What is SMM Strategy and How is it Prepared?

Social media marketing is one of the most dynamic and rapidly changing fields of digital marketing. So, what is social media marketing, and how is it defined? Social media marketing is a digital marketing activity aimed at engaging with your target audience, sharing content, and increasing brand awareness through social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn. These activities ensure the presence of brands in the social media ecosystem, making it possible to communicate directly with customers.

Unlike traditional marketing, this type of marketing has a more interactive and customer-oriented approach. Through user interactions such as commenting, sharing, and liking, brands can receive immediate feedback. This allows brands to quickly update their marketing strategies and achieve more effective results.

Social media marketing strategies enable brands to build strong relationships with customers and foster loyalty through social media.

Today, social media marketing has become a crucial tool for brands, as people spend a significant part of their lives on social media platforms. This provides companies with the opportunity to reach millions of potential customers directly and improve their products and services by quickly gathering feedback. Developing effective social media marketing strategies helps maximize this potential. Strategies involve selecting the right platform, analyzing the target audience, determining content types, and setting the frequency of posts to ensure greater engagement and conversion. Thus, social media serves as a powerful tool for brands to both connect with customers and generate revenue.

How to Create a Social Media Marketing Strategy?

Social media marketing strategies are one of the key elements of a successful digital marketing campaign. So, how should these strategies be developed? As a first step, brands should strive to understand their target audience and their social media usage habits. Target audience analysis plays a crucial role in determining which social media platforms will be more effective. For example, a brand targeting a young audience may prioritize platforms like Instagram and TikTok.

Another important step is defining social media goals. In this process, brands should set short-term, mid-term, and long-term objectives and develop strategies accordingly. Creating a content strategy is also a vital part of this process. A well-structured content strategy ensures that the brand’s message is conveyed correctly. Additionally, having regular and engaging content helps grow the audience. Finally, by designing campaigns aligned with the brand identity, it is possible to enhance the brand’s consistency and credibility.

Let’s take a look at how to create a social media marketing strategy in 8 steps:

1. Set Your Goals

Define SMART goals for your social media strategy: The first step in creating a successful strategy is to set your goals. Without goals, it is impossible to measure success and return on investment (ROI).

Your goals should have the following characteristics:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Achievable
• Relevant
• Time-bound

This is the SMART goal framework. This approach guides our actions and leads to real business results.

An example of a SMART goal:
"We will use Twitter for customer support and reduce our average response time to under two hours by the end of the year."

Track key metrics for your social media strategy: While it is easy to track statistics such as follower and like counts when implementing a social media strategy, proving their real value can be challenging. Instead, it is more effective to focus on metrics like engagement levels, click-through rates, and conversion rates.

You may want to track different goals for different platforms or even different usage types for each platform.

For example:

• If LinkedIn is used to drive traffic to your website, you should measure clicks.
• If Instagram is used to increase brand awareness, you can track Instagram Stories views.
• For Facebook ads, cost per click (CPC) is a widely used success metric.

Social media goals should align with your overall social media strategy. This makes it easier to demonstrate the value of your business.

2. Learn Everything You Can About Your Audience

Building an audience: Knowing who your audience is and what they want to see on social media is crucial. This way, you can create content they will like, comment on, and share. If you want to convert social media followers into customers for your business, this is essential.

You should have information about your target audience, including:

• Age
• Location
• Average income
• Typical job role or industry
• Interests, etc.

Recognize your audience and customers as real people with actual needs and desires. Learn how to target them on social media and interact with them effectively.

Gather data: Social media analytics can provide valuable insights about who your audience is, where they are located, and how they interact with your brand on social media. These insights help refine your strategy and better target your audience.

For example, Jugnoo, an Uber-like service for auto-rickshaws in India, used Facebook Analytics to discover that 90% of users who referred others were between 18-34 years old and that 65% of this group used Android devices. They used this data to target their ads and successfully reduced their cost per referral by 40%.

3. Know Your Competitors

Conduct a competitive analysis for your social media strategy: A good competitive analysis will help you shape your social media strategy and give you a better understanding of what to expect in your industry. At the same time, it will help you identify market opportunities.

For example, if one of your competitors is dominant on Facebook but not very active on Twitter or Instagram, instead of trying to attract the followers of a strong competitor, you may want to focus on platforms where your audience is underserved.

Use social media listening: Social listening is another way to monitor your competitors. Search for the competitor’s company name, account activities, and other relevant keywords on social media. Learn what they are sharing and what others are saying about them.

By continuously monitoring your competitors, you can identify changes in social media usage and spot new trends in time.

4. Conduct a Social Media Audit for Your Strategy

If you are already using social media, evaluate your activities so far. Ask yourself the following questions:

• What methods are working, and which ones are ineffective?
• Who is interested in your content?
• Which platforms does your target audience use?
• How does your social media presence compare to competitors?

Once you have gathered this information, you will be ready to think about ways to improve. Your audit should clearly define the purpose of each social media account. If an account’s purpose is unclear, consider whether it is worth maintaining.

Questions to help with decision-making:

• Is my audience present on this platform?
• If so, how do they use this platform?
• Can this account help me achieve my goals?

Asking these questions will help ensure that your strategy is developing in the right direction.

Look for fake accounts: During your audit, you may come across fake accounts that use your business or product name. These accounts can be harmful to your brand. To ensure your followers recognize your official account, consider verifying your Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram accounts.

5. Create Accounts and Optimize Profiles

Decide which platforms to use: When selecting the social media platforms you will use, you should also define your strategy for each one. Angela Purcaro, social media manager at Benefit Cosmetics, told eMarketer:
"For our makeup tutorials, we are all about Snapchat and Instagram Stories. Twitter is reserved for customer service."

As a reference, you can look at how other small and medium-sized businesses use social media tools to connect with customers. Keep in mind that Facebook and Instagram have even surpassed email for this purpose.

Optimize your profiles: Once you have decided which platforms to focus on, it is time to create your profiles or optimize your existing ones to align with your strategy.

• Ensure that all profile fields are filled out.
• Include keywords that users may use to search for your business.
• Maintain consistent branding across all platforms (logos, images, etc.) so your profiles are easily recognizable.

6. Get Inspired

While it is essential for your brand to be unique, you can also draw inspiration from other businesses that are successful on social media.

Social media success stories: You can usually find these stories in the business sections of official social network websites (e.g., Facebook’s business section). Past case studies often provide valuable insights that you can apply to your social media plan.

Award-winning accounts and campaigns: To explore top-performing brands on social media, you can research winners of Facebook Awards or Shorty Awards.

Your favorite brands on social media: Which social media accounts do you enjoy following? What do they do to engage people and encourage sharing?

For example, National Geographic is one of the most successful accounts on Instagram, combining stunning visuals with compelling captions.

Ask your audience: Consumers can also be a source of inspiration on social media. What are your target customers talking about online? What can you learn about their needs and desires?

If you already have social media channels, you can ask your followers what they want from you. Just make sure you are paying attention to their feedback and meeting their expectations.

7. Create a Social Media Content Calendar

Sharing great content is important, but planning when to post it is equally crucial for maximum impact.

Determine the right content mix: Your calendar should reflect the goals you have set for each social media profile, ensuring that everything you share supports your business objectives. Based on this, you can establish the following distribution:

• 50% of content should drive traffic to your website.
• 25% of content should come from curated sources.
• 20% of content should support lead generation (e.g., subscribing to a newsletter, downloading an e-book, etc.).
• 5% of content should focus on your company culture.

By including these different types of posts in your content calendar, you can maintain a proper balance. If you are just starting and are unsure of what kind of content to post, you can test the 80-20 rule:

• 80% of your posts should inform, educate, or entertain your audience.
• 20% should directly promote your brand.

Additionally, you can apply the one-third rule of social media:

• One-third of content should promote your business, convert readers into customers, and generate revenue.
• One-third should share industry-related thoughts and stories from business leaders or similar brands.
• One-third should focus on personal interactions with your audience.

8. Evaluate Your Strategy and Make Adjustments

Your social media strategy is a crucial document for your business, and it is unrealistic to expect to get it perfect on the first attempt. As you implement your plan and track the results, you may find that some strategies are not as successful as expected, while others perform better than anticipated.

Analyze performance metrics: In addition to checking the analytics provided by each social network, you can use UTM (Urchin Tracking Module) parameters to track visitors coming from social media and analyze their behavior on your website. This will help you understand which social media posts drive the most traffic to your site.

Reevaluate, test, and reapply: As you collect data, use it to continuously reassess your strategy. These insights can be used to compare different types of posts, campaigns, and strategies. Conducting ongoing tests helps you determine what is working and what needs to be changed, allowing you to optimize your strategy in real time.

Surveys can be a great way to measure the success of your strategy. Ask your followers, email subscribers, and website visitors if you are meeting their needs and expectations and what type of content they would like to see more of. Then, adjust your strategy based on this feedback.

Social media is constantly evolving. New platforms emerge, others undergo demographic shifts, and your business will also go through changes and growth. This means that your social media strategy should be a dynamic document that is regularly updated and adjusted as needed.

To maintain the effectiveness of your strategy, review it regularly and do not hesitate to make changes according to new goals, tools, and plans.

When updating your social media strategy, ensure that everyone on your team is aware of the changes. This way, they can work together to maximize the benefits of your business’s social media presence.