30,000 (84%)
5. Users with some college experience (82%)

Instagram's most popular demographics include:
1. Women users (38%)
2. 18-29 year olds (59%)
3. Urban located users (39%)
4. Those earning less that $30,000 (38%)
5. Users with some college experience (37%)

Twitter's most popular demographics include:
1. Women users (25%)
2. 18-29 year olds (36%)
3. Urban located users (26%)
4. Those earning less that $50,000 - $74,999 (28%)
5. Users with some college experience (29%)

LinkedIn's most popular demographics include:
1. Men users (31%)
2. 18-29 year olds (34%)
3. Urban located users (34%)
4. Those earning less that $75,000 (45%)
5. Users with some college experience (50%)

Snapchat and other auto delete app's most popular demographics include:
1. Men users (24%)
2. 18-29 year olds (56%)
3. Urban located users (39%)
4. Those earning less that $50,000 (38%)
5. 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 is why many brands use a social media dashboard that can provide an overview of who is 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 are an agency providing insights for your clients or an enterprise company discovering your own demographics, an all in one dashboard solution is critical.

3. Establish Your Most Important Metrics

While your targeted social media metrics might be the most important step of a strategy. Engagement metrics sometimes paint a better picture, building lasting relationships works on social. Large audiences and likable content is absolutely great, but there are some other metrics you might want to purse in 2018:

Reach: Post reach is the number of unique users who saw your post. 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 funnel. 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 is about seeing who interacted and if it was a good ratio out of your total reach. 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 hashtag. Did customers find your recent campaign offensive? What type of sentiment are people associating with your campaign hashtag? It is 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 is not quite as difficult.

4. Research Your Social Competitive Landscape

Before you start creating content (we promise we are almost there!), it is 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 is making your competitors successful.

Again, we will always believe you should not 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 find out who is 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.

5. Build and Curate Engaging Social Media Content

Did someone say content? it is no lie social media content is extremely important to your marketing strategy. However, it is 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.

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.

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

6. Engage with Your Audience and Do not 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 not forget these core elements of "networking" and it takes effort to ensure conversations or engagement opportunities are not left unattended.

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

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 is not there to communicate, what is 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 is smart to learn the best times to post on social media, but it is just as critical to engage after posting.

7. Track Your Efforts and Always Improve

So, how well did you do on your SMM strategy? Without continuously analyzing your efforts, you will 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 have got down your most important goals, network preferences and metrics, now it is time to make sure you made the right decisions. Knowing you have 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 is why the most commonly used metric (80%) for marketers is engagement.