Are you looking for more from your social media marketing? More engagement, more conversion, more reach? It’s time for an advanced social media strategy, and with my four simple steps, you can do it yourself.
Step 1: Define your social media marketing goals
Every business is different, so your social media goals should be too. Your goals will depend on your business, brand mission and values, size, location, growth strategy, customer avatar and more.
Updating your social media audit is a great place to start. Where are your most engaged, best-paying customers online? Which platform is sending the most people to your website to purchase? Review your investments too – how much time and money are you spending on each platform? Are the results proportionate to your input? Remember that some of this information may be on your client intake sheet or through your website analytics.
Now consider what you would like to improve. Which stage of your sales funnel needs the most work? Is it brand awareness? Conversion? Advocacy (clients who share and shout about your work or product)? Convert this into a SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achieveable, Relevant and Time-Bound) goal.
For example:Diggers Inc management is happy with their following and engagement rates but not seeing a lot of conversions. They really need more people to visit their website and book their services. A SMART goal might be ‘to double the number of click-throughs (from 20 to 40) to our website from social media by Christmas’. As a small business, this modest shift might make a big difference to their bottom line and is within what they consider possible, given they do their own social media.
In addition to being SMART, your advanced social media marketing goals should be profitable. Followers and links can become vanity metrics that never convert, so focus on real engagement like comments, click-throughs to your website and post shares instead.
Step 2: Test your ideas and analyse the results
Whatever your goal, an advanced social media strategy will need actionable steps to get you there. Think about what you might do to achieve it, then start testing and analysing the results. Your initial action steps might include advertising, repurposing content, tagging or following members of your audience, engaging with influencers or collaborations, or simply posting more of the same, but with better hashtags. For most of these, start small, test often and adjust according to the outcome.
For example:
If advertising is within your budget and plan, you might try A/B testing. Send different ads to different audiences and see which one does better. Then retarget and expand the reach for the ad that got you closer to your goal – whether that’s followers, click-throughs or purchases.
If you are staying in organic social media marketing, try different styles of posts with the same hashtags or the same style of posts with different hashtags. Compare the pair. Which got you closer to your SMART goal?
Our hypothetical friends at Diggers Inc reviewed their posts and saw that on days they shared images of finished work on social media, clicks to their website spiked a little. As they did not have a marketing budget, they decided to test before and after photos against the existing after photos. Within a few weeks, they found an increase in click-through rate when they posted before and after photos. Now they know what to focus on.
Step 3: Optimise, retarget and stay authentic (your most important advanced social media marketing action)
Once you have all the data, use it! Don’t post exactly the same style of post every single time, nor use the same hashtags every single time (this can turn into a disadvantage). But do increase the ones that got you closer to your social media marketing goal.
But if it doesn’t feel aligned with your business, don’t even test it. It may boost you initially, but if it doesn’t align, your market will eventually get wind of it, and you will lose the know, like and trust (built on your authenticity) that is so important in business.
Step 4: Schedule reviews and stay engaged
There is no easy way to say this, but if you’ve achieved steps 1 – 3, be ready to repeat regularly. Truly advanced social media strategy is about constant engagement, being authentic and consistent in your brand, and adapting to what your audience wants to see.
I suggest you plan only a month or two in advance, keeping an eye on your results. You might get a feel for what is working (or not working), and gently adjust as you go, or you can choose a formal review every month or two. If you go formal, put it in your business calendar as a priority for your time.
However, if you want to set and forget your advanced social media marketing – book a call today, and let me take it off your hands.
