July 11, 2022

For years now, social media has been an important tool to engage audiences, create communities, and to drive site traffic and purchases. Over 40% of Americans use social media to interact with brands during their buying process, and 68% either use or would like to use social media to ask questions or obtain further information before buying a product. 

So how do you make sure your social media marketing reaches your target audience and meets their consumer buying needs? The following are a few basic guidelines to follow when crafting your social media marketing strategies.

Define your mission and outline your goals

You must specify what you want to accomplish with your social media marketing efforts, be it driving customers to the purchase stage, or simply to enhance your brand awareness and keep you (or your client) at top-of-mind when they embark on their customer buying journey. Your goals will determine your first steps in building your strategy, and define which results to measure when evaluating how successful it was.

Specify your target audience and identify your competition

You probably have a great idea of what your existing customer base looks like, but consider the opportunity to expand it to a slightly wider range, or even to narrow your focus to a smaller subset of your current audience. The more selective your target is, the more specific you can be with your message and content. Looking at how your competition targets and communicates with audiences like yours can reveal styles and techniques that will inform your own marketing plans.

Pick your platforms and customize your content

Generationally, Gen X can be found on Facebook, while TikTok and Instagram are preferred by Gen Z. Meanwhile, YouTube and Twitter have similar levels of engagement across all the age groups. Each platform is somewhat different in terms of the style and format of content that performs best.  

Regardless of the platform, responsiveness is key. All age groups prefer to communicate with brands through social media rather than via any other channel. Take care in assigning your team roles to ensure that questions and comments on your social media content are quickly and effectively addressed.

Use social media tools to measure your performance

Each social media platform is constantly improving their own performance measurement tools to give advertisers feedback on how their campaigns are working. And there are plenty of third-party sites and software that can provide deeper layers of tracking and analytics, even scheduling and optimizing your posts for you and taking some of the grind out of running your campaigns.

Evolve your strategy

The final step is to make sure that your social media marketing strategy is performing as you planned. Measure your results against your intended goals and ensure you achieved what you wanted. These reports will inform you on how to tweak your content, choose which platforms to focus on, or even adjust your goals going forward. Most importantly, never be afraid to try out new ideas in your next campaign.

Whatever the immediate goals of your social media campaign may be, there are platforms and audiences out there waiting to hear your message. A carefully crafted and measured media strategy will produce results that you will be able to track in real time. Let me know if Mosaic Media can assist you in putting together your next campaign!