How to Create a Winning Social Media Marketing Strategy in 2018

If you go a few years back and see how different brands and companies were using the social media, you will find that it was very easy. Most of the brands or companies just set up their accounts and post a few updates about their brand. There was nothing more required and the brand that has just a good social media profile page they were doing much better than their competitors.

But now, the time has changed. You can’t ignore the importance of social media and just creating a brand page with a few posts is not enough. Now you have to make an effective marketing strategy to have an upper hand on your competitor with the help of social media.

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Here we have a few tips for your successful social media marketing strategy:

Write Down Social Media Marketing Goals

Now in 2018, if you create your social media accounts without any plan and goals, then you are just wasting your time and money. To create a successful social media marketing campaign, you must write down your goals before you start. You have to be very clear in your mind that what are your goals and what you want to achieve with your social media marketing campaign.

The goals you set should be achievable as well. Unrealistic goals, like achieving 1 Million likes for your brand new Facebook page, is not a realistic goal. Though you can do this, but that would be waste of money as you spend all your efforts in getting the likes through paid campaigns and you can lose the focus on the quality fans.

Whatever your goals are, you should write down these goals and stick to your plan throughout your whole social media marketing campaign. According to a study by Sprout Social, those who have a written plan have 30 times more successful than those who don’t have any written goals. Moreover, there are 83% brands and companies who start their marketing campaigns on social media without any plan.

Tip: To interact with all your followers on different social media platforms, you can use a professional social media automation tool.

Target the Right Audience

You should need to increase your social connections with the targeted people who might be interested in your product. A single targeted social connection is better than hundreds of other connections who are not interested in your brand or product.

You must have a proper study about your brand as well. You should know who would be interested in your product? What age group is most suitable to target to sell your product? Your professional marketing team (Not social media marketing team) knows better who to target.

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So take input from the marketing team and then pass that information to your social media marketing team and ask them to target the audience who would be interested in your product. You should also know if your product is for men or for the women? So you have to focus the audience accordingly.

Almost every social media network has maximum users from the age group of 18-29 years. So you should have a strategy to attract that age group.

Focus on the Most Important Metrics

Most of the brands and companies focus on the total number of likes or followers. Whereas sometimes having more followers is not important. In a social media marketing campaign, there are many other metrics which are more important than total followers. Like reach of your brand page is very crucial which shows that how many users are getting your updates in their feeds. Clicks and engagement show how many users are involved with your stories and updates.

If you have millions of likes but your post is not reaching to user’s feed or if they are not interested in your updates and not clicking or commenting on your stories then you have no advantage of those millions of followers.

Here are some social media metrics for different platforms:

You should also focus on the hashtags selection. Your social media management team should be aware of what are the most important terms are used for searching on social media. Based on those results, you should use those search terms in your posts as hashtags.

The better hashtags are used in your updates, the better results you get with your social media marketing in 2018.

Don’t Try to Sell Your Product in a Single Shot

Many brands try to sell their product by publishing a single post about their product and they provide all the information in that single post. These kinds of posts can’t get the attention of social media users.

It is better to use teasers. Give your message and updates to your social connections in an attractive way. Don’t directly reveal your product to the audience. Discuss a simple problem and tell your followers that soon you are going to provide a solution. Tell them that you have concerns about the problems of your followers and so you are working hard to provide them an easy solution.

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Once the buzz is created and everyone is waiting what could be the solution to their problem, reveal your product with top 3 features and try to engage your social connection by replying to their comments.

Include Links to Products in Social Media Updates

Don’t ask your customers to visit your website’s main page and then search for the desired products. Many users who land on homepage page will never search for their relevant product if they can’t find that on the home page.

Tip: You should learn how to get more traffic to your website with various marketing strategies.

It is best to provide a short link to your product page in the related post on your page. Whenever you provide some good information and details of your product on your social media page, you must provide the short link of targeted page.

Use Videos to Educate Followers Why Your Product is Better

More than 80% users on social media, share video content on their profile page. And it is also a fact that most of the users don’t watch the video from start to the endpoint. Most of the users only watch the video for 1 or 2 minutes. So if you can create an attractive and professional video, that can convince the users in 1 to 2 minutes that why your product is better, then it would be a big achievement for you.

If your followers like your product video, they will share that video with their own social connections. In 2018, creating video content and sharing that on Facebook, Instagram and YouTube can provide very good results.

Share Customer’s Reviews

You should share reviews about your product from the real customers. It is difficult to get a review from satisfied customers as when a customer likes your product he/she don’t want to spend some time to give you a feedback while if the customer doesn’t like your product then you will definitely get a negative review as your customer will take some time to say bad about you.

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To get positive reviews from real satisfied customers, you can give some offers to satisfied customers. Like you can offer them that if they show your product in a video and give some comments about the products, they will get some reward points which can be later used to buy another product free of cost.

So, ask your customers to make their video with your product and share that video with you. Later you can share their video (with their permission) on your social media brand page and your website as well. This will help you in winning the trust of existing and new customers.

Tip: You can use Instagram effectively to boost your sales. This article could be helpful.

Post at Best Times

To reach more people, you have to give your most important updates at the right time. You should check the stats of your brand’s social page and should know at what time maximum users are engaged with your page.

If you share your content during late night, you will not get the maximum reach and your efforts will not provide you results. Whereas if you try to connect with your social connections at the peak time you will get the best response and there are high chances that you will get some sales or at least a good response from the users.

Final words:

Social media marketing is not a piece of cake in 2018, you have to compete with your local or international competitors. They all are working on social media to take advantage of their social connections. So if you want to be successful on social media, you have to make a good plan, target the right audience, create unique and attractive content, share the content at right time in the best way. This is the only way to make your social media campaign successful in 2018.

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