Social Media Marketing Strategy: Meaning & Contents

Procedures for Developing Social Media Marketing Strategy

The 21st century businesses are driven by digitization and companies must adapt quickly to changing circumstances in the marketplace. Otherwise, a company may become laggard relative to its competitors. Digital transformation has enhanced our social interaction, including the way we conduct business.

In today’s business environment, it is very common among consumers to visit online to research about a potential product or service before making buying decision. For this purpose, it is essential for companies to strive to improve its digital footprints across multiple social networks.

The following are the underlying procedures for developing social media marketing strategy, including:

• Determine a social media marketing goal to be achieved, and this should be consistent with the overall corporate objective of the organization. The social marketing goal should be specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time bound. It should also be unique and complement the overall strategic marketing goal.

• Establish a social media budget. Company should develop a budget with which it can run the social media activities. Social media marketing is a viable undertaken that require financial resources. The requisite limited scarce financial resources should be allocated in a judicious and efficient manner across the identified social media accounts. More resources should therefore be allocated to or spend on social media account that generate or have the potential to achieve the highest revenue or increase brand awareness and reputation.

• Identify and evaluate the company’s target audience profile including their demographic, psychographic, geographic, and behavioral tendencies. The social media marketing activities should be channelled to customers who are more likely to buy or patronize the company’s product or service. However, the product or service should reflect the current market needs and be distributed and promoted to the target audience at the right price and quality to generate increasing sales. The areas of interest of the target audience should be identified and the marketing campaign efforts should then be directed towards satisfying the identified interests.

• Identify the most relevant metrics. The social media marketing strategy should be designed to identify the most relevant metrics, particularly the ones that produce the best result. More attention should then be given to the metrics that are consistent with the intended goal. Thus, more resources should be directed to improving the metrics on a going concern basis to get the best and consistent result.

• Carry out competition analysis to identify major rivals, best practices, and spot opportunities. Competition analysis is intended to help identify and understand the strengths and weaknesses of comparable companies operating in the same industry. This is premised on the believe that the company’s rival will adopt similar social media marketing strategy. Therefore, the company should know what the competitions are doing on social media, whom they are targeting, and the kind of phrases or key words they are using to attract potential customers.

• Select the right social media network. Company will need to create social media accounts including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Google my business, etc. depending on the intended goals to be achieved and manage each effectively. The top six (6) social networks with monthly active users as of January 2022 include: