SMM Strategy: What You Need To Know Before Starting
Action 1. Analyze
Before starting any business, you need to think carefully about whether it's worth it, whether it's buying new clothes or going to the movies. Moreover, you need to analyze everything well if you enter a highly competitive market.
Ask yourself questions. What are the strengths and weaknesses of my products, services? Who will need them in this social network? What is the best way to present these benefits? Use classic marketing tools - SWOT and PEST analyzes. They are great at helping you understand what can be served as an advantage and what still needs to be worked on. Companies large and small regularly use these methods in their preliminary market analysis.
Step 2. Set a goal
Once you understand that everything is worked out and ready to launch, you should sit down and cool off. Before a great ad campaign that will be remembered by millions, there are a few more steps to follow. For this, set a goal. What do you want to achieve?
- Scaling - to conquer more market space.
- Customer loyalty - so that your customers trust you more.
- PR - to build up publicity capital.
- Traffic - if you already have a website and need to increase the number of visits to it.
- Profit is the most obvious.
Step 3. Use a systematic goal setting method
One of the methods by which you can set goals is SMART
S - concreteness. Pick one or more goals and stick to them. It is impossible to achieve everything at once.
M is measurable. The goal should be measurable. How much percentage to raise traffic? How much to increase profits? What do we want to get from customer loyalty, how will it manifest itself?
A is reachability. You have a specific plan of action that you will follow to achieve your goal.
R - relevance. To what extent is this goal possible to achieve? You assess the situation soberly and understand the risk you are taking.
T - limb. Any goal should have a specific deadline. Otherwise, it turns into an endlessly stretching process.
Follow these steps and you have enough information to get started right.
Step 4. Self-analysis is good, analysis of competitors and target audience is even better
The analysis of the target audience is extremely important before going out on the social network. Imagine, you spent money on an advertising campaign on Instagram, and your goods, ATVs from a Canadian company, are very expensive, nobody buys. The audience is not the same. I had to go to Facebook. It's a shame, but money, time and effort have already been spent. Another example. Imagine that you have a great product that is being sold on a website, but the same product has dozens of similar competitors on social networks. It will be difficult to fight for a client with them: their audience on the social network has already formed, and in order to lure their clients, it will be necessary to produce high quality content. This means a large investment in an advertising campaign. That is why you need to calculate everything carefully, as much as possible.
Step 5. Choose your promotion channels wisely
The promotion channel that suits you best depends on many factors, such as the product category. If it's a premium product, then try Facebook; if clothes or shoes, then Instagram will go. Several different social networks can be run depending on the budget. Usually companies with acquired capital allow themselves this. For small businesses, the option to stay on one social network, for example, Instagram, is suitable. A great option for a start. A beginner can easily figure out how to use it.
Step 6. Choose your main KPIs
There are some indicators that are difficult to measure. These include:
- transitions from community to site, from site to community;
- comments;
- reposts;
- likes;
- for "Instagram" - the number of views of posts.
They are a fairly objective indicator of whether the audience likes what you are doing. At the same time, it is important to correlate the number of clicks, likes and other indicators with the total number of subscribers or customers.
Step 7. Be on the wave of trends
Keep track of what's popular right now - this will allow you to stay relevant to your users. If you make more useful content than others, then the audience will certainly pay attention to you. To do this, you need to constantly monitor popular information: what people like, what they repost, who they follow on social networks, what communities they read. Understanding the sentiment of the majority is helpful in making your campaigns more accurate.
Step 8. Do creatively
Staying on trend and writing about hot topics is great. But it's much cooler to create truly creative content. Creativity isn't necessarily expensive. Its key feature is memorability and recall. For example, it can be a catchy phrase, an unusual character, for example Nesquik, that appears in every video of the company, including on social networks.
Step 9. Put quality over quantity
Once you've figured out everything your audience needs and created a group with your company name, it's time to make some awesome content. You learned what it should consist of: creativity, trends and your information. Focus on quality: there is so much information trash on social media. Users demand good content. The more the audience likes the content, the more loyal they are to your company.
Action 10. Choose to promote communities and people
If you have influencers in your niche, turn to them for help. Make a cross-promotion or order a post from a blogger - this will be organically woven into the overall advertising campaign, especially if the post is native. In addition, you can buy ads in thematic communities. For example, advertising a computer mouse and headset in the community dedicated to computer games.
Step 11. Try contests
Competitions are classics. They are especially good at the start when you need to warm up the audience and attract new subscribers. However, if your community is filled with bad ads, there is no quality content, these subscribers will quickly unsubscribe. In the future, while maintaining the quality, contests can be repeated to revive the audience.
Step 12. Viral Marketing
Viral marketing is unpredictable. It is impossible to calculate whether you will be of interest to the audience or not. If you still manage to do this, you will pay off all the efforts immediately. Example: a clip of Viti AK, recorded for a casino advertisement. Thundered all over Russia. Even those who have never heard of it became interested in the casino.
Step 13: Keep your head on the results - take control
Do not lose your head from success if you see the frenzied growth of subscribers. They can leave as quickly as they came. The reasons for your successes and failures must be recorded. There are different indicators for this.
Reach - shows how many people watched the ad, how many of them clicked on it, where they went.
Clicks - Shows which ad posts have had the best response from users.
Conversions - if you post links on a social network that ultimately lead to the site, then you can track what gives the best result.
Mood - if users send reports to posts, something goes wrong, and you need to change the content of the advertisement.
Hashtags - to track how the generated information is distributed.
Conclusions
Don't be afraid to try. An SMM strategy is not as complicated as it might seem at first glance. Yes, it’s impossible to take into account all the factors and guarantee yourself 100% success, but that doesn’t mean you don’t need to try. Especially when there is a plan that you follow. Run different ad options to better understand the client. Understand that he is interested in what worries him. Create a separate strategy for each separate campaign. An RC that was successfully created once may not work a second time. If you find it difficult or you do not want to understand the confusing market of social networks for a long time, then turn to the professionals. They will do everything faster and more efficiently than a beginner.
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