How to Create a Social Media Promotion Strategy

Hi, my name is Crystal King. I am the HubSpot Academy Social media professor and today you're going to learn why you really need to develop a social media strategy for your business to really have the most success. And if you like what you see here, make sure you subscribe and you like and that will help you get alerted when HubSpot Academy has new videos out on the channel. If you really like what you see, then you can take our free social media certification. The link will be at the end of the video or in the description. Enjoy. Hi, I'm Crystal, the social media professor for HubSpot Academy. Creating a promotional plan that takes advantage of social and digital technologies will help you shape the conversation about your business, build loyalty, and attract new customers and partners. Social media shouldn't replace other inbound promotional methods like email, events or public relations, but instead should augment them, offering another set of marketing channels for you to explore. There are many benefits to having a social media strategy. It will help you expand your other marketing efforts so your content has the chance to be seen by a wide audience and hopefully the right audience. It will also help you build brand awareness. Gone are the days when your only way to build that same awareness was through billboards or magazine and television ads. With social media, you have the ability to bring your brand content directly to your customers, partners and prospects. Now you can be where your audience already is. Social media is one of the most powerful ways to connect with your audience. Sprout Social reports that when consumers follow a brand on social, 67% of the consumers are more likely to spend more with that brand and 78% say they will visit that brand's physical retail store. This is, this is especially true among millennials. 84% said they were more likely to buy from a brand they follow on social media compared to a brand they don't follow on social. Social media helps you attract buyers to your products and services and it gives you the ability to directly have conversations with those individuals at the time and place of their choosing. It sounds like a lot of opportunity, doesn't it? In fact, social media is in many ways the ultimate way to do inbound marketing. That's, that's because it's a one to one medium which gives you and your company the chance to market in a direct but very human way.

Social media, its impact on marketing, I think has really been pretty profound. I'll give maybe two specific examples. One is when you think about, I will say, kind of old marketing, this is still how a lot of us are thinking about marketing. The idea is that you're waiting for people to get to your website and your website is like the holy grail and you're doing everything you can to lure people to your website. But what's happened with social media is we don't have to like actually sit around and wait for people to come discover us anymore. What's happening is we actually now have the opportunity to take our message, take our content, take our information to where the conversation is already happening. And that's on social media. And if you think about what else is happening, it's really completely leveled the playing field for businesses of all sizes. And if you think about the fact that Click N Curl, which is like a 10 person beauty company in the Midwest, that a post of theirs can be seen right next to Dior international powerhouse with $100 million marketing budget, that's crazy. In all other past forms of marketing, something like that has never been the case. So social media has really kind of changed everything.

That brings us to one of the most important parts of your social media strategy. It's also the same thing that sits at the heart of your inbound marketing strategy. The buyer Persona. A buyer Persona helps you determine who your ideal customer is. Understanding who you want to reach will guide you in a variety of ways, from choosing the right social media platforms to use, to creating the best mix of content to share, to being able to target advertising to the right audience. Make sure you understand all the basic demographics about your buyer Persona, like age, gender, income, occupation, interests, motivations and objections. But if you can also go a few steps further and dig into their psychographics, which websites they visit, which online shops they frequent, and which social sites they like the best. Social media gives you the ability to be more personal and really hone in on the right type of Persona for your products and services. So the more you know, the better you can target those social audiences. There is one other crucial piece of the social media promotion. Aligning your social strategy to your business objectives. Having business goals and objectives in place will make it easier for you to create social media goals that will transform viewers and readers into buyers. As with your business goals, you want your social media goals to use the smart method, specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and timely. As an example, if your company has a goal of building brand awareness among college students students, one of your social media goals might be to develop videos with content that's helpful or funny for college students and set an advertising goal of reaching 250,000 college students by the end of the year. Even better, you can set a secondary goal of having the students interact with the content in some way, commenting on it or sharing it with their friends, thus increasing brand reach and giving you a direct way to measure if and how you're meeting your goal. Being able to articulate your social media goals and plan the impact your goals will have on the company's return on investment or or ROI is also the key to securing executive buy in and budget for your campaigns. Having your buyer Persona and business objectives in mind will be helpful as you traverse your way through building your social media strategy.

So the components that go into our social media strategy, we basically look at four different things, right? So the first one is paid social media, right? So all the efforts that we, all the efforts that we're going to to put out there to proactively talk to our audience, right? So the second one is community management, right? So it's really tracking the conversations and being, being on top of what's happening out there, not only with the brand itself, but also with pop culture, right? The third one is organic content, right? So all the content that we are going to put out there, but not necessarily sponsor through paid media, right? And then the last piece, which I think it's one of the, it's a piece that I like the most, is really our reactive power from a creative standpoint to really respond as fast as possible to all the things that are happening in that channel, right? So how do we spot something and come back with a creative idea that talks and inserts the brand into that conversation?

To build your social media strategy, you'll need to be able explain each social media channel and how each one is best used for social media promotion. Understand the impact of social listening and engagement. Develop a social content strategy for your social media plan. Identify ways that metrics are crucial to understanding the success of your digital efforts and finally how to integrate social media into your other inbound efforts, including your website, conversations and blog posts. There are a lot of moving parts in developing this strategy, but mapping out the actions you're going to take will get you one step closer to achieving your business goals.