Social Media is one of the strongest tools for marketing and advertising in the present century. The content you post on your social media forum can turn your brand into a household name and your followers into fans. However, everything needs proper planning, hard work, and execution to reach the top, and handling social media content is no exception.
While PPC advertisements may fetch you hot leads, when it comes to creating brand awareness and engaging your customers, content marketing is the king. With the growing popularity and usage of social media, it is by far the best platform to reach out to a large audience.
Here are some of the best tips and tricks for crafting a solid social media content marketing strategy that can surely bring success to your venture. But before that, we first need to understand what content strategy is and why is it so important?
What is Content Strategy and Why is it Useful?
When creating content for your business profile, you cannot treat your account as a personal blog. Creating a content strategy helps you target a bigger picture and a wider goal.
Again, when creating content, you need to be mindful of your target audience, their preferences, and how to use the views you get from great content to get your sales rolling. You need to guide your content ideas by business factors to boost audience engagement, and ultimately sales figures.
Sporadically updating your audience whenever you get time, randomly on different types of social media platforms, will not do the magic for you. You need to identify specific goals, create valuable posts that align with these goals, and then distribute content on the right platform. This would help you weigh the results well and then fine-tune your strategy accordingly.
Also, there is no one-size-fits-all strategy for creating and sharing effective content for your social media links. You need to develop a master plan that would guarantee success in the long run. Here is a plan that has longevity and can fetch growth for your brand and business.
Identify and Set Goals
The first step towards a successful content goal is to plan the type of content you need to create and how your content marketing strategy can help fulfill its achievement. Some of your top goals may be:
- to increase brand awareness
- create sales/lead generation
- increase community engagement
- grow the audience for your brand
- increase web traffic
Now, depending upon your goals, your content marketing strategy should be such that it pushes these goals towards their fulfillment.
Plan Your Social Content
Whatever content you have created, it is very important to run an audit report to understand which posts performed well and which ones didn’t. Your content goals and your audit report should be in alignment with each other.
For example, if improving brand awareness is one of your goals, you need to look at your follower count on each platform and identify the posts which helped create new followers. This way, you would be able to rule out what kind of content would help you expose your brand to new people who want to follow you.
Build a Content Calendar
Having identified your primary goals, you now have to build a social media content calendar. This would help content planning in a better manner, would help you visualize and organize your ideas in a manner that makes the execution of your strategies easy and effective.
A content calendar makes it quite simple to collaborate on social media posts with different people across your company. It’s also very assistive and helpful in collaborating with different departments and creating a more well-rounded plan.
Promote and Distribute Your Content
Planning and publishing forms only a part of your social media content strategy. Finding ways to equally distribute it on varied types of social media networks for maximum visibility is also a challenge and a very important step towards success.
This means you have to build upon a content distribution strategy that would help you share your posts more widely. You can use share buttons on our posts, engage your audience by asking a question and encouraging them to answer, and engaging participation with widespread users.
Measure Results
Last, measuring all your above efforts would give you an idea of how you have performed so far and what improvements need to be made for better longevity. This will optimize your plan through detailed metrics.
Every month, you need to analyze your data and take a top-level view of your content. Taking a look at how each piece of content was performed would help you understand the trend and even weigh the variables that it had working with.
Some important social media metrics to measure are:
- Awareness- This is judged by the number of times your content was seen by people
- Engagements- The number of shares, reactions, clicks, and comments your content scored
- ROI- Conversions and referrals earned from external sources
There are many types of social media analytics where you can measure performance of your Business online. But the catch is how to understand which one would work best for you. And what would compel your audience to act? And whether the channel you have chosen is the right pick for your business type? This may include positioning and rightfully presenting your content. For that, you need to ask yourself a few questions.
- What kind of audience is using this channel, and what is their purpose behind using it?
- Will your objectives be fulfilled by it?
- Does it fit with your editorial mission?
- What results are you aiming to achieve?
- What kind of content works best on this platform?
Final Take
Social media is a huge arena that needs to be studied and researched well before plunging into it and using it for your business promotion. Planning your content strategy for your social media presence is an ongoing process. You need to plan them out curiously and stick to the essential steps through a strategic approach so that you never get deviated from your final goals.