Social Media Marketing: what it is and how to create a strategic plan

Social media marketing: when social media and marketing meet, a business starts a second life. Your project moves in fact in a dimension, the digital one, where it lives of new languages and contexts. But above all: a direct relationship with users-customers.

If up to now you thought that social media marketing was about sponsoring some content on social networks, then this is the article for you: it’s time to get acquainted with the matter. Continue reading, and you’ll find out why your web project so far has not taken off: because you did not have a strategic plan.

Social media marketing: what it is

Communicating your business through social media, combining brand values to advertising campaigns: this is social media marketing. A constant and targeted action in which, by creating content, you maintain a direct line with your audience.

Transforming social audiences into customers

The goal, of course, is to turn that audience into customers: to build a relationship of credibility. That way, when they need a product or service like the one we offer, they’ll choose ours. Moving forward, then, the goal of social media marketing will be to turn customers into ambassadors: people who not only recommend our products or services, but also promote them of their own volition.

Social media marketing: how to start

Social media allows you to reach various targets through text, images and video. So when you start a social media marketing campaign, the first step is to ask yourself: who are my buyer personas? That is, the profile of the user we are addressing: age, habits, interests, what are their needs.

Once we have identified the profile of our user-customer, we can choose the social media channel through which to communicate. Is our product aimed at an audience of teenagers? Then we will focus on Tik Tok. Is our customer base business? Then LinkedIn is the answer. Or again, an adult audience? We’ll probably find it on Facebook.

Social media marketing and website: an integrated strategy

Social networks allow us to create a direct contact with our audience: we can respond to their requests, identifying their needs and interacting instantly with them. The social media in short, are the meeting point with users.

At the same time, however, we must not forget that social networks are a private property subject to continuous policy and algorithm changes. Consequently, it is necessary to combine our social with a website where the customer will find information, contacts, products and everything related to our business: social and website must interact with each other, with the first referring to the second through links.

How to create a strategic plan

We talked about social media marketing and how social can help a company connect with its audience.
We’ve also stressed the importance of having our own domain: a site that, through the keywords that characterize us, can rank among Google results and allow us to be found through social search as well. At this point, understanding the importance of an integrated strategy, we need to create a strategic plan. That is to plan.

Brand values

First of all, identify the brand values and bring them forward. A customer must not only appreciate our brand, he must identify with the messages it proposes. For this reason, it is important not to espouse a cause just because it is fashionable: the risk is that, at the slightest contradiction, you run the risk of making mistakes that cause you to lose customers. This does not mean remaining neutral in order to protect yourself: it just means choosing carefully your values, those of which you are a true spokesperson.

Content

To start sharing content, it’s essential to plan. Establish an editorial calendar: you can use an Excel spreadsheet, in which you associate a content with its day and text part. Once you start sharing content, you can figure out what your community appreciates the most: informational posts? The videos? Polls? Assess whether or not your audience interacts. Try to engage them by asking them questions, suggesting they share the post with someone, asking them to leave a like. In short: push them to be active with a call to action.

Remember one key thing, though: how we use social. We scroll through the feed distractedly, in a continuous stream. Maybe while we are on the bus, or while we are waiting for the coffee at the bar: in these situations, nobody has the concentration to deal with a formal or too complex text.

The Pixel

Designed content, your social media marketing campaign is not such without sponsorships. Depending on the case, you can either highlight a piece of content or create an actual campaign. However, you will have to understand which are the contents that convert, that is those that push the user to perform the action you want: fill in a form, land on the landing page to which you directed him, insert a product in the cart.

In short, you’ll have to understand which content is more performing, and to do that it’s essential to install the pixel. It’s a string of code to be inserted in your site: the pixel allows you to check when a user arrives on your site after viewing your ad on Facebook.

We’re at the end of our social media marketing guide, now you know everything you need to know about the topic. Start designing your content!

Contents

Contents is an innovative, high-performance marketing tech company that has developed a proprietary software platform that analyses, produces and distributes original content. Contents also uses the Natural Language Generation system, based on Artificial Intelligence, which allows us to create natively multilingual and personalised content in seconds, without the need for human intervention. Our services are designed for e-commerce, editors and web agencies. Sign up for free!