How To Develop A Social Media Marketing Strategy

A social media marketing strategy set the tone of any in which a business intends to use social media platforms to achieve overall goals of the organization. It is blueprint of how the organization intends to achieve its goals within the framework of its social media objectives. Any business can develop a social media strategy. All business should have one before stepping into the social media world. Below are suggested steps to take when developing an SMM strategy.

Step 1: Restate Your Company Objective

Your company objective may not be directly linked to the internet or social media in particular. It is the umbrella theme of your organization that every other objective and goal falls under. In other words, your offline and online marketing strategy are meant to serve the purpose of your company objective. The strategies adopted offline will as a matter of course be different from that applied for online marketing because they are different in character and scope. The overriding issue is that both will serve to achieve the aims and objectives of the business.
Again and in a macro sense, the strategy adopted for one internet platform may be different to that adopted for another. This should be noted when it comes to social media because most of the platforms have something uniquely different from each other. Your social media strategy should be able to identify this uniqueness and devise means of using them to achieve your social media goals.

How To Develop An Social Media Marketing Strategy

Step 2: State Your Overall Social Media Objectives

You may have more than one objective. It is important they are all listed. Once you know what you want, you have gone halfway in solving the problem of how to achieve it. An objective may be online reputation management while another may be promotion of a new product. SMMs gives the team a basis and a platform to create solutions as they match aspiration to the individual social media platforms.

Step 3: Match Objectives To Social Media Platform

This is important. There will always be a platform that is most ideal for an objective. Again, you could have a platform that can serve various objectives to a certain degree of seamless integration. Explaining this further, platform A may serve Objective C pretty well while serving Objective A and B partially well. Platform Z can serve objective C excellently well but Objective A poorly and Objective B woefully.
I hope you are getting the picture? It is not just about making the right match but decisions have to be made that might include sacrificing something in order to find an ideal balance. For instance Objective B might be as critical as C if not more and the business might be looking at creating a one-stop oversight function so that it is not spread and scattered. There may be the issue of expertise and cost implications in deciding what platform to pick. Hence, they may be looking at picking a middle platform that will serve all the objectives fairly well instead of picking one that will serve only one objective excellently.
As an aside, businesses do not seem to know the implication of not handling their social media marketing strategy as they should. It could bring immense benefits or great loss to the company. Taking time to sort this out at this stage could be the difference between success and failure.

Step 3B: State Platform Objectives & Plan Of Action If You Have Picked Multiple Platforms

You already have your social media objectives and have selected the platforms to use, state how you are going to use each platform in line with achieving desired objectives. This means that each platform must also have a desired objective because this is what will guide while using them. Developing individual strategies for each platform will give you the chance of bringing them all together to achieve your social media marketing plan.
This in a nutshell is an SMM strategy. There may be one or two things you can add that is unique to your insight and business. The idea of having a plan is that you have a guide that will keep you on track.

Implication Of Not Having A Social Media Strategy

• The business will not be able to measure its success or failure.
• They will move without direction.
• They will not have a prepared plan to respond to opportunities.
• They will not have a prepared plan to respond to negative or reputation damaging events.
• Preparing a social media plan gives you the edge in dealing with things you never saw coming because you still have to overall objective as a guide.