Best SMM Strategy for 2021

Social Media Marketing as a way to promote your Business

 This Blog is a guide on creating your SMM Strategy in 2021; which is much easier done than it sounds. It does require a little time, focus and research but only takes 8 easy steps to complete.

Let’s start from the beginning and answer the question of what is Social Media Marketing or SMM? SMM is a process of using your Social Media platforms to promote your business, connect with your target audience, generate traffic to your site, increase leads and conversions. SMM also includes posting quality and relevant content on your Social Media pages across platforms, engaging with your followers, performing visitor analytics & running Social Media ad campaigns. Or to simplify it, it is using all marketing tools and weapons on social network pages.

Another important question to answer is what Social Networks to target when promoting your business? Will Facebook ads bring better ROI than Twitter? And what about Instagram? since you already have thousands of followers there. How to know which platform to use? We have an easy answer here for you, – “The more the merrier.” And even better news, you can manage all your SM accounts from one of Social Media Management apps, our favorite is Hootsuite – www.hootsuite.com. It makes it so much easier for you to post, respond and analyze. Plus, your posts can be posted on all your Social Media accounts at once saving huge amounts of time and effort.

8 Easy Steps to Create an Effective SMM Strategy

Now back to the best SMM strategy for 2021, where we outline 8 steps you would need to accomplish in order to set yourself for success:

• Set Social Media Marketing Goals for the year
• Learn & understand your target audience
• Analyze and audit your past SMM performance
• Find out what competitors are doing
• Set up / Optimize / Upgrade your Social Media accounts
• Plan your content ahead of time. Create Calendar
• Learn from the best, follow most successful Social Media Business pages
• Track progress, analyze and adjust based on results

 

1. Set Goals

Like any process in life and business in order to be successful needs a set of clear and SMART goals. Where S – specific, M – measurable, A – achievable, R – reasonable, T – time bound. If your goal is “Get as many Facebook page likes as possible” is NOT a SMART goal, but you can convert it to one. It would sound like – “Get 5,000 page likes on Facebook with help of Like Campaigns by end of 2021 … ” You get the idea, be as specific as you can and set clear timeline, to keep yourself or your team members accountable and track the progress. Good set of goals usually consists of 3-5 SMART objectives. Also make sure to write them down with times, dates and employees responsible for completion.

2.Know your audience

Why is it important for you to know who your target audience is? Because you need to know what kind of content they are interested in, what keeps them engaged and makes them like and comment. When researching and analyzing your audience keep track of things like:

 

• age
• demographics
• location
• typical jobs or industry
• average income
• interests
• preferred type of content
• favorite social media platform

 

Once you have good understanding of your target audience, let’s say they are 30–40 year old stay at home moms, with average household income of $ 100,000 or 40-50 year old man, who work in sales and love fishing, with household income over $ 250,000 / year. Admit your Marketing strategy, content and approach would differ drastically, which makes it extremely important to know details of your potential customers and is a cornerstone of your Social Media Marketing Strategy building process.

3. Analyze and Audit your previous Social Media Marketing performance

This is probably not your first day on Social Media, it might be the first time you taking it to a professional level, but most likely you already had a profile and followers, comments and interactions with customers on your pages. Look back and analyze following:

• what were your most liked pieces of content?
• posts, videos, blogs, how to articles?
• which content create most of comments?
• who are the people liking and commenting?
• which platform brings most engagement?

Answering those questions will help you shape your target audience and as result to shape your SMM strategy.

4. Find out what competitors are doing

Know your competition, know who you are playing against and perform competitive analysis of their Social Media accounts and campaigns.

• What are they good at, what are their weaknesses?
• What platforms are they using?
• Which of their campaigns create most of user engagement?

Answering those questions and monitoring their social media accounts will also help you adjust your game plan, possibly you can borrow and improve their ideas and apply them in your SMM strategy. Or for example, if they are using Instagram as their main social media platform to engage with their customers and already have a solid following there, you should explore and double down on your Facebook profile instead of trying to compete with them on Instagram. You can find more information on Facebook profile and ad campaign set up here.

Another big piece of knowing your competition is “Social Media Listening,” which refers to analyzing conversations and comments not just around your brand, but around your industry including your competition. Knowing what customers are saying about your competitors’ products and services will help you shape better social media marketing strategy.

5. Set up / Optimize / Upgrade your Social Media accounts

By this step you already established which social media networks you will be using to promote your business. After that, time to set up professional accounts and establish main purpose for each platform. For example, you run Craft Brewery and planning to use Facebook for general business info and updates, Instagram for featuring pictures and videos of new seasonal beers, Twitter to provide customer care and Linkedin for posting open positions and career opportunities.

6.Plan your content ahead of time. Create Calendar

First rule of Social Media – you have to be active, second rule you need to provide quality content, third you need to be consistent in terms of volume and time when you post your content. This is vital for success of your SMM campaigns; it doesn’t do any good for your company’s image if you post 3 times a day one week, and post nothing for the next two weeks. It would be much better if you used same 21 posts (3 times a day for a week = 21 posts), but spread them one a day for 3 weeks consistently and preferably at the same time (time of the day which creates most engagement for your posts).

Creating SMM content calendar is an excellent way to manage your posts, it keeps them organized, consistent as well as helps you spread different types of content you are sharing. Our recommendation is to use Social Media Management tool to help you manage your accounts. Most of them already have a calendar integrated, and will allow you to plan ahead and schedule your posts in advance, rather than trying to come up with content on a fly and post daily. In other words,  it is smarter to dedicate last Friday of the month to create next month’s posting calendar. After that, upload it into social media management platform and not worry about posting for the entire month.Content will be posted automatically and you just need to monitor activity, engage with your customers and reply to any comments they might leave.

7. Learn from the best, follow most successful Social Media Business pages

Keep an eye on Social Media Pages that you like to read and follow. Think why are they getting your attention? What is different unique about them? Can you use that in your SMM strategy?

In addition, you should follow most successful Social Media pages regardless of their industry, monitor their content and see what you could apply to your pages to get more awareness, clicks and likes. Analyze what makes them different, what makes you like & follow them and share their content? Is it crisp images, funny quotes or perhaps their casual approach and educational articles?

8. Track progress, analyze and adjust based on results

Last but very important step of your SMM strategy is to track and analyze your progress. Be sure that not all your strategies will perform up to your expectations, some will do worse and some might perform much better than initially expected and that is fine. Main goal of this step is to realize it and adjust your strategy accordingly.

Implement tracking systems, use each social network analytics to track your visitors and understand their interests. Track how many of them went to your website and if they made any purchases or requests. What piece of content and from which social network you had most visitors to your site, which social network brough you most conversions? Therefore, tracking your site traffic is very important. Once, you have that information, you can adjust your strategy and strengthen your presence on platforms which brought you most quality leads.

Takeaway

Continuously optimize your content, if your Twitter doesn’t create much engagement, try Instagram instead. Or if your customers are asking for product videos instead of pictures on Instagram, consider opening YouTube channel. Where you can post product reviews, “How to” manuals, instructions, etc.

Keep what is working and quickly act on what is not, try new things, set goals and monitor results. After that, do not be afraid to change things up a bit, or completely, best part about social media it is an open dialogue. Your customers will tell you when they like changes or when they don’t. You can always change things back if needed, but what if new way will double your sales? Worth giving a shot, isn’t it?

 

Sophie H                                                                                                                                 1/10/21