We explain what an SMM strategy is, why it is needed, and how it helps businesses communicate with their audience.
What is an SMM strategy and why is it needed?
Developing an SMM strategy: stages
When and why do they adjust strategy?
Let’s sum it up
What is an SMM strategy and why is it needed?
Table of Contents
SMM promotion strategy is part of the company’s marketing and communications strategy. Marketing uses various tools to help businesses achieve their goals: SMM, targeted advertising, PR, event marketing, and others. In the case of SMM ( from English Social Media Marketing ), social networks act as a promotion channel.
If a marketing strategy is usually written for 1-3-5 years, then an SMM promotion strategy is usually developed for 3-12 months. On the one hand, because social networks are a very dynamic channel, and on the other hand, the mix of marketing tools needs to be regularly reviewed and adjusted to get maximum results for the business.
An SMM strategy is a kind of step-by-step “instruction” on how to use social networks, marketing resources, and a team to achieve the desired indicators ( KPI ): increase sales or recognition, attract a new audience, or increase the loyalty of the one you already have. Such a plan is developed when deciding to launch communication in social networks or adjust the current strategy to new inputs, goals, and objectives.
For example, an online flower shop wants as many people as possible to know about it, and for site visitors to place orders more often. Then an SMM strategy is needed that:
Will show the store to the maximum number of potential customers.
It will stimulate the audience’s need: “Wow, what a beautiful bouquet! I want one for myself, my mother, my wife!”
Makes online shopping as easy as possible: “Order this bouquet in two clicks and get a discount with the promo code VESNA10.”
SMM-стратегия помогает на трёх уровнях
SMM strategy helps on three levels:
1 – Strategic: What you will do in the next quarter or year and how this will bring you closer to the desired business outcome.
2 – Tactical: How will this specific post within your monthly content plan help drive sales, awareness, or loyalty.
3 – Organizational: to “synchronize watches” and understand whether the manager and the team coincide in their understanding of goals and objectives.
The creation of an SMM strategy is carried out by in-house or third-party SMM promotion specialists – if the company contacts an agency and entrusts it with all communications in social networks.
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Developing an SMM strategy: stages
Before developing an SMM strategy, it is necessary to obtain input from the customer:
what period to plan for: 1, 3, 6 or 12 months;
what social networks already exist and which ones can still be used;
what resources are available: budget, team, other promotion channels;
goals and objectives of the plan;
Brand introduction: the tone in which we communicate with the audience, corporate style , company events calendar.
It is important to know whether the company has a marketing strategy: if so, the social media strategy should be its continuation. The strategy should not be confused with the content plan, which describes all the posts with the release schedule on each platform. Unlike the content plan, the strategy sets the main vector and contains only individual examples for each communication.
Analysis of target audience, brand and competitors
Developing an SMM strategy begins with research:
company product;
target audience;
competitive environment;
brand book and brand strategy , communication strategy;
available resources;
platforms that are already used for promotion.
You can get this data from internal analytics or conduct research yourself. It is important to divide the audience into segments and understand what is interesting to each of them. And also to catch valuable insights, that is, unexpected details and behavior patterns that are not on the surface. All this is necessary to understand how, for whom, on what platforms and in what formats to post content and how to communicate with the audience – not only in posts, but also in comments.
For example, you found out that the main audience of your flower shop on social networks are women from city N aged 20 to 45 who like beautiful compositions and color combinations. But purchases are more often made by men who care about price, convenient delivery, and also for flowers to last as long as possible. One of the strategy options is to come up with how to use SMM to encourage women to share posts more often that will attract the attention of their male subscribers.
Setting goals
The goal of an SMM strategy is what you want to achieve at the end of the journey. It should be directly related to the goals of the business. For example, “posting content that even competitors will share” is a bad goal, but “increasing bouquet orders from social networks by 40% in 3 months” is much better.
To formulate your goals correctly, you will need the data you received during the research stage. Otherwise, it will be difficult to determine which direction to take. Perhaps, at this planning stage, you will understand that other marketing channels are more suitable for your audience and your tasks than social networks. But it is much better to tell the client about this right away than later, after months of work and a wasted budget.
Setting tasks
The tasks of the SMM strategy are how you will achieve your goals in practice. They also follow from the business goals. For example: attracting people to events using a poster on social networks, forming a loyal community around the brand, or collecting online catalogs for products and selling them. This will determine which platforms and formats you choose and how you will communicate with subscribers on social networks.
In the case of our online flower shop, the tasks may be as follows:
introduce users to the brand through reach: so that they will definitely remember the store for the next holiday;
increase the number of subscribers who will regularly see content in the feed and remember the brand;
increase the number of clicks on the site;
to show the scale and capabilities of the company in order to interest corporate clients with large orders.
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Setting KPIs
KPI (Key Performance Indicators) are key performance indicators. These are indicators that help evaluate how successfully we have achieved the set goals. It is important that KPIs are tied to business objectives, i.e. not “post 100 posts” or “get 100 likes,” but “attract 100 clients” or “get 100 positive brand mentions.” These are the indicators that will ultimately help you understand whether the SMM strategy has helped the business or whether it needs to be changed.
For an online flower shop, based on the tasks, the following KPIs can be selected:
20 new orders from social networks per week;
10 new registrations on the site and subscriptions to the newsletter, which gives a 10% discount on the next order;
1 large order for an event or company per week.
Sometimes KPIs are difficult to digitize — for example, if you need to increase brand awareness or audience loyalty. In this case, marketing research and subscriber surveys come to the rescue — before developing and at the end of the SMM strategy.
Content Topics and Formats
At this stage, we plan how best to address the audience and what to talk about with them — so as to solve the tasks set. Again, the analysis we conducted at the very beginning of working on the strategy will help with this. The main rule is this: first, we find out what the subscribers’ “pain” is, and then we offer a topic and format.
For example, we learned that many subscribers of a flower shop are upset that they are given the same bouquets for all holidays. To fix this, you can come up with a series of posts with meme pictures, where you can explain what is best to give and on what occasions. You can tie a repost contest to this, so that ladies, on the one hand, tell their potential gift-givers about their preferences, and on the other, increase their social media reach due to their subscribers.
Once you understand which topics and formats work best, you can turn some of them into regular columns. For example, post photos and videos about each of your employees or review new flower deliveries. The columns can be weekly or less often. This will warm up your audience’s interest and teach them to view posts regularly.
In terms of tasks, content can be:
Engaging: collects likes, reactions, shares and comments using a call-to-action – for example, a question or a vote.
Reaching out: helps to reach a larger audience and attract new subscribers. Ideally, such a post will go viral and social media users will share it en masse on their accounts.
Selling: helps bring clients to the site, encourage them to place an application or order.
Here are the content formats used in social networks:
Text: depending on the platform, audience and objectives, these could be longreads of 5,000 characters, short engaging posts of 500 or posters of 50.
Picture: real photos, drawn scenes or infographics. As a rule, a post with a picture is more likely to be noticed and social networks show them to a larger number of users. Therefore, it is better to supplement text posts – especially long ones – with an image.
Video: full-length videos with interviews or reports, short promotional videos or presentations, videos for 3-minute clips.
Promotion plan
A promotion plan is an important part of an SMM strategy where you describe how you will promote your content, page, and products. It should not be confused with a content plan, which contains a full schedule, platforms, and content for all posts. Here is what a promotion plan should definitely include:
promotional goals related to business goals;
promotion period;
budget;
methods: paid (targeted advertising on social networks and advertising with bloggers); free (regular posts); mixed, for example, a competition among subscribers with gifts from the brand;
what additional resources will be needed, such as time to negotiate with bloggers or deliver prizes to competition participants.
Only after this, at the very end of drawing up a strategy for social networks, do they begin to develop a media plan – with distribution of costs and forecast indicators.
Analytics
To assess whether the SMM strategy in social networks has brought the desired effect, an analysis of target indicators is carried out. Some of them are leading indicators: that is, those that are one step earlier than a specific result for the business; and some are business metrics that reflect contact with the product and purchases:
Total reach – the number of users who saw the content;
engagement – the number of interactions: likes, reposts, saves and comments;
number of clicks on links from posts;
number of registrations on the site; sales volume – in units or in money;
number of brand mentions on social networks – with a link to the official account;
the overall tone of comments and mentions: positive, negative or neutral.
Sometimes ROI (Return on Investment) is additionally assessed — that is, the return on funds invested in SMM promotion within the framework of this strategy. This is possible when users from social networks place orders and the site conversion increases.
When and why do they adjust strategy?
If analytics show that the SMM strategy is not bringing the expected results, it is worth reviewing. This can be done at any stage: at the end (for short-term ones), after a month or a quarter. Sometimes you don’t need to measure all the indicators — it’s enough to see that users have started to unsubscribe en masse or that the reach of posts has dropped sharply. Here, it is important to make sure that the reason is in communication, and not that the company has found itself in the center of a scandal or the product has become unavailable to many customers.
The second case when the strategy is changed is a change in business or marketing inputs. For example, the company has changed its name or positioning, its direction has changed, or a new product has appeared. In this case, the entire strategy needs to be redone from scratch.
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Let’s sum it up
SMM strategy is a part of the company’s larger marketing and communication strategies that concerns the brand’s activities in social networks.
To develop an SMM strategy, it is important to study the customer’s request, the product or service being promoted, and the resources that the company is willing to allocate to you to achieve the set KPIs.
The SMM strategy includes: general overviews for 3–12 months, a content plan, a promotion plan, and a media plan for the next month of work.
Analysis of the results obtained is one of the most important stages of implementing an SMM strategy. At this stage, it is important to evaluate not only business metrics, but also leading indicators. This data helps you draw a conclusion about the effectiveness of the current strategy and make decisions about adjustments.
