​​​​​​​Social media marketing isn’t all about brand awareness. More than half of marketers using social media say it helps improve sales, which is why it’s important to integrate social media

1. Integrating with the rest of your digital strategy

Social media marketing isn’t all about brand awareness. More than half of marketers using social media say it helps improve sales, which is why it’s important to integrate social media marketing into your larger digital marketing strategy to get the most out of it.

Some of the marketing strategies you want to integrate include are:

• Content marketing
• PPC and display advertising
• Email marketing
• Search engine marketing
• Offline marketing

 

2.Analytics tracking is one of the most important things you can do to improve your social media marketing strategy over time.

3. Budgeting : With your goals set, next, you need to determine how much money you can allocate to your social media marketing strategy.

4. Resourcing/team building: 

• Research by Simply Measured shows that while actually developing a social media strategy is more difficult for small businesses, enterprise companies also face significant challenges in securing enough internal resources to make it happen.
• Here are some other tools you can use to simplify social media campaigns for you or your team:
• Blog aggregator tools - Use a tool like Feedly to aggregate all your blog feeds in one place. Easily select content to share with your audience all from one platform.
• Social media automation tools - Use Hootsuite, Buffer, or another tool and schedule your social posts to go out at optimum times. They’ll also help you analyze your results.
• Social following tools - Use ManageFlitter or FollowerWonk to identify and follow your target audience.

5. Research

• Once you know who’s going to run your campaigns, and what tools they’ll use to create it all, it’s time to research:
• Your campaign content (What resonates with your audience?)
• Your posting strategy

6. Choosing your platforms:

If you want to effectively target your audience, you’ll want to reach them on several different networks - but that said, you shouldn’t plan to have a presence on every single platform.

7. Producing content

Your social media strategy will require a mix of content to be successful, so you'll need to develop a process to create this content, and maximize its worth.

• Visual
• Emotional
• Useful

8.Creating an audience persona

The core of effective social media marketing is about speaking to a specific audience with your social posts. And unless you have an intuitive idea of who your target audience really is, you’ll need to create audience personas.

The most important social networks for teens and young adults are:

• Instagram (32%)
• Twitter (24%)
• Facebook (14%)
• Snapchat (13 %)
• Tumblr (4%)

 

Here are some helpful resources for creating your audience personas:

• How to Create Buyer Personas with Social Media Data - Hootsuite
• How to Mine Social Media Data for Persona Marketing - TrackMave

9. Goal-setting and objectives

• Once you've got a good idea of who your audience is, you’ll then need to identify key goals for your social media marketing efforts.
• What do you actually hope to achieve with your strategy?
• The top goals for most SMB social media marketing programs are:
• Building brand awareness (74%)
• Getting website traffic (53%)
• Lead generation (41%)
•  Analytics