Whenever you think your social media profile is all set according to the latest trends, there is another to swoop in. It catches you without a warning, and your profile looks like a failing case again. Today, the world is running around social media. Need a writer? Look up on LinkedIn. Do you need an honest review of your product? Instagram is the one for it; if you need a consultation, check Facebook Groups; if you need to sell Gen-Z products, TikTok might help.
If you are a small business trying to target the right audience through the right team, you might be struggling with this ever-changing social media dynamics, too.
Social media is no longer a choice; it is a must, especially for small businesses. Marketing is less about advertising and more about building relationships and fostering trust. Casual followers can have a huge potential to be your loyal customers. But do you have a great social media promotion strategy plan for 2024? Can you make your voice heard in this noisy world?
You have landed in the right place if you are just looking for a strategy. We have compiled a guide, and by the end, you will have the strategy set to start for this year.
Let’s start!
What is Social Media Marketing?
Social media marketing is the technique of leveraging social media platforms to engage audiences and build a solid brand reputation. It can help you reach and achieve your marketing goals and enhance brand awareness.
- Create and post relevant content to share with your target audience. Add value to the visitor’s daily scrolling through blog posts, images, or videos.
- Run social media ads to grab the attention of a wider audience demographic.
- Engage your followers through the comestio, giveaways, or QA sessions.
- Always monitor the results and stay aware of what works or what does not. Then, alter your strategy according to it.
Remember that social media marketing is a powerful tool for all business sizes. But you need to remember that one size may not fit all solutions. So, you need a rock-solid social marketing strategy that aligns with your target audience. It will require understanding the audience along with the careful selection of social media platforms. We will surely talk about all of it in our guide later.
Social Media Marketing Strategy Vs. Social Media Marketing Plan
Some people can mistake it as just the interchange of terms, but it is more than this. Both of them are significant for social media marketing. The strategy revolves around the direction and plan to turn any ideas into action. For example, when starting a project, you think about your whats and whys. The plan is for you to implement the How and make it a reality. By understanding the differences, you can always concentrate on them more effectively.
Just think of it like:
- The strategy is asking the questions: Why are you present on social media? What are your goals for it?
- The plan is: How will you execute the strategy? What are the specific actions to implement the strategy the right way?
Examples:
- Plan: Post high-quality videos (maybe 3 in a week). Run influencer social media campaigns and answer the questions or engage the audience in the comment section. Additionally, post the reviews.
Why Do You Need a Social Media Marketing Strategy?
Planning your social media digital marketing strategy at the start of the year can save you both time and additional effort. It will bring consistency to digital presence on all social media channels. If you understand the goals and targeting options of your business, you create the right type of content generation positive results.
A social media strategy can be a great help such as:
- Improve brand awareness and reach new audiences through relevant social networks.
- Develop Customer Loyalty.
- Offer timely customer support.
- Attract leads and convert them to sales.
Common Social Media Marketing Goals
If you look up and get the strategy templates of many companies, you find that various social media managers have certain goals for them and their teams. For the right social media marketing guidelines, the basics of these goals are:
- Increase brand awareness by x%;
- Increase community engagement by x%.
- Make x number of social posts every month.
- Create x amount of video material each month.
- Get x number of leads via social media every month;
- Drive traffic of x amount to the website every month.
- Increase social media followers by x%.
- Leave x number of comments on LinkedIn per month.
- Increase social media ad ROI by x%.
You can use it as a template for your strategy.
The Importance of Proper Planning in Social Media Marketing Strategy
A well-structured social media strategy is a treat for your business. If built on thorough planning and research, one can reap the long-term benefits of social media.
Some of those benefits are:
- Planning enables you to customize content for specific audience segments, enhancing relevance and engagement.
- A content calendar provides a consistent flow of posts, preserving your brand’s presence and reputation.
- Clearly stated objectives assist in measuring the performance of your social media advertising activities.
However, before you get all the benefits, you might want to overcome some of the challenges, too.
What are the Possible Challenges?
- While planning is important, strict adherence to a timetable may limit your capacity to respond swiftly to real-time events or trends.
- Finding a balance between promotional, instructive, and amusing material can be difficult because each serves a distinct function.
Social Media Trends to Look in 2024
Before you build a strategy and brainstorm with your team, let’s have a look at the latest social media marketing trends that are most in demand in 2024. You need to understand them for the next step.
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Private Spaces will Rule
Private space is famous nowadays, and groups and communities are more likely to help people connect on the same page and have a good, healthy discussion.
Some social media marketers are certain that these can benefit many people in the future. Brands can share informative content and have discussions to understand consumer behavior. Answer the concerns there and sell their products or services naturally.
You might not get the engagement per your goals, but you will have more brand awareness. Once people start talking about your brand, it is one way to boost it.
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Entertainment Fuels the Social ROI Engine
You might be wondering what entertainment has to do with a serious organization. We get it; it is a strong word. But you don’t have to feel intimidated by it. All you need is the right way to connect entertainment to something quantifiable.
Besides, it is a demand of your consumers these days. After staying in touch with family and friends, the most common reasons people use social media are to enjoy themselves and unwind psychologically.
Furthermore, they dislike brands that are overly self-promotional.
In 2024, brands that create interesting material on social media will succeed in capturing eyes, engagement, and (eventually) market share from brands that continue to publish the same old content.
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SEO for Social Media Channels
You might think it is new, but not really. For example, if you are searching for some hotels or sights in a country you will be traveling to, you will follow the hashtags on Instagram. Yes, this is the way of a new generation. They don’t turn to Google for these things. They find restaurants on Instagram; they follow review pages or influencers to learn about products and places. So, you cannot underestimate the SEO power of your social media channels. In 2022, approximately 40% of Generation Z preferred TikTok to Google for information searches.
This makes improving your content for discoverability—both in feed and through search—more critical than ever.
It is not that hard. Just like you optimize your website pages, you will optimize your social content. Optimize your posts and profile for optimal discoverability by using the appropriate keywords in your caption, hashtags, and alt text.
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Nano-Influencers Take the Stage
Nano-influencers are people with fewer followers, mostly less than 1000. These people are new, fresh, and ready to rock. They are emerging with the force, and most often, they are most trusted by the common people. You might want to hire a celebrity influencer, but they foster less trust in people. Depending on your audience, you need someone close to people on a common ground.
Besides, 44% of the markets think that Micro-influencers are always the best at benefiting your business through collaboration at affordable rates. Such persuasive findings suggest that nano-influencers, with their smaller size but highly engaged following, should also expect similar cost benefits.
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Storytelling Is Less Linear
This is one trend that is still useful in its full swing. It is the ultimate hook for any brand.
Then, there is a TikTok survey trend report for 2024, which states that
“Ends of stories are starting first. Multiple story arcs can happen at once. Communities are making up fictional celebrities and narratives.”
This storyteller style helps audiences to dig deeper to understand what’s happening.
How to Crush Your Social Media Marketing Strategy in 2024?
As you dive into planning your digital marketing in 2024, you must know the right way to plan your action. Let us help you with the things you can consider and work around to make a great marketing strategy for 2024.
1. Start with What Worked in 2023
We all admire that once you step forward, do not look back. Still, sometimes, we need to take a look and know our mistakes or the things that worked out best in the end. Similarly, when planning a 2024 strategy, watch the 2023 campaigns.
Ask questions like what kind of content can hit or turn off your potential customers. What were the best campaigns? What type of content boosted engagement? To answer all the questions, check out the metrics like traffic, conversion rates, and the graph of popularity on social media. Listen and understand your customer’s needs through comments, too. This will give a more elaborate picture of sorting out your strategy for digital marketing strategy.
2. Research Your Target Audience and Select Your Networks
Remember, every platform has its audience. You cannot build a strategy based on assumptions. It is unhealthy for your business. Moreover, leaders and marketers need valuable insights to run a successful social media campaign. You need to leverage the right tool for research insights on your target audience.
Do not worry, it was not very expensive. You just need to know about the audience’s preferred social media platform. If you want to know the type of content you need to publish for the right attention, here are a few statistics to keep in mind:
- The Sprout Social Index has stated in a report that 53% of consumers agree that social media usage has increased over the last 2 years.
- Instagram had 2 billion active users in 2023 from all over the world. Right now, it is picking up the pace, and most people are around the age of 13-17.
- As for Pinterest, it is most popular among women, and almost 60% of women get their ideas from it. Besides, it is famous among the Gen Z and millennials.
3. Perform a Social Media Audit
By now, we have already established that a good social media strategy is all about the right plan. Once you have looked at last year’s performance and you also understand the target audience, now is the time to run a social media audit to get more idea on the strengths and weaknesses of your ad campaigns. Make a detailed report on the post consistency, clicks, organic conversions, and recent feedback from customers. Also, check the data for each platform and see if it is reaching the right audience or not. Am I too thin across too many platforms? Remember that this is not a one-time thing.
You need to understand that the average user logging shifts every six to seven months. So, you need to evaluate the performance every 6 months, too. Besides, it requires energy to carry multiple platform strategies. Therefore, you need to spend a good time and stop investing in platforms that are not helpful for your business goals.
4. Set S.M.A.R.T. Social Media Goals
Once you have run the audit and have a better understanding of the platforms to leverage along with the customer’s voice, now begin setting smart goals for your social media. Know the type of content you will be producing and how to engage customers so they will come back for more. For the best smart goals plan, focus on the goals that are:
- Specific
- Measurable
- Achievable
- Realistic
- Time Bound
Keep all of these in mind and then create a social media goal for your business, whether real estate, healthcare, or any other. Avoid anything generic and confusing.
5. Check Out The Competition
By the time you have enough understanding about the audience and platforms. But before you make a final call, ensure that you are also aware of the activities of your competitors or other companies working in the same industry. It might save you some time as well because there is a chance that your competitors are already performing well on certain metrics. Deeply dive into the strategies they are implying and the topics they are using for content production. It will help you know your audience on a deeper level.
Moreover, if they are already on social media platforms, judge their profiles and understand the points where they lack engagement. Besides, there might be some opportunity for you to get started because the companies are missing it.
By studying your competitors’ social accounts and content, you can identify market gaps and opportunities and also gain valuable information to help drive your approach.
This is not a one-time task, by the way. As part of your social listening strategy, you should always be aware of your competitor’s social media presence.
6. Leverage More User-Generated Content (UGC) Than High-Production Content
When something seems too perfect, it is false or fabricated. This is what your future customers think. Gen Z doesn’t prefer too much perfection in anything. This is the kind of mindset that leads to low trust in brands with too much perfection.
Right now, your goal is to increase trust, and UGC is your cost-effective method of getting more authentic and valuable content. Compared to the high-production content, people will trust authentic content.
The rawness in your content will bring more people to trust you as someone original. Even according to the Semrush Report 2024, consumers are more likely to engage more with UGC than polished content. Rawness in your content is proof of a human-centric approach.
With technology slowly taking over, social media will be all about the voices of people every day. So, your content has to resonate with humans looking for the best offers.
7. Optimize Your Profile(s)
The first place social media buyers will look to learn more about your brand is your social accounts, which are where your content is put together across all platforms. You must provide all relevant information upfront because of this.
Start by selecting a platform that is beneficial for your business. Besides, always include your business name and details on your platforms. Let them be aware of the bio and everything your visitor is trying to learn about you. Additionally, focus on the visual elements of your profile. Then, focus on consistency and the right size and format of the images to ensure the quality.
8. Plan and Schedule Your Posts
Planning and scheduling are the most significant parts of your social media strategy. Consistency is the main key, but you have to set a certain posting frequency. You can always adjust how frequently you post to reflect what your audience is reacting to or not reacting to. However, you must adhere to your decided timetable unless you deliberately decide to change it for data-driven reasons.
Using a social media post planner is the simplest approach to creating a regular posting schedule in the shortest time. Plan and draft your content in a visual calendar, then schedule posts to go live at your personalized optimum time to publish based on audience statistics.
What Metrics Can Indicate Your Social Media Success?
The best social media metrics can help you track and monitor your performance and adjust your social media goal accordingly. Some of the significant metrics are as follows:
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Engagement
Likes, comments, shares, and feedback of any kind show you the engagement rate on your profile. Compare it frequently and keep analyzing the audience actually interacting with your posts. This statistic is very useful for relationship-building goals because it demonstrates how actively your followers engage with your brand.
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Sentiment
Sentiment is the feeling of the customer about a certain topic. It tells you how much of this involvement is truly helping you sell—or whether your content is driving away loyal followers. The sentiment is an important metric for brands looking to improve their reputation.
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Clicks
The number of clicks you receive indicates how many people are actually taking action after reading your article.
When you carefully track clicks, you can determine what types of material pique your audience’s interest on each social media channel.
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Reach
When it comes to increasing your audience and brand recognition, tracking your reach is critical since it tells you whether or not your content is being seen as a result of marketing efforts. If not, you should reconsider your social approach, particularly the hashtags you employ to reach new users.
Bottom Line
Social media sites are gaining immense popularity. More and more people are found participating in these growing platforms. With a clear focus, you can always reach the right audience. Though your social strategy may evolve, identifying your goals, audience, content strategy, and more will help you get started correctly and increase your ROI.
Once you’ve established your social media marketing approach and have the best social media network strategy, you can reach potential clients online. If you want a reliable digital marketing agency in UAE for your social media management and search engine optimization, let the Digital Hub Sol be your partner in steering your business correctly.