4 Tips for Building an Effective Social Media Marketing Strategy

Whether you’re a business magnate or just learning the ropes, it’s not uncommon to run low on customers from time to time. Unfortunately, it can be difficult to know how to reach potential customers effectively.

However, with social media marketing, you can reach prospects, build your business, and make a name for yourself within your niche. Best of all, there are a number of techniques you can employ to ensure that your social media marketing strategy is solid and effective.

In this post, we’ll offer up some highly effective tips for building a social media marketing strategy. You’ll learn why each technique is important, as well as how to utilize them most effectively. Let’s get started!

1. Create Clear Objectives

Without clear objectives, you may have a general idea of what you’d like to do (e.g. grow your business through the use of social media), but no idea how to get there.

Fortunately, clear objectives aren’t difficult to create. In fact, here’s two tips that will get you on the right track:

1. Be specific and realistic. Avoid vague goals; instead, create ones that are specific (such as gaining 1,000 Twitter followers in 90 days) and realistic.
2. Ensure your objectives are measurable. The only way to know whether your objectives are being met is to create objectives that are measurable. Measurable objectives should ideally be quantifiable (such as the number of followers you will gain).

Objectives are the foundation of your social media marketing strategy. It's important that you put a lot of thought into your goals and objectives, and revisit them regularly.

2. Target a Specific Audience

When you create content, you should do so with a specific audience in mind. This helps you narrow your focus and target only those who are interested in your products.

In order to target your specific audience effectively, we’ve broken the process down into three simple steps:

1. Find your audience. This is one of the more difficult things you will do, but when executed correctly, the rewards are huge.
2. Pick the right social media platforms. Pick the platforms your audience most frequently uses. This will save you time, and give you a better chance of reaching your targets.
3. Speak to your audience's needs. You need to create a sense of urgency in your followers. This is why you must speak to their needs and let them know that you have the answer.

Social media is the perfect place to engage your target audience. It gives you a platform to share content that's catered specifically to them, and to create relationships that can lead to future sales.

3. Set Up a Posting Schedule

 

To build a strong social presence – as well as feed your content-hungry followers – you need a consistent and solid posting schedule in place.

To set up a posting schedule that’s right for your audience, there are a few things to keep in mind:

1. Be consistent. Pick a posting schedule you know you can stick to. Consistency is much more important than volume – especially in the beginning.
2. Mix it up. Promoting new content is important, but consider adding in a few of your older blog posts to provide your followers with a helpful blast from the past.
3. Automate the process. Popular social media automation tools include HootSuite and Buffer, and they enable you to plan your social media posts well in advance.

If you're starting small, slowly work your way up to more posts per day, but never sacrifice quality of content for quantity.

4. Cloak and Track Your Social Media Links

Link cloaking involves changing the URL your followers will see into something that is better branded for your business. Cloaked links can be easily tracked to see which ones are working for your business. This is beneficial for a number of reasons, and it can serve your business well when done correctly.

In order to begin, you will need the help of a link management plugin. We recommend our very own Pretty Links, not only for its cloaking and tracking abilities, but for its variety of other link optimizing features, too.

Getting started is easy. After purchasing your plan and installing the plugin, all you need to do is create a new link (choosing Cloaked as the Redirection type), enable tracking in the Advanced Options dropdown, and then use the link on your website and social media profiles.

Once the link has been in use for a while, you can then check out the stats on its use by going to Pretty Links > Clicks:

Here, you’ll see an overview of each link’s stats, including the number of clicks and the referrer (if there is one).

Conclusion

As a solid source of potential customers, social media provides your business with endless growth possibilities. Of course, you must know how to utilize those possibilities to their fullest in order to see the best results.

In the above post, we offered four tips for building an effective social media marketing strategy. To recap, they are:

1. Create clear objectives
2. Target a specific audience
3. Set up a posting schedule
4. Cloak and track your social media links

Do you have any questions about building a social media strategy to grow your business? Let us know in the comments section below!