According to the Digital 2020 report from Hootsuite and We Are Social, 321 million new people joined social media in 2019, which brought the total from 3.48 billion to 3.8 billion social media users (an increase of 9%) in 2020.

That’s a massive number of people active across social media platforms. Therefore, it’s a powerful medium for brands to engage with their target audiences, boost traffic to their websites, generate more leads and even more sales. Besides, it’s a budget-friendly way to extend your reach, increase brand awareness, increase your search rankings across the internet, and elevate your engagement rate.

Thus, if you haven’t leveraged the power of social media yet to market your business, today is the perfect day to begin.

Here is a 3 step guide to creating an effective social media marketing:

What are your marketing goals?

Just like designing any plan, determining your goals is the very first step. Make sure that you create a list of your marketing goals.

With clearly defined goals, you create a concrete path towards your goal. The list of goals will also help you to know how to monitor the performance of your strategy. So, make sure to create goals that are measurable and actionable.

In creating your social media marketing goals, ask yourself the following questions:

What are the objectives of my business?

What do my target audiences expect from my business?

What social media platforms will help me achieve my marketing goals?

Who are your competitions and what are they doing?

“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.”

This quote from Sun Tzu clearly explains the reason why you must study the competition if you want to get ahead of the game. By understanding how your competitors are doing on their social media marketing, you understand what is working that you should try and what’s not that you should avoid. This allows you to learn from your competitors’ failure and success.

However, this doesn’t mean you copy exactly what they are doing. This only means that you get inspiration, data, and knowledge that you can use when creating your very own social media marketing strategy.

How do you measure your performance?

You must learn to identify social media metrics as they will help you measure the performance of your marketing efforts. When you learn to interpret social media metrics, you take your social media game a notch. Metrics help you understand how your strategy is going, what type of content is getting more engagement, which demographics are engaging more in your content, what times are you getting more engagement and more.

All of these data are very crucial when developing your social media marketing strategy. Social media trends are always changing and so you must know how to read your metrics and change your marketing plan as you progress.

There is no perfect social media marketing plan as there are no definite social media trends. Therefore, you should keep up with that’s the trend and be flexible enough to adjust and alter your plan to make it better and better.