Social Media Strategy in 7 easy Steps | Tips for every Kenyan Business

Having a great digital marketing strategy is key for every business in Kenya to ensure growth. Creating an Impact on Social Media is not always easy to achieve.  Companies should focus more on being social than just being on social platforms.

With the constant emerging tools and platforms, companies can easily fall into the trap of just being tactical with their online marketing instead of being strategic. According to the Global Digital Stats and Report, there were 22.86 Million internet users in Kenya in January 2020. Social Media Users were 8.80 Million.

The statistics also showed social media penetration stood at 17% in January 2020. From that information, you can see there is a large audience to tap into. Hence you will need a proper strategy to ensure an effective marketing strategy or plan.

Here is how you can create a winning social media marketing strategy in 7 Steps. Effective Tips For every business in Kenya.

1. Set Social Media Marketing Objectives

Before creating any marketing plan, It’s crucial to first define your objectives before you got into too many details of activities and content. This will help keep you focussed, and also help track how well your marketing strategy is performing. 

Some objectives include; Drive website traffic, raise brand awareness or authority, Increase sales or retention, Improve customer support, Boost customer loyalty, and Increase PR mentions or media relations.

Allocating different goals for each social media platform can be highly effective. The reason for this is, user behavior varies in each given platform. A good example, a bakery business might find that activities on Twitter may help you reach customer support goals, whereas on Instagram maybe it’s the best opportunity for social sales.

2. Research Your Competitors on Social

Every business is competing for attention on social media. Doing a competition analysis on your competitors on social media platforms can boost your chances of being heard over the noise. You can also learn from what they are doing and spot opportunities.

You can use competitive analysis tools to help automatically analyze competitors’ accounts and engagement, find out what percent of your competitors’ traffic comes from social media. Social listening is also another way to keep an eye on your competitors. There are tools for this to help set up listening streams to monitor relevant keywords and accounts in real-time. 

Once you have done this, collect this information in a document, identify your competitors’ weak spots ( like platforms they are not fully leveraging on) and take advantage of this in your marketing strategy and marketing plan. 

3. Research Your Audience

Before deciding on your target platform or consumer, it’s crucial to identify where your target audience is currently active. Certain platforms are highly dominated by certain demographics. For example, Pinterest, 81% of users are female, while Twitter, 65.5% of users are male.

If you’re not targeting the right people your content will fall flat, your engagement will drop, and all your hard work will go unnoticed. A good place to start thinking about these audiences is by creating a Buyer Persona to bring together everything there is to know about a target customer or follower.

This breaks down your different audiences into individual personas, making them feel more like real people. Building personas help you define certain aspects of your audience’s personality and create content that resonates with them.

4. Audit of Current Social Media Success

For every marketer, they should always ask themselves, “How did this content help me achieve my goals?”  If you are not analyzing each post to see how it performed then you might not easily tell the impact you are making on social media. This with time will also help slowly refine your marketing strategy. Social media tools such as google analytics, Twitter analytics, or each platform’s internal analytics to help track your performance.

Collect the metrics overtime on like a spreadsheet document, highlighting the number of posts, followers gained, how many views, how many clicks, impressions, website referrals, and so on.   This data will define current social media engagement and benchmark improvements.

5. Set Up a Social Media Content Calendar

With new content, news, and ideas that come every time, it’s easy to get caught up in the day-to-day of managing multiple social media accounts. A social media calendar will save you time and allow you to track and test different strategies to see what resonates most with your audience.

Before setting up your calendar it is good to first re-evaluate your goals. Once you identify your major goal, maybe it’s brand awareness, dedicate 50% to that given goal. There are certain frameworks to help know how to align your calendar.

The 80/20 rule states that only 20% of your posts should talk about your brand. The rule of thirds says you should divide social media posts equally between promotional content, thought leadership, and personal interactions. Don’t just create promotional content, that can be a turn off to many, creat time for social interactions too and personal attention.

6. Plan Content Promotion & Distribution

Content promotion and distribution can be a challenge to many Kenyan Businesses. Developing content with a specific goal in mind is key to a winning distribution strategy and easier subsequent ROI calculations. To effectively do this, marketers need to understand what types of content work best with their audience.

Developing a well-thought-out distribution can separate a successful social media marketing strategy from one that sees the little impact. To avoid making any unnecessary investments, marketers need to think more strategically in terms of both content production processes and distribution strategies. 

Online search and social media are key channels for marketing to potential buyers hence the need for regular creation of content that drives social engagement and for applying different content optimization and SEO techniques. Another way to do it is, Combine paid, owned, and earned media strategically and include influencer marketing too.

7. Monitor Social Media Impact

Sometimes it may be tempting to treat every like and comment as a sign that your social media is working, the only true way to determine your success is by comparing your results to your strategic objectives. Utilizing tools like Google Analytics makes it easy to see how social is impacting your overall traffic. 

Here are some metrics you would want to track from the objectives we mentioned in step 1.

Drive website traffic (Unique views, social media referrals), Raise brand awareness or authority (Social mentions, direct traffic), Increase sales or retention (Lifetime value, average order value, revenue changes), Improve customer support (Renewals, ticket wait times), Boost customer loyalty (Retention rates) and Increase PR mentions or media relations( Backlinks, media mentions).

The seven steps in this post will help you build a strategy from the ground up. Get started on these steps today. For impactful social media, campaigns visit Growthpad Digital Consulting who will take you into a journey of exploring online marketing strategies that are specifically tested and proven to deliver you results for any Kenyan Business or Corporation. Engage us today by booking a FREE 30 minutes strategy session with our team here.