An Insight into 8 Crucial Steps in Effective Implementation of Any Social Media Marketing Strategy

Successful implementation of social media promotion plans is only possible when you have a proper strategy in place. Our aim here will be to look into some of the steps you need to take for creation as well as proper implementation of any social media marketing strategy.

What are the main steps in effective implementation of any social media marketing strategy?
If you want your social media marketing efforts to deliver desired results then it will be important to utilize different strategies for improving effectiveness of your efforts.

In the following sections let us look at some of the steps you need to take.

Step 1: Analyze Your Business Objectives and Goals

First step in proper implementation of social media marketing strategies would involve developing a clear idea of goals you want to achieve since it would be very difficult to move in the right direction without knowledge of objectives to be accomplished.
Thus, you will have to analyze your business goals and decide how social media can be utilized for attaining those goals. Some of the most common goals that you should include in your strategic planning are:

• Improving awareness about your brand
• Reduction in marketing expenditure
• Retain customers

The best thing to do will be to create two primary as well as secondary goals and work to achieve them.

Step 2: Create Marketing Objective

Goals will not be useful in case parameters have been defined which indicate successful achievement of those goals.
As for instance, if you have generation of sales and leads as one of your goals then you will have to specify the total number of sales and leads that are to be generated to signify successful achievement of that goal.

As such, marketing objectives which are measurable, relevant, specific, time bound and achievable help in defining path to be followed for accomplishing your business goals.

As for example, you can keep a marketing objective of improving leads by about 40% for generating required number of sales and leads. Another thing you will have to keep note of is that marketing objectives are to be created only after available resources are analyzed so that the objectives can be achieved in the best possible manner.

Setting timeframe (such as by when the goals are to be achieved?) is another important factor you will have to consider while creating marketing objectives.

Step 3: Identify Your Customer Base

In case you notice lower engagement on your social media profiles then it could be due to the fact that social media marketing campaigns are not targeting your ideal customer base.

Accordingly, your aim should be to:

• Analyze buyer personas
• Understand demographic details of your customers
• Comprehend their likes, habits and problems
• Deliver right messages at the right time to right people

Step 4: Examine What Competitors are Doing

By analyzing what your competitors are doing, you would be able to better optimize your marketing strategies by including ideas which are working for them.

To accomplish this task you wil have to:

• Create a list of 4-5 main competitors in your niche
• Examine social media networks they are active in
• Perform analysis of content strategy they have
• Check frequency of posts, time of the day they are making the posts and number of followers they have
• Study the kind of content they are posting, whether it is promotional in nature or informative
• Analyze the type of response they are providing to their followers
• Check the amount of engagement they are able to create on those social media networking sites

Step 5: Select Channels and Plan Your Strategies

Creation of account on all social media sites without analyzing how good the site will be for them is not going to provide desired results.

Thus, you will have to analyze the social sites most of your customers are active on and work accordingly. As for example, if most of your customers are active on Facebook then you will have to invest time and money on promotional campaigns and advertising on Facebook.

Step 6: Develop a Well Planned Content Strategy

Your marketing strategy will not succeed if good informative content is not part of it. As part of your content strategy it will be necessary to consider several aspects, which are:
• Type of content, posting frequency (as for instance, to determine posting frequency, analyze Facebook Insights to know when fans are viewing your content) and time of posting
• Presentation of information (whether content will include images, be textual content only or include links and videos)
• Content should match current trends on social media platforms for content delivery

Step 7: Plan Allocation of Resources and Budget

To plan your social media marketing budget you will have to examine:

• The tools which will be required (such as CRM, monitoring tools and software for email marketing).
• Cost for outsourcing services like video production and graphic designing.
• Expenditure on purchasing advertising.

You will have to make a final cost projection so as to understand the affect it will have on your overall marketing budget.
The best thing to do will be to keep highest priority for marketing strategies which will provide quick return on investment (ROI). Your short term marketing strategies should include social referrals as well as advertising while long term engagement, development of content and fan acquisition should be part of long term strategies.

Step 8: Decide about Roles

You need to work towards improving productivity of your workforce, prevent overlaps and confusions. This will be possible when roles are clearly assigned to all the team members working on implementation of social media marketing strategies.
Another aspect you will have to look into will be creating a plan for execution of all the processes. The marketing efforts should be analyzed on daily as well as weekly basis so that changes can be made as required.

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