Social Media Marketing: How to Use Social Media Marketing to Your Advantage In 2023

Social media marketing can be effective for building an engaged audience where your (potential) customers already are, generating traffic from different sources for a constant stream of visitors, and growing your business.

But social media marketing can also be a time-consuming task that often gets lost, so that your social media presence either goes unnoticed by your target audience or generates no interest. A waste of resources, instead of the valuable addition that social media marketing can be.

What makes the difference between these two scenarios is having a clear strategy for targeting all of your social media activities. Plus a streamlined process that ensures you can apply that strategy without it taking up too much of your attention.

But the beginning can be tricky. There are so many different channels where you can create a presence and that takes effort.

That is why we have put together this extensive step-by-step plan for you. Here you can read how to set up your own social media strategy and find tools and tips to successfully apply that strategy for your social media marketing.

Index:

The importance of social media strategy

How do you create a social media marketing strategy?

Schedule your content

track performance

Apps for Shopify merchants highlighted

Stay flexible

The importance of social media strategy

Before you post something, it is good to visualize the big picture: what exactly do you want to achieve with your activities on social media? And how can you best handle that?

Your company (your website or webshop) is the center of your social media strategy. And your strategy is how you align all of your social media activity with your goals.

Whether it’s TikTok ads or influencer marketing, social media gives brands access to cost-effective marketing. Social media marketing can serve a variety of marketing functions:

Drive traffic and sales

Tap into influencer networks

Build brand awareness

Gathering an engaged audience

Connect with customers and prospects

Provide customer support

This is because you have a wide variety of social media networks to include, each with its own strengths and weaknesses to consider.

To keep things simple and easy to get started, we break down your social media strategy into seven parts:

Goals : The results you want from your efforts and how you will measure them.

Target groups : Research and define your customers.

Metrics: creating a data-driven marketing strategy.

Content Mix : Recurring ideas or post types to include in your social media programming.

Channels : the social networks you want to spend your time on and what you will use them for.

Infrastructure : Set up the process and tools to efficiently execute your strategy.

Improvements: Adjust and innovate throughout the year.

This is not a recipe for success, but a framework to lay the foundation for your social media marketing. By the end of this guide, you should have a better understanding of how all of these points fit together like a puzzle and complement each other so you can make smarter decisions and adjust your strategy over time.

How do you create a social media marketing strategy?

In 2020, more than 1.3 million new users were added to social media every day. Each of them spent an average of two hours and 25 minutes on social media channels and messages.

A good strategy helps your brand find the right customers in this social media world. Whether you’re new to social media or rethinking your 2022 strategy, follow these steps to build a social media strategy.

Set goals that are relevant to your business

Identify your target groups

Determine your statistics and KPIs

Create your content mix

Set goals that are relevant to your business

Everything you do and post should be tied to one of your business goals. So first establish what your goals are and think about how you will measure the success of your social media marketing efforts.

Here are some goals worth considering that you can add to your strategy right away or later:

Increase brand awareness : Reach more people to increase the chances of your brand being seen by the right people. You can measure this by impressions/reach, shares, mentions, and other signals that show a real person has seen your post(s).

Create demand for your products : Get people excited about your products by providing relevant inspiring or informative content. You can then measure this via the number of clicks to your website, products added to a shopping cart or comments/messages from interested customers.

Generate leads : Entice your audience to leave their email address and then warm them up to a purchase. You can also build an audience of interested shoppers that you can retarget with ads.

Direct Sales : These are paying customers that are the result of your social media activity. You can measure this by the number of orders or your turnover.

Driving Offline Traffic : If you have a brick and mortar store or host events, one of your goals is to get people to a certain brick and mortar location.

Networking to Create Collaborations : Connect with influencers or like-minded brands for influencer marketing or co-marketing campaigns.

Build a loyal following : Build an engaged audience that is interested in what you have to say. Don’t use bought or fake followers to increase your follower count. You benefit much more from an authentic community of people who are genuinely interested in your products and who promote your content or products to others. You can measure this by the number of followers you’ve gained or lost over a period of time, or by the engagement rate (total engagement divided by the number of followers).

Building Social Proof : Collect positive testimonials content from customers/influencers that portray your brand in a positive light and that you may be able to use in other marketing activities.

Provide customer service : By being present on social media, you give customers the opportunity to ask questions, express complaints and request information. So one of your goals is to provide this support to customers or redirect customers to another channel. One way to measure this is by your direct message response time (as seen by a badge on your Facebook page, for example).

Becoming an authority in your target market : Social media gives you a voice that you can use not only to participate in conversations, but also to steer those conversations in a certain direction. By sharing your specific knowledge, you can create credibility around your products or services.

All of your choices must serve one or more of these purposes. In addition, any new ideas and tactics you want to try should be judged on how well they can contribute to achieving these goals. Some may be long term investments, others more short term.

Keep these goals in mind during the next step: figuring out exactly who you want to reach.

Determine your target audience

Marketing, both on social media and beyond, starts with a clear picture of your ideal customer. Take the time to research your target audience. Look at demographics and psychographics or patterns that help you form a picture of who your customer might be. With this exercise you not only collect valuable information for your strategy, but also develop a communication style and tone for your brand that match your target group.

If your business already targets a niche audience (e.g. people with cats), this is easier than trying to appeal to a wider audience (e.g. internet service providers or airlines). Take a look around the places where your target customers frequent, like on Reddit, and check the comments on blog posts to see what’s on their minds.

Facebook, one of the largest social networks with 2.89 billion monthly active users, is also a great place to do some research on your target audience. Check out your competitors’ web pages and click through the profiles of some engaged loyal followers to get a better idea of ​​who they are and what their interests are.

Once you have collected enough information, you put everything together and, based on the characteristics found, you create your ideal customer, a so-called ‘buyer persona’.

You don’t have to fill in all the characteristics, but write down as many as you can to get a good picture of this person.

Location : Where do your ideal customers live? The country alone can be helpful, but if you have a local business or only want to operate in a certain area, focus on those places.

Age : What is the age group of your customers? Keep this as broad as possible unless you’re sure your target customer is of a certain age.

Sex/gender : What is the gender or gender identity of your customers? Depending on your brand, this can be totally unimportant or essential.

Interests : What interests, hobbies and passions do your customers have? This information is useful for audience targeting and coming up with content ideas. (For example: cooking, hip hop, yoga).

Career/industry : In which industry do they work and what functions do they hold? Whether this is relevant to you depends on your business.

Income Level : What is their income level? Are they price conscious or willing to spend a little more on quality products?

Relationship status : Are your customers single, dating or married? This is useful to know, for example, if you are in the wedding industry.

Favorite websites/apps : What kind of websites do they bookmark? Do they check Instagram or Pinterest daily? Are there certain apps they can’t do without?

Motivation to buy : What reasons do these customers have for buying your product? If you sell sports equipment, these are questions you can ask yourself: Do your customers see sports as a kind of status symbol? Or are they looking for a way to fit sports into their busy lives?

Doubts to buy : What could be the reasons why they don’t buy your product? Do they doubt the quality?

Other information : Everything you haven’t listed yet, but is relevant, such as education, stage of life (new parents), events they attend, etc.

When creating personas, it’s not about your description being 100% accurate, but about making the best possible estimate of the type of person that is easiest to convert into a customer.

As an example, let’s say I started my own clothing brand selling t-shirts to potential clients in the Amsterdam area:

Location : Netherlands

Age : 22 to 34 years

Interests : Foodie, hip hop, bars, basketball

Career/Industry : Business or tech

Income level : 40,000 to 70,000 euros

Relationship Status : Single

Favorite websites to visit : BlogTO, Toronto Life , Instagram, Facebook

Motivation to buy : Show off their pride in wearing this Dutch brand

Buying concerns : rather buy from an established competitor or avoid brands that do not seem authentic or are not really known in the Netherlands

Most of these attributes can be targeted directly or indirectly through ads on social media channels, but it’s helpful to write it all down and use it as a basis for the type of content you want to share and the tone you want to use.

Keep the personas broad. Once you execute your strategy and get more and more real feedback, this will change. Your personas evolve and become more accurate.

Perhaps one of your assumptions turns out to be wrong or your customers have a characteristic that you hadn’t thought of at all.

Either way, social media marketing is one of the best ways to find out who your customers really are. And you can also use your findings for other business aspects, such as product development.

You can take it a step further and develop different audiences or target segments, such as gift seekers, shoppers who already buy from the competitor, and influencers or companies you would like to connect with.

But even with at least one main target group, you already have a better starting position for the next step in your social media strategy: what are you going to post.

Determine key metrics and KPIs

It feels like there are a million numbers to look at for your social media analytics. There is a number for almost everything.

Each social media platform has a different analytics tool. What you decide to keep depends on the above goals.

However, there are a few numbers you’ll want to keep an eye on to grow your social media accounts.

Involvement

Social media engagement involves tracking a number of different metrics. It is used to understand if your audience is actively interacting with your content and how effective campaigns are. High engagement rates indicate a ‘healthy’ audience (ie how active/engaged they are) and that your content is interesting.

You look at different engagement metrics, such as:

Likes, comments and retweets. Engagement rates like shares or retweets are different on every platform. But likes and comments are universal for everyone.

Involvement. This number is the number of post-engagements divided by the number of impressions for each.

Click. This metric is closely related to click-through and shows the number of times someone clicks on your content.

awareness

Awareness metrics can tell you about your brand’s visibility on a platform. If you have goals to increase brand awareness, look at:

Account mentions. The number of times someone mentions your brand on social media. These can be positive or negative and give you the chance to interact with people and shape the perception of your brand.

Impressions. The total number of times a post appeared in a browser’s timeline.

Reach. The total number of unique people who will see your content.

Sentiment. The voice of your brand. It shows how many people are talking about your brand compared to competitors.

Return on investment (ROI)

One of the most important metrics for any social media campaign is ROI. You can track sales if you use an in-app store like Facebook Shops. You can see how many people bought something on your website from a social channel in your Shopify Analytics under Sales by social source .

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