Let’s say you have already studied the client’s business and are ready to start working on promotion on social networks. Before moving on to active actions, there remains one more important step. Creating an SMM strategy.
SMM Strategy
This is a basic document for an SMM specialist, department, freelancer or brand, which displays the basic rules for the presence of a brand or product in social media and all the necessary information about it. The SMM strategy spells out all the main points that affect the work of a specialist. The rules governing behavior on social networks and the goals that need to be achieved.
Crafting a strategic SMM plan can enhance your online presence, just as playing book of dead free play can elevate your gaming experience in the world of online casinos.
Social media specialists are not so much interested in entertaining, engaging, or communicating with consumers. They have a specific marketing task in front of them. For example, increasing profits, repeat sales, increasing company awareness.
An Ideal SMM Strategy Should Answer Several Important Questions
- Where is the company located?
At this stage, you need to conduct a competitive analysis. You need to analyze the target audience and accurately assess the current position of the company. What is it like?
- Where is the company going, wants to go or what does it want to achieve?
Here you will need to set goals and objectives.
- How can a company get there?
At this point, it’s time to determine what tools you will use to achieve your goals.
What’s the Ideal Strategy
An ideal strategy always begins with an analysis of the situation. First, you need to conduct a briefing. This is a mandatory step for any SMM specialist, no matter a freelancer or an advertising agency employee.
At the briefing, you need to ask the client certain questions in order to find out in more detail how his business works and what business goals concern him. It is also necessary to communicate with a marketer or internet marketer, colleagues from the PR department. All this will allow you to get a complete picture of what is happening: what unique offer does this particular business have, what are its features and disadvantages, how does the purchase scheme for a product or service work?
It is important to record the information received in a brief, which will then be needed by all people who will be associated with marketing on social networks: a specialist in targeted advertising, copywriters, photographers, producers.
What is important to remember about the brief? People are reluctant to fill out any questionnaires, so it is better to prepare questions for the client in advance and interview him taking this list into account. All this is necessary to find out what the expectations are for marketing on social networks. Based on the brief, you can already plan goals and objectives, that is, think about what specific client problems can be solved with the help of marketing on social networks, and also in the future put down KPIs – metrics by which performance will be tracked.
The next stage is competitor research. The competitive environment directly determines how you can reach your goal and how difficult or easy this path will be.
The third stage is analysis of the target audience. On social networks, a company interacts not with abstract people, but with potential clients, and the better you know them, the better content you can create: tap into their fears and pains or, conversely, into positive emotions.
An analysis of the target audience can be provided by a marketer, the client himself can tell you, or you yourself, using the analysis of social networks and statistical data, can get to know the audience better, and therefore interact with it better.
The Tone of Voice
You also need to choose a tone of voice—the style of communication on social networks. It also applies to community management, when you, as an SMM specialist or administrator, respond to a client on a social network. How formal is the company in communication? Does he communicate with a certain amount of humor, can he allow himself to joke, or is all communication within the framework of business ethics?
The general rule in social networks: here you need to behave more friendly and open, try to communicate on a “person-to-person” level. However, if we are talking about a large company or B2B, this imposes certain restrictions on communication even on social networks.
Tone of voice is an important part of the strategy, which is fixed before the start of work – before the copywriter was given a brief and given technical specifications, before community managers began answering clients’ questions on social networks.
Next, based on competitor research, analysis of the target audience, brief, set goals and objectives, you need to select channels and tools to solve problems. Will there be targeted advertising or will there be work with bloggers? Will there be placement in thematic communities? Which social networks will be chosen? All this is part of a portfolio of instruments.
Find the Big Idea
The next stage is a big idea and creativity.
Important: you don’t need to make content for the sake of content, just to fill the airwaves. A huge amount of content appears on the Internet every day, so your task is to decide what you want to communicate to your target audience, what exactly you want to hook them with, how to direct them to the right consumer decision – to choose you. People on social networks need to be convinced that they want to be your subscribers, clients, and also talk about you.
To do this, you need some idea, a concept that you will broadcast in all your communities. It will run like a red thread through all your posts and creatives.
After this, the content development stage begins: content plan and rubricator, photography, video shooting, editing, post-production (processing, color correction, sound overlay). You will further promote, stimulate, distribute and show this content on social networks in order to reach the audience you need. This is already one of the final steps – promotion.
Final Step
After the content and advertising campaign have been created, collaborations with bloggers have been carried out, placement has been made, you need to understand whether everything was a success. Were the goals set at the first—strategic—stage achieved? Has the plan been achieved? It is necessary to analyze this, look at all the statistics performed by the KPIs and make further decisions. Do I need to adjust anything or can I continue in the same spirit?
This is a repeating cycle: each time at the strategic stage, based on an analysis of the situation, certain decisions are made, a plan is written and implemented, and the results are analyzed.
It is important to understand: you don’t need to write a strategy for a week or two, try to analyze one or two posts and immediately make new decisions. Typically, strategies are developed for at least a quarter (at least a month). There are situational strategies dedicated to news events.