Why Your Social Media Marketing Strategy is Missing the Mark (And How You Can Fix It)

Social Media Marketing is extremely competitive in nature, and today with more and more brands exploring the digital route, you are bound to come across a lot of obstacles.

If you are someone who is trying to up the social media marketing game for your brand and struggling with the same, then there may be multiple reasons behind it.

Today, I don’t need to talk about the importance of Social Media because that’s something we all already know about, but the bigger question revolves around how well we do it.

You may have come across a situation where you have invested tonnes of money on a specific social media ad platform and still failed to get the much-desired result, have you thought about the reason behind it?

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These days’ brands prefer to hire agencies who can help scale their social media presence, of course, they are professionals who know it all, when it comes to the social world, but don’t you want to be up there and know some things yourself?

In this blog post, I aim to uncover those essential things that you may have missed out on while designing your social media marketing strategy.

And together, let’s ace your social media marketing plan!

To begin with, let’s focus on a little bit of background.

1. Competition in the social media marketing space

If you have been using social media for a while now, not necessarily as a brand, but just for personal usage, you'd know that there are many brands out there trying to grab your attention.

Take Facebook for example, while scrolling through your feed, you are bound to come across ads that are specifically targeted towards you using Behavioral Targeting.

In such a competitive space, it becomes truly essential for brands to have that perfect social media marketing strategy that will generate leads.

That will grab the attention and generate sales in the long run.

So what is it that you need to analyze before developing your social media marketing strategy?

2. What do you require to design a social media marketing strategy?

In-depth understanding of your goals.

This is the most important and the most basic need, when it comes to designing a social media marketing strategy, but is it that simple?

Definitely no.

There are multiple layers to consider even when you are determining your goals.

And we will get into the details of it while understanding the approach of designing a social media marketing strategy.

Let’s tackle the bigger obstacle first, what is wrong with your current social media marketing strategy?

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3. Common issues with Social Media Marketing Strategy

When it comes to designing your strategy, these 3 common issues are faced by brands, let's analyze them.

a. Brand Focus

Most of the time, brands end up focusing their strategy a lot more on the brand/product being offered.

And there may not be anything majorly wrong with that (sarcasm intended), just that this approach may not work in the long run.

Your social media marketing strategy always has to revolve around your audiences, only then will it generate the attention you need.

b. Missing Target Audience connect

Brands focus on targeting the most used social media platform.

For example, did you know there are 140 million people on Instagram in India as of January 2021? That's a crazy number!

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But does that mean I blindly choose Instagram as my target platform?

Nope.

That clearly depends on your target audience, the majority of users on Instagram fall under the ‘teens category’ and if your brand doesn’t target teens, then well it’s a useless platform.

c. One creative fits all

Even today, I have seen so many brands using the same creative on Facebook and Instagram posts.

This happens due to a big assumption that both these platforms work on similar lines, but that’s so not true!

The usage of these platforms is different, which makes you act differently for both as well.

Think about it, your Facebook post (the text) is what you see first, before the image, so if the text doesn’t grab my attention, I may skip the image.

On the flipside, who reads the description on Instagram? The image must communicate it all.

The biggest sin to commit for a brand is to use the same creative for all platforms.

That just won’t sell guys!

Now that we have spoken about all the problems that you may face with your existing strategy, let’s look at how you can revamp and make it better through this best social media marketing strategy approach.

4. Best Social Media Marketing Strategy Plan

Your social media marketing strategy should always be designed keeping in mind your brand requirements and the goals that you wish to achieve.

These goals are further divided into 3 main categories and accordingly, your social media marketing strategy plan gets designed.

Let’s look at these 3.

i)Awareness

If your brand is new, and your end goal through a social media plan, is to grow the brand.

Then your social media marketing strategy falls under the bucket of Awareness.

Your focus should be around widening your reach not only specific to your target audience but also those, who may be remotely interested in what you have to offer.

Decide on those social media platforms which will provide you a larger reach and wider audience zone.

The aim is to illuminate your existing as well as potential customers.

Metrics to determine success: Followers, Shares, Likes, etc.

ii) Engagement

This is the stage where your brand is already well known, but now you need to focus on engagement.

This may be termed as a ‘testing stage’ as well since in this bucket, you can test various creatives and see exactly how your target audience interacts with them.

Choose those platforms that are interactive in nature, whereby you are giving your audience an easy option to interact with your content if they like it.

The aim is to engage your audience with the content, and may not focus on sales directly.

Metrics to determine success: Comments, Likes, Mentions, etc.

iii) Conversion

This is the third and probably the most difficult bucket to tackle.

And the difficult part comes in, because if your social media strategy fails with the first two buckets, then this one is most likely to fail as well.

Here, the aim is to convert the already aware and engaged set of audiences.

More than targeting the right platform for this one, the more crucial thing to consider is how easy is it for your audience to convert?

Are you giving them multiple steps to purchase a simple product, or are you making it just a click away?

Now that may determine the success of your strategy within this bucket.

Metrics to determine success: Website Clicks, Email sign-ups, etc.

Conclusion:

Ideally, every social media marketing strategy should go through all three of these buckets, ensuring that due importance is given at each level.

However, if your brand has already crossed the awareness stage, this may be the right time to focus on engagement and conversions.

Let us know in the comments below your tips and strategy to ace your social media marketing strategy!