For a brand to function well online and for digital media to contribute to achieving business objectives, effective social marketing strategies are needed.
When I talk about effective strategies, I naturally mean strategies capable of achieving set objectives. Above all, website optimization.
Creating a strategy is one of the most important processes, if not the most important overall, as it establishes the foundation upon which every choice related to the brand’s or company’s online presence rests.
In this article, we’ll look at the main aspects of a social strategy, distinguishing between local businesses and national brands.
Brand and Target for a Social Media Marketing Strategy: How to Understand Them?
Understanding the brand and target is the starting point for creating a social marketing strategy that works.
Every brand has an identity that is expressed not only through visual aspects like the logo, colors, and shapes, but also through words, with the definition of a true tone of voice.
Social media are made for people, and just like people, brands also have a character, a personality. It’s expressed in the choice of post types, in the way the brand writes and responds to comments.
Usually, we start from a brand identity document created directly by the “company, but this resource isn’t always available. How do you understand a brand’s” identity in these cases?
The answer lies on the other side of the screen: through the target.
The target, or the group of people united by a certain need or interest, can be summarized and synthesized into one or more buyer personas.
How to Create a Buyer Persona
The buyer persona is nothing more than a sort of identity document of our target, only more in-depth. Beyond demographic aspects, it also includes psychological and relational ones. Who does the target interact with? How do they get informed? What are their fears? What do they expect from a possible solution to the problem? What purchasing process do they follow?
Creating a buyer persona profile helps the social media agency delve into the target’s psychology, analyzing not only their conscious needs but also latent ones, complemented by expectations and fears, thus defining potential barriers to purchase to be overcome through communication.
Consequently, the brand identity must mirror the buyer persona and have the same attitude, the same point of view, and the same way of thinking as the target, albeit with a different approach, namely the problem-solving one. When the target has a problem, the brand proposes a solution!
A Practical Example
Let’s imagine that a pasta-producing company wants to speak to a target of adults between 25 and 50 years old, who presumably live with their families and share the main meals of the day with them.
Through “observation of the main channels on which it wants to be present, it discovers that its target communicates in a light and pragmatic manner, as well as having little time available due to the hectic rhythms caused by” work activities and family management.
With these indications, the company knows that it can propose on social media its pasta formats that cook in less than 10 minutes, paired with equally quick recipes.
Not only: from user interactions, the company discovers that many people struggle to find the cooking time indication on the packaging.
The agency managing their social media, therefore, decides to implement a strategy in this regard and proposes posts that leverage this insight, seeking interaction with the audience on this topic.
Having noted the interest, the company decides to produce packaging with the minutes written in large characters on the package and advertises its launch with a campaign on all its social channels, resulting in increased sales.
This (real) case is an example of how a brand can create harmony with the target audience through social media using a targeted strategy.
How to understand the client’s objectives
After understanding who our client is and who our target is, we must focus on the objectives. This phase is very important, as it helps us understand what the client expects from our online activity and how much they have understood the possibilities offered by this tool.
The simplest, but also the most effective way, is to interact directly with the client. A conversation is always the right way to start a collaboration!
To set up the social media strategy in the best way, some of the key questions to ask in any case are:
- The possibility or possession of multimedia materials and what type, e.g.: photos, videos, etc.
- The possibility of obtaining new material and in how much time.
- The USP of the product or service or its sustainable competitive advantage compared to competitors.
- Obviously, who the main competitors are.
- The budget available for marketing activities.
- If there is an internal resource or another agency with which you can communicate and work together.
Typically, the main difference in terms of objectives is related to the size of the client’s company: depending on whether it’s a national-level brand or local businesses, we find a significantly different vision.
Brand objectives
When studying a social media marketing strategy, the base to start from is always the objective. Compared to small local businesses, brands tend to have already defined business and marketing objectives.
Often, therefore, it’s enough to simply translate these objectives into actions on social media aimed at achieving them.
The question that instead needs to be asked when developing a strategy for a brand is: what do brands want from social media?
Brands are sufficiently well-known not to need social media as a direct sales channel, but they use them as a means to strengthen their awareness, ensure that their fan base remains loyal, and create a community around the brand that can expand organically.
Brands, in short, are looking for people who share their values. Through values, in fact, the target identifies more easily with the brand until becoming a loyal consumer.
Such loyalty, obviously, can be rewarded with dedicated initiatives through social media, which will obviously need to be provided for in the strategy.
Typical examples range from extra content for the community to discounts sent via email, but also include contests and referral programs.
In general, based on our experience, brands don’t need to use social media to obtain direct purchases. Rather, they tend to exploit the medium by following its nature as the simplest method to create a vast community potentially without boundaries.
SME objectives
SMEs, unlike brands, focus on local audiences, smaller, but usually with more transversal interests.
The need of small and medium enterprises is primarily to see an economic return on investment in the short to medium term. Liquidity and cash flow are very important factors for conducting business.
In this case, the social marketing strategy must provide for profile management aimed at making the product or service known. Always in a creative manner and keeping in mind that the winning element is consumer insight, to then exploit the acquired notoriety to attempt direct conversion.
Generally, strategies for local businesses have short funnels, with conversion sought on both cold audiences and warmer groups.
In addition to local businesses, however, we must also consider small e-commerce operations, which necessarily need a longer funnel, not necessarily more complex, and higher budgets.
In both cases, however, the main KPI remains achieving a positive ROI in a short time.
Social marketing strategies for SMEs, moreover, involve greater integration of all available channels and tools, especially in the upper part of the funnel. The goal is to receive traffic from multiple sources and not lose any conversion opportunity.
Choosing social channels for an effective strategy
The question that clients often ask most frequently is: which social networks will we work on?
The most correct answer is: it depends.
Generally, it’s not a good idea to work on all social channels if you don’t have an adequate editorial plan, appropriate material, and especially sufficient budget to cover all platforms.
One thing that is often underestimated, in fact, is the low organic reach that all commercial profiles have compared to pure entertainment content.
Today, it’s impossible to have a sufficient engagement rate to achieve your goals if you only rely on organic reach.
This is due not only to the business model of social platforms. They make profits through the sale of advertising space, but also to the “goal of getting users to spend the most time possible in their apps. The” algorithm, therefore, will tend to show entertainment content more often than commercial content.
To choose the channels, therefore, we need to take a step back and return to when we defined the buyer persona and brand identity. We tend, in fact, to develop the strategy on the platforms where the target spends more time, but also on those we think may be more suitable for the brand’s tone of voice.
Whatever the platform, it is essential to correctly identify trends by periodically using appropriate tools such as Google Trends. With the right creative input, almost all trends can be leveraged on your social channels.
Types of posts
Depending on the type of channel chosen, of course, the strategy involves a certain type of content.
Although according to Statista, “84% of users prefer videos to other types of content (a constantly growing trend), some platforms like Instagram and Pinterest are particularly well-suited to the” use of static images.
When preparing a social media marketing strategy, deciding upfront the types of content we will create helps the creative department of the social media agency plan the work, making channel management more efficient and faster, as well as more effective.
If for the choice of channel we referred to information on brand and target, to know what type of content to include in the strategy we must think about the objectives to be achieved.
If the “goal is to sell a product, for example through e-commerce, we are likely to have more success proposing videos rather than photos. Given that”84% of users on the web say they made the decision to purchase a product after seeing one or more videos.
From a creative point of view, we must never lose the main focus: the platforms ask us to create content capable of entertaining. So before informing or trying to sell, we must entertain the target and create the mechanism explained “earlier where the brand identifies with the” user and vice versa.
Useful tools for your social media marketing strategy
Let’s review some online tools to immediately start putting together a social marketing strategy.
In particular, these tools will need to fulfill three fundamental tasks for the activity:
- Identify trends.
- Create an editorial calendar.
- Produce posts quickly.
Google Trends, as we’ve just seen, is perfect for fulfilling the first task. In a few screens or with a simple search, we can discover trending topics from the last few hours, days, or months.
Intercepting trends is crucial for identifying consumer insights that the target audience can relate to.
Consequently, it’s necessary to create an editorial calendar.
On this point, the debate about the best tool to use is open and very heated. In reality, everyone works with different information and it’s impossible to find a single model that works for everyone. Among the various options, we can mention Trello, Google Calendar, or Agorapulse. Often, the solution that works best is much simpler and consists of a common spreadsheet.
Our invitation is to experiment with various solutions. It’s likely that at the beginning none will be suitable, but after examining several alternatives, you’ll be able to find the right fit.
Finally, we recommend the evergreen Canva for creating posts with an attractive graphic appearance and extreme speed, a fundamental aspect if operating with instant marketing methods. It’s excellent for professionals who don’t have a creative department at their disposal.
Conclusions
These are, in brief, the starting points for implementing effective social marketing strategies. It’s always important to remember, however, that each company represents a unique case.
If you want a personalized social strategy that will help you achieve tangible results, contact us!
