How to Create a Social Media Marketing Strategy That Increases Conversions

Your social media marketing campaigns can succeed if you specify what you want to achieve.

That enables you to plan what to do to reach your goals.

A social media marketing strategy helps plan your goals, the actions to take, and the metrics to track and achieve them.

That allows you to understand the audience to target, the content to create, and the platforms to focus on and drive conversions.

The good thing is creating a social media marketing strategy is simple. This content explains how you can do it.

Choose Your Social Media Marketing Goals

Increasing brand awareness and conversions, and retaining clients are every business` goals. However, you can`t succeed by mixing all goals in a single social media campaign.

That`s because every goal has a specific approach.

You would not use the same marketing tactics for brand awareness goals as you would for conversion goals.

To increase brand awareness, you should create content that informs how helpful your business is to your audience. This helps build trust with your audience and increase followers.

If your goal is making sales, you should create content that persuades people to make purchases. This involves using social media copywriting skills to make your audience curious about purchasing your products or services.

Here is content that covers social media copywriting skills to increase conversions.

If you want to increase leads, your content should entice people to sign up for your email list.

And after drawing followers and converting them, you need to retain them. That requires providing products or services that provide ongoing value.

However, your goals will be easy to reach if they are S.M.A.R.T., which is an acronym for

• Specific: You should be able to define what, why, when, and how you want to achieve your goals and where you need to focus your marketing.  
• Measurable: You can only gauge success or failure if you know how much progress you want to make with your marketing campaigns, which helps you set a proper budget.  
• Attainable: Your goals should align with your skills and business resources. That enables you to set marketing campaigns that you can fully execute.
• Realistic: You should not set too good to be true goals. Align your goals with your business level, resources, skills, motivation, and time. Setting to earn $100000 in a month with a startup business that makes $1000 per month is unrealistic.
• Timely: You have to set a timeframe for your goals. This helps measure the performance and helps create campaigns that convert.

Set a Social Media Marketing Budget

Setting a defined budget for your social media marketing campaigns helps determine the profits or losses so you can know how to improve.

That entails calculating how much it can cost to run the marketing campaigns.

A social media budget can be fixed or flexible.

A fixed social media budget refers to allocating a fixed amount of money for the whole campaign period, whether a week, month, or year. Meanwhile, a flexible campaign implies modifying your budget according to your social media marketing campaign performance.

No matter the budget type you decide, you have to set a foundation for your campaigns. That involves setting how much it can cost to

• Buy the equipment
• Purchase software
• Hire freelancers
• Pay Influencers
• Run ads

Your social media marketing budget size is determined by the goals you want to achieve and the campaign timeframe.

If you, for example, have 100 email subscribers and your goal is reaching 10000 subscribers within a month, you must allocate a big budget. However, if your goal is reaching 3000 subscribers within three months, you will require a small budget.

See more on how to set a social media marketing budget here.

Identify Your Audience

You can create targeted content that brings conversions if you know your audience`s needs.

Social listening is one of the ways to know your social media target audience.

That requires using social listening tools like Sprout Social to know who mentions your brand and what they say.

Satisfied clients may appraise your brand and recommend it to others without tagging you. Also, unhappy ones can mention how awful your business is to warn others from buying from you.

All that can help you learn how to improve and create a better business.

Another way of identifying your audience is spying on relevant social media marketers` businesses. Examine their audience, the content they create, and the language they use in their content.

Audience research enables you to know your audience`s demographics and set a defined persona that can help you create content that resonates with people and converts.

It also enables knowing the social media platforms to focus and reach your target audience.

Check this content and learn more about how to identify your audience`s intent.

Research Your Social Media Marketing Competitors

Photo by Kampus Production: Pexels

Understanding how your competitors conduct marketing helps learn marketing gaps and create successful social media marketing campaigns.

You can know your competitors by doing a competitive analysis, which requires researching relevant businesses and examining their marketing performance.

Learn the social media platforms they target and their content performance.

Tools like Feedly can help you to easily conduct competitor research. You just need to paste your competitor's name or URL in the tool and you`ll get their content performance.

You can even track and get daily, weekly, or monthly competitor content performance updates.

That helps you get ideas of content that performs well so you can emulate it and boost your social media marketing campaigns.

Social media listening tools such as Buffer also help know what your competitors` audience talk about them.

You will see positive mentions, which help learn people`s preferences, and negative ones to help identify marketing gaps. This enables improve your business and outdo your competitors.

Social listening also enables you to understand and gauge your competitors` influencer marketing results and know the best social media influencers to target for your business.

Here is in-depth content on how to competitive analysis.

Do Social Media Audit

Unless you are starting, your past campaign performance should help you learn how to conduct the current ones. They help understand

• The content that performs well or worst
• Your target audience
• The best businesses e.g. freelancers and influencers to work with
• Your audience`s favorite social media platforms
• Your competitors` performance compared to you

This enables you to have a solid foundation of what to focus on or avoid.

Maybe in your last campaigns, you set a budget that doesn’t align with your goals, you can properly calculate and allocate funds suiting your campaign needs.

Or, your content could be relevant to your audience, but it`s too salesy and has no personal connection with your audience. You can make it more informative and fun to relate with your audience and convince them to perform your calls to action.

Social media marketing audit helps you know how to tweak your campaigns to align with your audience`s needs and convert.

Choose Social Media Platforms or Improve Existing Ones

Each social media platform requires a specific strategy.

That’s because every audience has a purpose for using their preferred platforms.

People who want to learn professional skills focus on platforms like YouTube, LinkedIn, or Medium. And platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and Threads are for entertainment.

So, base your marketing efforts on a social media platform that aligns with your business goals.

For example, if your goal is increasing sales to a B2B business, focus on platforms like LinkedIn.  If you want to increase brand awareness on a B2C platform, you can market on TikTok.

However, to easily increase your reach and resonate with your audience, create descriptive social media profiles.

That entails creating a social media bio that describes the services or products you offer and how helpful they are.

Also, include keywords aligning with your business and audience`s searches to improve your rank and followers.

See how to create an intriguing social media bio in this content.

Besides, business social media platforms should be in business mode. This enables you to access business tools to help you easily conduct your business.

You will get tools like scheduling and analytics to schedule content and see its performance.

So, if you already have social media platforms, check if their bios are up to par. If not edit them. If they are still in a personal account mode, convert them into business to enjoy the free marketing tools to boost your social media marketing strategy.

Create a Social Media Content Plan

Image by Anna Nekrashevich: Pexels

People will convert and enable your marketing campaigns to succeed if you create content that aligns with their intent.

A content plan helps you know the content to create for a specific audience on particular social media platforms and drive conversions.

That includes knowing how to optimize content for your social media platforms.

Content formats vary from one social media platform to the other. For example, YouTube requires video content, while Medium needs text content.

Besides, you will easily attract and convert people if the content resonates and solves their pain points.

An example is when you sell affiliate marketing courses. The audience`s pain points can be a lack of sales. You can entice them to buy your courses if your content teaches them how to increase sales to their affiliate business.

However, people can build trust and reliability in you if you create content that has a personal connection. That involves mixing sales content with personal content.

To achieve a good content mix, you can implement the rule of thirds, which entails

• Making a third of your content about driving conversions 
• Focusing a third of your content on sharing informative content
• Targeting a third of your content on building personal interactions

Then create a content schedule to help you know when, how much, and what frequency to post what content type.

Each social media platform has a specific posting frequency that works the best. For example, you can increase your post reach if you post 3–7 times per week on Instagram. But to increase awareness on LinkedIn, you must post 1–5 times per day.

Here is more about social media posting frequency.

Then create a lot of content in advance and schedule it so it`s posted automatically to enhance consistency.

You can use your social media marketing built-in tools or third-party tools like Hootsuite to schedule your content.

The next step is engaging with your audience.

If people comment on your content, reply to let them know that you are a real person and not a bot. This builds relationships and helps grow your social media following.

Another way to drive traffic to your social media content is using ads.

Ads enable content to get a high reach within a short time compared to organic content.

However, the downside is you will spend much more money than organic. So, you must be skilled so you don`t lose money on failing campaigns.

If you aren`t skilled in creating social media ad campaigns, you can hire a social media manager to help you.

Here is how to set up social media ads.

Moreover, to further your content marketing efforts, you can hire social media influencers to help you market your business.

To find social media influencers, you can search on Google or use tools like Upfluence.

Track and Tweak Your Social Media Marketing Strategy

If you want to know how successful your social media marketing strategy is, track your campaign performance. This helps you know

• Your followers increase or decrease
• The number of engagements
• Your post reach
• The number of shares
• The number of social mentions

You can know all these metrics easily using your social media platforms` analytics.

An increase in these metrics indicates high campaign performance, while a decrease signals a fall.

If you identify a failure, examine the cause and create content that converts. That requires interviewing your followers about what they like and dislike about your business. Then take their views as insights to help you improve your business. 

You can also research your competitors to see their best-performing content and replicate it.

Besides, ensure to keep learning different ways to create appealing content. That`s because social media marketing is ever-evolving. You can only succeed by knowing the trends and implementing them in your campaigns.

Improve Your Social Media Marketing Strategy and Create Successful Campaigns

A social media marketing strategy helps you specify what to consider for your marketing campaigns to succeed.

It helps to know your target audience and the social media marketing platforms to focus on and understand the content that resonates with your clients.

It also enables you to know how much to spend for your social media marketing campaigns to succeed.

That allows you to create targeted social media campaigns, track performance, and modify them to increase conversions.

What`s more, keep learning to improve your knowledge and create successful social media marketing strategies.