Why Communication is key in Social Media Marketing Strategy

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Let’s start with the question “ what is social media strategy?”

Social media marketing is a tool that helps you to connect with the audience to build your brand, increase the insights, and grow your business using social media platforms.

The major social media platforms (at the moment) are Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube, and Snapchat.

This includes posting and advertising your products on your social media handle.

But social media isn’t only about posting blogs and liking pictures. You need to have an effective plan behind what you’re posting and a goal that you want to achieve from it.

Without a plan, it will be hard to achieve good results on social media. Hence, it's important to understand who your audience is, and what they want.

HOW TO CREATE AN EFFECTIVE MEDIA MARKETING STRATEGY

While working for the marketing strategy its important to ask yourself the 5Ws and 1H for making it effective:

#1: Who

It's important to identify who your audience is actually. That means identifying everyone involved in the purchase of your product. Be sure to ask yourself; “ Am I delivering my content to the right people?”. By this, don't leave valuable voices out by mistake.

You can differentiate your audience by following factors:

1.Job

2.Age

3.Gender

4.Salary

5.Location etc.

Also, don't forget to ask the followings to yourself:

Who are your current customers?

Who do you want to buy your products and services?

Who are you marketing to now?

Answering these questions will help you to analyze the current scenario of your brand. This will lead you to build up an effective social marketing strategy.

#2: What

What do your customers buy?

This is one of the most important questions to answer. This not only helps to identify your best sellers but also will help you to shape your product or brand according to the needs of your consumers. Monitoring your social media handle, you can always be on top of what your consumers are saying about you and what improvements do they want. If the reviews are good, continue with it; if not take it as an opportunity to excel your brand.

#3: When

When are your sales highest?

Not all brands have regular sales. Keeping a track on your sales peak will help you to know the demand of your consumers. The highest sales month or season will let you know about the most selling product of your brand and you can improvise your other products according to it.

When do consumers buy more products?

So it's important to analyze whether your brand has seasonal sales or regular sales. Knowing the frequency will help you to create awareness among your customers about what to buy and when to buy. For instance, if you get more traffic on Monday rather than Friday, take advantage of this to engage more audience and grow your brand. In fact, you should see the timings whether it’s morning, or the nights, you get more engagement.

#4: Where should I publish and promote?

Where should I publish and promote?

On which social media platform are you getting a larger audience? Yes, this too matters. when it comes to social media content marketing, you have to analyze which social media platform is giving you a higher number of insights. Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. it can be any. Invest your time and promote your product more on that platform. Posting regularly will help your content to show up on more feeds and hence will increase your insights.

Where does your audience live?

Researching your consumer’s geography is important, Yes, geographic targeting will help you to display your advertisement to the audience in your area. This will also increase awareness about your product among the audience. For example, if you’re a chemist in Birmingham, you won’t get consumers by advertising about your business in London. Hence, to target the right consumers, you should use effective keywords in order to improve the chances of showing up your content at the top in the searches.

Where did they discover you online?

One of the simplest ways to identify your target audience is to find a form where they get to know about your business. It can be through search engines, online sites, newspapers, social media ads, knowing this will help you to focus in the right way.

One simple way to identify your target audience is to find out where your current customers first discovered your business. Whether from search engines, local directories, online review sites, social media, or word of mouth, knowing where they found you can help you plan where to focus your targeting efforts.

#5: Why

Why would they buy from me?

Needs and Wants: are the two perspectives of most purchases. Having knowledge about your products and services and why would they prefer to buy your product will provide you additional insight in targeting your audience and will help to grow your local business. For instance, a person looking for a dentist will have different expectations and journeys than someone looking for a barber, so it’s important to understand “why” they would.

Why would they choose to buy from your competitors?

There could be numerous possible reasons why consumers may buy from your competitors and not you. Customers have multiple choices while selecting a product to buy.

The factors that might affect are:-

1.Customer service

2.More followers on social media

3.Better online reputation

4.Better discounts

5.Better quality

So, analyzing all the factors why they might buy from your competitors over you can help your product or brand to improve in many terms.

#6: How

Now after analyzing all the 5W’s the question comes, “how will I measure success?”

So first of all its important to keep in mind that every business has its own social media requirements. Generalize your growth and compare it from the past. Also, it depends on how big your business is. You can hire a social media manager who will monitor everything, post on social media, and will provide you the metrics.

So now after we have decided about the social marketing strategy and planning so far it’s time to focus on communication is key in a social marketing strategy.

Communication is the base of any social marketing campaign. The way you present your ideas to people plays an important role. It should be noticeable and should attract people’s attention. If people don't understand, aren't exposed to, or don't pay any attention to your message, they won't respond by changing their behavior.

Therefore, while delivering any message effectively you have to pay attention to these four aspects:

The channels through which the communication is delivered.It’s important to deliver in a language that is understandable by the audience out there. Also, your services should be available in places where the target audience will come in contact with.

The design of the message. The tone in which you deliver your message is important. How the communication looks, sounds, and reads will do much to determine whether the target audience will notice and pay attention to it.

The use and choice of spokespersons. Here social media influencer marketing helps. Choosing a credible person who can target a large audience can contribute hugely to your message. Signing social media influencers and collaborating with them will help your brand to get more insights for sure. You just need to find an influencer who fits best according to your brand or product.

The use of familiar themes and values. Using a familiar situation or idea or appealing to the values of the target audience can help to smooth the way for a new concept or a suggestion for a behavior change they hadn't considered.

To overcome the most common barriers to social marketing communication you can use the four aspects given below:

Ignorance. Often, members of the target population know little or nothing about the issue, and therefore don't see it as relevant.

Selective inattention. Your issue is just one of the thousands of messages to which the target audience is subjected every day. If it doesn't have a "hook" to draw them in, they'll screen it out.

Selective inexposure. People make it their business to stay out of the way of messages that they see as meant for groups other than theirs, or that they find frightening, discomfiting, or annoying.

Principle. If your message contradicts the religious, moral, or cultural values of the target audience, they'll see it as hostile and wrong unless you can either convince them that another principle takes precedence in this case.

EXTRACT

Alan Andreasen, one of the gurus of social marketing, suggests eight steps to effective social marketing communication:

Set up outcome-linked, measurable objectives for your communication strategy.

Develop messages that emerge from the target population, recognizing message competition.

Select appropriate channels.

Develop different communications for different market segments.

Pretest every message.

Integrate your communications program internally (make sure that your communications all say the same thing).

Integrate your communications program with everything in the marketing mix.

Evaluate outcomes by your original criteria.

I hope, the points mentioned above will help you to analyze your social marketing planning and make it more effective. Also, it will help to excel the way of delivering messages and communicating with your audience.