Social Media Marketing: How to pick a strategy and tools

How do you prioritize all tasks related to social media marketing? From publishing content to monitoring the marketing campaign’s progress, it could be challenging to think of all the work a marketer needs to cover every day. Luckily, there are several time-saving and easy-to-use social media marketing tools available to aid you in completing such tasks. 

But, how can you determine which tool is the right match for your needs?

This article covers the points you must consider to choose the right social media marketing tool for your business. However, before selecting a tool that best fits your needs, it’s significant to design an effective social media strategy first. We have laid the most vital points below to help you with the same.

How to develop a social media strategy?

Know your buyer personas

It is crucial to conduct thorough research on your customer base, segregate them into different groups and then create their personas. It will enable you to understand their demands better and help you target them on the right social media channels. 

Also Read: What is an SEO backlink pyramid? How does it work?

Identify the right platform to conduct social media marketing

Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and Facebook are among the most famous platforms for social media marketing. The key is to start with a few platforms and figure out which one works best for the content you plan to develop and the target audience.

Create a social media content plan

You are required to constantly develop compelling and high-quality content which can help build and grow your business. Posting random content makes this task challenging, so having a social media content plan is crucial. Ensure that your content planning strategy matches your buyer personas and goals well. 

Have achievable social media goals

Identify a few of the goals that you wish to achieve through social media marketing. It could be anything from increasing your email list to driving engagement with giveaways or competitions. Pick the goals that match best with your needs. 

How to choose the right social media marketing tool?

Also Read: LinkedIn Marketing Ideas to Generate Leads

If you wish to choose the best social media marketing tool, determine the central issues that made you start searching for it in the first place. The aim here is to look for a suitable tool that can help resolve these issues and let you do things you couldn’t do before. 

Here is a list of the major challenges witnessed by most social media marketers:

Publishing on different social media platforms manually

It isn’t easy to log in/out of every social profile and also network each time you want to post anything new for the target audience on various social media platforms. However, social media marketing tools make it easy to actively leverage your content on several social media platforms because they are designed to upload, edit and schedule many social media posts in one go. 

Moreover, they also come with additional features like an inbuilt media library and content suggestion that help you curate quality content.

Engaging with the audience

People tend to like a business that engages with its audience on social media platforms. However, several companies avoid proper engagement on social media and miss out on future business opportunities. 

Also Read: Why Is Search Engine Optimization Needed For The Growth Of Your Business?

Being proactive, listening, and responding to comments might sound easy, but it is challenging to do so regularly. That’s where a social media marketing tool helps you track conversations related to your business across all your social media platforms and even identifies what people are talking about you.

Monitoring results

Monitoring results in social media is a challenging task for marketers in particular. Earlier, it wasn’t easy to obtain and understand social media data. However, there are several amazing tools available now that make it easy to access data for marketers. 

These tools help get an encompassing view of your social activities and how your engagement helps you achieve success. 

Lack of financial and human resources

In a survey conducted with over 300 social media marketers, about 26 percent of the companies say that their biggest networking challenging online is the lack of proper resources. Several organizations, especially the small ones, hardly have the funds and workforce to run their daily social tasks. 

But now, you don’t have to worry if you don’t have sufficient funds or a workforce.  There are numerous affordable, robust and free social media marketing tools to aid you in managing numerous social profiles, run contests, monitor analytics on several platforms, and schedule posts by yourself.

Other things to keep in mind while making the final choice

Pricing and billing options

The tool you choose must match your budget. Some free tools come with limited features, while others come with advanced features and therefore have a premium price. Hence, once you have a fair understanding of your goal, consider the price and billing options of the tool you plan on using. 

Team collaboration

 If you plan on inviting the other team members for collaborating and increasing productivity, ensure that you choose a tool that comes with support for team collaboration. A good social media marketing tool will offer you this option and a lot more. 

Where to search for good social media marketing tools?

Now that you have better clarity on your needs, it’s time to begin your research. Here are some resources that you can use to find the best social media marketing tools:

• Google
• Product Hunt
• YouTube
• AlternativeTo
• Quora
• Capterra

Which one to use- Single-purpose or an All-in-One Tool?

The answer to this question entirely depends on how complex your issues are. If you’re witnessing all the mentioned issues, no Single-purpose social media marketing tool will work right for you. However, if you face one or two of the above-listed difficulties, you can then use a Single-purpose tool.  

Here is a list of some of the most useful tools to manage your social media marketing effectively:

• Sprout Social: It is a great tool for tracking all your social media activities, engagement, and content.
• Buffer: This is an incredible tool to schedule, publish and analyze your content without any hassle. 
• Edgar: It is an ideal tool if you want to recycle your best quality content automatically.
• Tweetdeck: This is an excellent tool to manage Twitter accounts.

The ideal way to determine which social media strategy would work best for you is by testing different tools and content first and then measuring the final results. That is how you can learn what is most helpful for your business.  

Conclusion

Selecting the most suitable and appropriate social media marketing tool is a huge investment in a social media strategy. The right tool will spare you a significant amount of vitality and time. Hence, it is crucial to take ample time to be clear on what issues or challenges you are facing before you start doing the research.