In 2021, around 4.2 billion people worldwide will be active on social networks. That’s almost every second person. This opens up completely new possibilities and communication channels for companies. Here you will learn step by step what is behind sound social media marketing, how you can reach the right people at the right time with the right content – and which strategy will help you become visible in the social networks in the long term.
1#Develop a social media marketing strategy that fits your business and brand
Getting started is often the right way. In the case of social media marketing, however, it is better to be smart than to “just do it”. Smart means above all: strategic. Think of social media marketing as a long-distance run – building organic reach takes a while. You not only need good endurance, but also a lot of preparation, training sessions, good equipment and individual technique so that you can compete and stand out among all the other runners. This means: With a well-thought-out and authentic social media strategy developed from your brand that focuses on your customers and pursues your goals in the long term, you can prevail against other providers.
Do you want to develop a sustainable social media strategy? The 5 most important questions:
Take your time and ask yourself the following questions – this will help you develop a social media strategy:
Who are you? Be clear about what you (want to) stand for as a brand and company. Pack this into a crisp sentence that will stay in your customers’ minds. The Golden Circle method, for example, helps here.
What do you want to achieve as a company on social media? Be clear about what you as a company want to achieve with your social media strategy. The more precisely you define your goals, the more precisely the strategy can be tailored to them. Are you looking for new talent? Position yourself as an employer brand on social networks and reach groups that are interesting for your recruitment. Are you changing from a pure dealer to a solution provider? With a brand campaign you can get this into the minds of the right target group. Important: Set yourself realistic (and measurable!) goals – and take wastage into account.
Who do you want to reach as a company on social media? You have to know people who are interested in order to create good content. Admittedly, target groups on social media are a complex topic. But the better you know your (potential) customers, the more precisely you can respond to their wishes and develop content that exactly suits their needs. We have written down in detail here what lies behind target groups, what this has to do with so-called personas and how a corresponding concept works.
Which social media is your target group active on? To reach your audience exactly where they spend most of their time, look at data and not just go with gut feeling. Use the campaign management tools of major social networks such as Facebook and LinkedIn and carry out precise analyses such as Google Analytics. This analysis is the basis for reaching your target group in a tailored manner. Important: Analyse regularly. Check and question your content – and the behaviour of the target group on the respective channels. The use of dashboards is helpful so that you don’t have to analyse each channel individually – and you can see the entire campaign activity at a glance.
Goals for a social media marketing strategy
Social media is everywhere – at any time, worldwide. It connects, inspires and has revolutionized communication. People spend a lot of time on social networks. Your (potential) customers are also there every day. Marketing jackpot, at least actually – after all, you want to attract and retain exactly those people with your brand. However, social media and the digital age have not necessarily made this any easier. The digital space is comparatively diverse, sometimes confusing – and competition is now fierce. Instagram works differently than Facebook and LinkedIn is a new cosmos. Understanding how things work, logic and algorithms and keeping an overview as a company is not that easy. But that’s exactly what’s worth it: With a good social media marketing strategy, you can reach exactly the right people via exactly the right channels at exactly the right time. This allows you to expand your reach, turn interested parties into (regular) customers and ultimately build a strong digital identity. Social media marketing is your key to success – provided you do it smartly.
Goals of a social media marketing strategy can be:
- to increase the awareness of a brand
- To direct visitors to your website
- Generate leads on the website or channel
- “Pre-warm” customers for sales
- ultimately increasing sales
#2.Turn those interested on social media into fans of your brand and build organic reach for your company
Almost every study shows that people find advertising annoying. At first it sounds like you have a problem – after all, you want to promote your brand or draw attention to your services. We give the all-clear: In the digital age, this works without being annoying. Nowadays, social networks allow you to reach people specifically with content that really interests them. Strictly speaking, this is still advertising , but it no longer has anything to do with annoying advertising promises. This has a decisive advantage: users consciously decide on your content – ideally, they turn from interested people into fans. The prerequisite for this is that you meet customers exactly where they are: on the right channel, at the right time, with the right content. To achieve this and build organic reach, there are a few things to consider:
Good content is key: More than ever, good content is the lever for attracting customers. High organic reach therefore always (also) results from a high-quality content level. Relevant and cleverly thought-out content serves as a flight path for successful social media marketing because it is shared, saved and commented on more often. For you this means: It’s better to work on teasers, videos and articles and see what offers your target group added value.
Get to know the rules of the platforms: Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube and other social networks and platforms differ in many aspects – for example in terms of target groups, functionality, algorithms or media costs. Find out exactly which channel (probably a mix of channels) is ideal for achieving the goals you developed in your social media strategy. LinkedIn, for example, is well suited for B2B communication. If you’re looking for staff or want to reach the masses in the B2C sector, you can’t ignore Facebook and Instagram. Familiarize yourself with the respective requirements – for example with the use of hashtags that users use to actively search for topics. But emojis, tonality and the correct number of characters can also play a role.
Get creative: Use the full range of possibilities on social media to increase your organic reach. Try out different formats, use stories, surveys, reels, competitions or entire articles (e.g. on LinkedIn) that stimulate discussion. Those who try out new things and surprise people are more likely to be remembered by the community.
Follow the customer journey: Use tailored content that fits the phase of the customer journey. You don’t know the customers yet? Then produce content that attracts attention and works without interaction or even prior knowledge on the part of the user. Have you already reached potential customers and are you already known as a brand? Then rely on content that brings you closer to the purchase phase and is ultimately convincing.
Stay on the ball: The magic word for organic reach is continuity. Post your own contributions, follow other channels, comment and moderate (see community management) – regularly.
The customer journey phases at a glance
IMAGE: In the image phase, you enter into real social interaction with your target groups. Your main goals: to create organic reach and define your digital identity. You can turn people into fans and build a community through relevant content on your social channels.
CONSIDERATION: In the consideration phase, potential customers already show interest in your products and services, but still need a final push to decide on you. Your task: Accompany the journey and impress people with relevant content – in-depth magazine articles, infographics, videos, etc.
CONVERSION: In the sales phase, you help potential customers quickly contact you and make it easy for interested parties to buy your products or services. For social media, this can mean, for example, in-app shopping on networks like Instagram or lead campaigns on LinkedIn that either reach their goal directly in the channel or lead to sales landing pages on your website.
#3. Develop social media formats from your topics that are convincing – both in terms of content and visually
Anyone who scrolls through their feed (whether Instagram, Facebook or LinkedIn) usually has little time. Your content must be “snackable”, meaning it can be consumed quickly – and at the same time remain in your memory. Make people stop by developing social media formats from your topics that are convincing in terms of content and visuals. Watch out for:
Strong imagery: Images and videos convince faster than text.
Strong teasers: Good content needs good teasers. Be sure to write in easy-to-understand language – with strong verbs, concise but varied sentences. Avoid passive constructions, filler words and technical terms and address the target group directly – ideally as if you were telling friends about something.
Form follows function: The content determines the format.
Recognition value: Your content must fit the brand. Use colors and shapes from your corporate design as recognition value.
Templates: Create templates for specific formats that you can refill over and over again. This saves you work in the future and allows you to respond straight away with a good post if things need to be done quickly.
#4.
Create a clear social media editorial plan
With a social media editorial plan, you as a team can keep track of planned and already played content across many channels, make handovers easier and identify gaps and the need for optimization. Basically, your social media editorial plan should include the following elements:
- Subject of the post
- Author or person responsible for the post
- Publication date, possibly also the planned time
- Channels on which the post should be displayed
- Current status of the post (is it planned, in progress, in release?)
- The format of the post (image and text, video and text, image carousel and text)
- Link to the location where the content is located
Make sure that the social media editorial plan remains clear for everyone involved and does not become a stumbling block. Excel documents with countless columns, colors, boldfaces and abbreviations may look colorful and important – but they can be difficult to read and prone to misunderstandings within the team.
The rule of thumb when starting out is: alternate between different formats in your social media editorial plan in order to offer your followers as much variety as possible. If certain formats (such as video content) prove successful over time, you can shift the format focus and adjust the social media editorial plan. Even better: With the help of A/B tests, you can find out which formats and teasers work particularly well, where people click frequently and what goals the attention gained in this way achieves. This way you can also test at what time, on what day and with what intensity the planning and control of your content works best.
When weighting your content, you will probably have to weigh up frequency and quality at one time or another. Both are relevant to the success of your strategy and depend on what goals you have set and what (financial and human) resources you have available. If in doubt, it is better to reduce the frequency and focus on quality that stands out. You know: your content builds your brand – and is therefore too important to be mediocre.
#5.
Take your target group seriously and practice active community management
You posted creative and relevant content, excited people and turned them into fans. The trick is to make them stay loyal to you. The good news: If you follow points #1 through #4, you’ll be well on your way. The bad news: Developing and posting strategic content is only half the battle to building long-term customer relationships. Community management is often underestimated, but at least as important.
Anyone who publishes content provokes a reaction. In some ways, social media works no differently than real life. Anyone who travels here not only wants to be inspired, but also wanted to be liked, seen and heard. Think of contact with your digital fans as friendship. Friendships last a long time when they happen on equal terms. If they are one-sided, they quickly fall apart. For you this means: Don’t just get in touch when you want something. Take the needs of your community seriously. Don’t just respond (as quickly as possible) to questions, criticism and problems, but also engage in an active dialogue with followers. Think about surveys that are relevant to your target group, stimulate moderated discussions, observe trends, engage there and develop your own tone that suits the respective channel. What is part of good community management: Integrate content from your community into your own feed.
The big advantage of community management: If you are close to the community, you get to know it better. This knowledge is worth its weight in gold for your social media marketing because it allows content to be designed, created and planned even better in the future. Ideally, there should be a regular exchange between operational community management and strategic social media marketing. You should also think about this: the larger the community becomes and the more channels you use, the more complex community management becomes. Special tools like Hootsuite help you keep track.
#6.
Use media budgets
All social media strategies should include organic content. In addition, content can be pushed with an appropriate media budget and thus shown to even more people in a more targeted manner. These can be individual posts as well as complete campaigns. Unfortunately, it is difficult to determine the amount of the media budget across the board – after all, every company has different resources, priorities and goals (reach or interaction).
As a guideline, however, you should initially focus your media budget on the large and central social networks such as LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram. Here you generate a lot of attention and the costs for displaying the teasers are relatively low. Only when you have exhausted the reach potential of the large social networks is it worth expanding your activities to other platforms such as Twitter or Pinterest. Plan test campaigns to find out where the financial investment is worthwhile. And remember: don’t juggle too many channels. The ratio between organizational effort and media budget should be right. Managing campaigns is hard work, don’t underestimate that. Allow enough time to take care of the controls and continually improve them. Speaking of improving:
#7.
Analyze how well you achieved your social media goals and continually optimize
And what has all this brought? This question is of course obvious, after all you have invested time and money. The good thing: Success is measurable in the digital age. You can use analysis tools to regularly check the performance of your social media campaign . How do your users behave? How long do they look at your content, do they continue to click on your page, do they stay there? Pay close attention to who reacts positively – for example with clicks on links, with likes, shares or long video views. These are important indicators that you should keep an eye on and record in order to make adjustments to your social media goals if necessary.
Extracting the most important ones from the flood of analysis data is not that easy without years of experience. Ultimately, different metrics are important depending on the objectives of your campaign. Is your goal for people to engage with you and your brand? Then analyse CTR (click-through rate), CPC (cost-per-click) and dwell time. If you want to generate reach and maintain your brand image, keep an eye on impressions, the increase in followers and interactions; If you want to generate leads, you measure conversions.
Once again, it’s clear: analysis is a must; Constantly questioning what, how and where you do something is essential. What worked well for a long time doesn’t have to stay that way. Keeping an eye on changes and reacting accordingly can save media costs and/or increase the efficiency of your digital campaigns.
Elementary for your social media analysis: an analysis dashboard
Analysing your social media campaign should become an ongoing process. The more precise the analysis of the previous campaign period (e.g. 8 or 12 weeks), the better you can control future digital campaigns. The key is to not analyse each platform individually. This quickly leads to errors and misunderstandings and makes your work more difficult. Instead, use dashboards that make your social media activity visible at a glance. Such a dashboard, for example, brings together all of Facebook’s activities. LinkedIn, YouTube and Instagram without having to switch between advertising managers. You set the observation period, filter according to target parameters (e.g. perception time or cost-per-click) and can pragmatically evaluate which digital campaign was successful.
New target groups
By the way: After the first phase of your social media strategy, you have usually already collected so much valuable additional information about your target group that you can use the algorithm to address new, previously unknown target groups that are very similar to the ones you already know. This in turn creates new topic and format ideas with which you can inspire, surprise and bind your community. In the end, you have to stick with it in order to become more successful. Consider re-marketing and readjusting your social media goals and content as a natural part of your social media marketing. No strategy is perfect from the start. Maybe you still remember the image of long-distance running: If you stay flexible, demonstrate endurance, and occasionally integrate sprints or backward runs into your training plan, you will ultimately make it to the finish line.
