SMM Strategy from Scratch: All You Need to Know for Success

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The rapid growth of the popularity of social networks in the past few years has led to the fact that marketing professionals simply cannot ignore this tool. It has become an integral part of the promotion of online stores and major brands, websites of transnational corporations, and personal specialized blogs. The content strategy should be planned in advance and built around the interests of your potential customers. It is impossible to attract a person to the community and keep him/her in it if you don’t have such a strategy. Today, we invite you to study the crucial points of a successful SMM strategy.

The Power of Social Networks

Today, social networks, with a properly planned and implemented campaign, can effectively work for almost any segment of the business, solving the necessary tasks. Ideally, each step or group of tasks should be delegated to specialists: for example, you can optimize your campaign with aitarget.com, the set of tools and solutions for effective marketing in social networks. However, for each business type, there are different solutions:

1. For large businesses (large manufacturers, banks and financial structures, developers, retail chains, brands, etc.), social networks solve long-term marketing tasks, increasing loyalty to the brand and its products, and track the wishes of their target audience in general.
2. For medium and small businesses (local manufacturers, traders, individuals), this is a working tool for solving problems of stimulating and increasing sales, announcing new products and promotional offers, working with a base of existing customers, etc.
3. For representatives of the online business, it is an effective way to attract attention to the site, receive targeted traffic to the resource and its subsequent conversion into sales, registration, subscription to the newsletter, and other targeted actions.

So, how should you start your social media promotion strategy? It is necessary to begin with the general planning of the campaign, its key fundamental components, which are almost the same for any advertising channel.

Defining the Goals of the SMM Campaign

With the help of social networks, you can solve various marketing problems, from managing the reputation of a brand to the final sales of a product/service. There are several main types of tasks that social networks can handle:

1. Sales

The most common approach is when the community/group is in some way a seller/consultant of the buyer, providing information about the product, user reviews about it, and a link to the product/service, by clicking on which the user will be taken to the webshop. There is also an opportunity to purchase a product without leaving the social network if the application has the functionality of an online store. With the help of a social network (community/blog/fan page), you get an excellent chance to interact with loyal customers, telling them about new products, special promotions, which leads to repeated sales.

2. Traffic

With the right approach, social networks can attract a large number of new visitors – leads, who, with the right approach, will become your buyers, subscribers, registered users, etc. depending on why and how you attracted them to the site.

3. Branding

On various social networks, there are many options for how to increase your brand awareness, loyalty, and presence in the environment of its target audience.

4. Reputation management

With the right approach, you can neutralize negative feedback, track their appearance, adequately respond to them, and most importantly – communicate with its sources and thus manage the company’s/brand’s reputation.

How to Determine the Target Audience?

When the goals are outlined, you should decide on the target audience. The correct TA portrait will help not only increase the number of users in the community but also reduce advertising costs. Divide your target audience into small segments to increase the effectiveness of communication, and be sure to describe these segments: what these people like, what they do, what books they read – the more details, the easier.

For example, if you promote a network of fast-food cafes, then the segmentation of audiences will look like this:

• Students of nearby educational institutions;
• Employees of nearby business centers;
• Travelers staying in inexpensive hostels.

You can have several groups of interest, but it is crucial to learn the level of their intersection. Whether this parameter is high, then you can combine several audiences into one. According to the above example, we will formulate the basic needs of each target audience category, and the messages for advertising publications focused on them:

• Students: Their main interest is to eat inexpensively but, at the same time, heartily. The main message for them can be “We offer inexpensive, large portions.”
• Business center workers: The main purpose is to eat quickly within the lunch break. The main message is “Don’t eat only sandwiches: delicious hot food is near the office!”
• Travelers: Their key goal is to eat fully and inexpensively. The main message can be “Don’t waste money on expensive restaurants, spend it on memories!”

As you have already learned, accurate segmentation of the target audience allows reaching a high level of involvement and more positive reactions.

Key Features of the SMM Strategy on Various Social Networks

We believe that identical content for all social networks is a solution lacking flexibility, and therefore not optimal. So, let’s talk about the features of the strategy for such social networks like Facebook, Instagram, and Telegram:

1. Instagram

To create a successful strategy on Instagram, you should pay more attention to the visual component. Large texts under the pics, poor-quality photos, a mismatched color scheme – all this is very bad. On the contrary, the post has to complement the nature of the pics, their style, color tone – everything to the smallest detail. We also have to note that the posts for Instagram should be as short as possible, but at the same time deliver the main idea and message to the client.

2. Facebook

This social network does not place such an emphasis on the visual component (although you should still remember about the quality of the pics), so the focus should be on the information component. The post can be rather long but without unnecessary pathos. There should be no aimless publications – only informational content. FB also offers a wide range of publishing formats – use them.

3. Telegram

The Telegram channel strategy is, first of all, providing interesting information. Telegram publication formats are not very diverse, so focus on text content and ask questions.

Nature of Posts

When making a content plan, it is vital to distinguish posts according to their topic, semantic load, purpose, etc. Create 15-20 articles (posts) in a specific format for each social network with no more than 20-30% of promo posts and 70-80% neutral texts (which will be of interest to the audience). In this regard, the main types of posts are the following:

• Informative. In these publications, you tell a potential customer about your product or service, reply to the questions, and share the latest news.
• Selling. The key goal of such texts is to tell about the benefits of the promoted goods, both in general and in comparison with rivals.
• Entertaining. Serious publications should be published from time to time with something funny or cool. This includes posts with humor, various polls, quizzes, and jokes.
• Viral posts. This can include various challenges, flash mobs, etc.

It’s vital to leave some space for situational content in your plan. New popular challenges or events often appear on the network. Sometimes reflecting on them in your posts is useful in terms of grabbing attention and increasing interest. Moreover, you have to adapt the challenge or news to your area. The only exception may be purely informative highly specialized resources with a serious topic, where this kind of hype would be inappropriate.

In Conclusion

SMM strategy has become a part of the business culture. It helps each team member understand the goals and expected results of the project and contribute to the development of the brand.  It is not enough to make a strategy at the very start – over time it must be changed. Typically, changes are formulated and introduced at the end of each reporting period.

Also, you need to constantly check various innovations in social networks and introduce into the strategy those of them that, in your opinion, can improve performance. The strategy is the foundation on which not only the general vector of work on a particular project depends, but also the effectiveness of each channel within the framework of comprehensive promotion in social networks.