Nowadays, it is considered standard practice to use social media marketing for any business.
Pretty much all companies, online and offline, try to use social media to get customers. However, the unfortunate truth is that most companies, especially small ones, don’t have a social marketing strategy.
Marketers and business owners resort to posting content randomly or trying to copy their competitors. This often doesn’t create any actual results and doesn’t affect the company’s bottom line.
Since we all know how time-consuming social media can be, approaching social marketing without a strategy could be a massive waste of effort.
This article will teach you a process you can use to develop your social media strategy every year. This process should help grow your social media following in 2023 and beyond.
Feel free to use the step-by-step guide for your own plan or to help your clients if you run a social media management business, such as a Facebook, Instagram, or X marketing company.
Creating a Social Marketing Strategy in 2023 - Step-by-Step Guide
Take the steps below to build your social media marketing strategy in 2023. Use the guide as a framework for creating a system for yourself or your clients. Let’s get started!
1. Begin with the Right Mindset
The biggest mistake you can make when setting off on a social media marketing journey is not having a strategy. However, once people get past that and understand that they need a plan, there are two mistakes that they tend to make. We’ll discuss these mistakes in more detail below.
Mistake #1: Focusing on results/metrics that don’t matter
The fact is that impressions, even clicks or comments, are not what you’re after. They are what we call vanity metrics. You’re most likely interested in driving more profit to your company or your clients.
Don’t get us wrong — getting more views and followers is vital to growing your network. However, this will not get you anywhere unless you have a quality strategy to convert those followers into paying customers.
Mistake #2: Trying to do everything everywhere all at once
The fact that you decided to have a social media strategy doesn’t mean you have to go out guns blazing on all fronts. People often think that they need to have a system for every single feature of every single platform to have a chance of success in social media marketing.
For example, if you’ve been thinking about using Instagram as part of your strategy, you probably think that means that you have to use Feed posts, Stories, Reels, ads, and so on. This is not the case.
The most solid and strategic social media plan is not one that goes super broad. It is one that is super focused on wherever you are. That means that instead of aiming to be everywhere, you should truly focus on just one or two platforms with a solid and complete strategy.
If you can do this well, you will get much better results than if you spread yourself too thin. Be strategic and thoughtful about your approach and choose the platforms that will be the best fit for your business and goals.
2. Set Proper Goals
We were just talking about how important it is to focus on the right results and have a result-oriented strategy. There are so many different results that you could focus on, but you’ll only get what you want if you know what you want, and that starts with knowing what your goals are.
Consider your business goals
Before you even start thinking about social media, think about your business. What are your current business goals? Try to be specific. Instead of just saying, “I want to be more successful,” or “I want to get more customers and make more money,” try to think about specifically which product you would like to sell more of to which audience. How many units of that product do you think you can realistically sell within the next month or the next quarter?
As you’re thinking about this, consider your goals related to how you’ll sell the product. Do you need to attract more potential customers, or do you need to communicate with the leads you already have more effectively? What facts do you need to communicate to your prospects to get them interested?
Get granular with your business goals and let them inform your social media strategy.
For example, if you want to attract one-on-one clients for your virtual assistant service, you don’t need many customers. Instead, you need to focus on attracting the right people and make sure you’re building genuine relationships with them.
Track your progress
Then you have to think about how you will measure your success.
With the goal from the example above, you might want to focus on how many people are filling out your inquiry form each week as a more general business metric. Over on social media, it could be how many people click to visit your intake form and the conversion rate there.
On the other hand, you could have an e-commerce brand, and you may want to sell thousands of units of a particular product every month. Let’s say you make handmade jewelry and want to sell more crystal necklaces.
In this case, your goal on social media might be to get more impressions, which means more people are seeing your jewelry.
While impressions certainly can be just a vanity metric, it could be crucial because the more people see your jewelry, the more potential customers you get. You could also focus on tracking the click-through rate to your website and the actual purchases of the specific product you’re pushing.
Focus on the OST of your goals
Keep in mind that your social media strategy and budget will be strongly influenced by the size and timeline of your goal. A neat little acronym to remember here is OST, which stands for Outcome, Size, and Timeline.
You need to know what the OST is for your goal. In the previous example, your desired outcome is selling more crystal necklaces. The size is whatever amount you want to sell, and the timeline represents the amount of time you have to complete this goal. The bigger the goal and the shorter the timeline, the more money and effort are needed to make it a reality.
3.Determine Your Target Market
The basic principle behind every marketing strategy is that you’re trying to find specific types of people to sell your product or service to. Obviously, it is much easier to find these people if you know whom you’re looking for.
Start by thinking about current customers. Do you want to attract more people just like them, or do you want to attract a different group?
Once you have a general idea of whom you want to attract, you’ll want to consider more specific things like:
- Age
- Gender
- Ethnicity
- Income
- Marital status
These and other factors determine the demographics of your target audience, but you also want to consider their interests. What is your ideal customer into? Are there specific books, movies, apps, or even hobbies that you could use to reach them?
You might have a lot of information about your target audience, or you might not. Either is fine, but the more closely you can pinpoint your ideal customer, the easier it will be to find them on social media.
4. Research Your Competition
You want to see what works for your competitors, so you can flatten your learning curve and create a more solid social media strategy earlier. This starts with identifying your competitors. You might already know who they are or need to do some digging.
Either way, once you know who your competition is, you’ll want to look at what platforms they are on. The main thing you should focus on during this step is analyzing the content they post. How frequently are they posting? What are they posting? How does their audience tend to respond?
Finding answers to these questions can give you tons of ideas and essential data on what you’ll want to post on your accounts.
5. Keep Learning from Your Mistakes
This isn’t necessarily about creating your strategy, but it is an important step in this process. You must keep listening and monitoring your essential metrics and adjust as needed. This is what the social media marketing pros do. No matter what they tell you, they rarely get it right on the first try. Instead, they devise a pretty good plan, to begin with, and perfect it as they go.
If you want to create a great social media marketing strategy, this is precisely what you need to do. You need to learn from your mistakes, learn from what’s working, and adjust.
This is a never-ending process. Your social media strategy will never be perfect because social media platforms and people’s interests constantly change. So, keep your eyes open and always be learning about what works.
Author Bio: Christopher Oldman
Christopher is a Digital Marketing specialist, Project Manager and Editor at Find Digital Agency and a passionate blogger. He is a devoted and experienced author who loves to pay attention to quality research and details. Focused on new digital trends and voice distribution across different channels, he starts the day scrolling digest on new digital trends while sipping a cup of coffee. In his free time Christopher plays drums and Magic: the Gathering.
Thanks for the informative article. While I appreciate the insights, I have to disagree. Social ads marketing is now dead. Spam platforms like X (formerly Twitter) is now owned by a talentless entrepreneur except making money, Elon Musk. He still thinks social media remains a good tool for him to say anything he wants. This is completely wrong.