Best Social Media Marketing Strategy in 2022- Social Media Marketing Strategy and Statistics

Social Media Marketing in 2022 is both an art and science. If you are a social media marketer already, you would probably be aware that marketing online requires numerous hats, and if you want to be super effective or want to get good at switching between the artist and scientist. 

An artist here is the right brain thinker since the brain’s right hemisphere is referred to as the creative side. It is responsible for primarily ideating visual awareness and deciding how attractive the content looks. On the other hand, a scientist is a left-brain thinker who is more tilted towards the logical side and responsible for linear thinking, including data analysis and metrics. The primary focus lies on the content’s performance. 

So before formulating a social media marketing strategy, you should always tap in first with your inner scientist as thinking the same. This will enable you to develop a plan freely, and it will also allow you to reverse engineer your desired results and provide you with valuable insights for the future. So tighten your seat belts now, as this article will give you a full tour of how to create a social media marketing strategy in 2022, just like a scientist.

Contents:

#1 How to determine which KPIs to track?

#2 How to use the scientific method to develop a result-focused social media marketing game plan?

#3 How to build content that’s engaging and relatable?

#4: Constructing and testing a hypothesis with an experiment

#1 How to determine which KPIs to track?

Whether you are building your social media strategy yourself or handing things off to your social media manager, the first thing you should do is get crystal clear on the goals you want to achieve. Step one to creating a social media marketing strategy like a scientist is to clarify your objectives and marketing goals. 

By now, you must’ve heard that vanity metrics rarely prove value. These are surface-level data points that aren’t necessarily indicative of a business meeting its real goals. A famous example would be an account with hundreds and thousands of followers but isn’t converting those followers into loyal customers. At the end of the day, they end up losing the plot. 

When establishing your social media goals, you will have to focus on the metrics that will impact your business’s bottom line features like engagement with real customers, getting new email subscribers, or the holy grail of money in the bank. 

During this initial step, you should be able to communicate effortlessly what social media success looks like for your business. And these goals should be measurable or something quantifiable that you can track over a specific period of time, allowing you to benchmark your progress along the way. 

These measurable goals are called Key Performance Indicators or KPIs. Some of the most common KPIs for social media marketing are:

a. Brand Awareness: It can be measured by tracking impressions, reach, engagement, clicks, shares, tags, and mentions.

b. Engagement: Likes, comments, DMs, clicks, shares, and saves. 

c. Traffic- CTR, Swipe-ups, and page views.

d. Leads, Business Enquiries, Contacts, and Booked appointments. 

e. Conversions: Sales, new subscribers, coupon usage, and completed surveys.

Hence, social media channels are often used as a part of a business’s top-of-funnel strategy. This is the most expansive funnel area where brand awareness is considered a priority. Once you create brand awareness among as many people as possible, you can use social media to deepen your connections with potential customers.

Those who eventually stick to this process will likely reach the narrowest part of the funnel, where a conversion is made, and brand loyalty is solidified. 

When it comes to social media to make sales, awareness is always the first step. Hence incorporating the KPI of brand awareness with a social media marketing strategy is something practically everyone should follow. 

You can measure how successful your brand awareness efforts are by tracking various data points related to impressions, reach, engagement, clicks, shares, tags, and brand mentions.

Pro Tip: Use your insights to keep track of engagement and consistently seek to set a goal of increasing your engagement rate by at least 30%. And if you are starting with your new account, experiment with various content types during the first three months. 

One of the biggest mistakes business owners commits is diving into social media without a strategy or intentional way to measure their progress. 

#2 How to use the scientific method to develop a result-focused social media marketing game plan?

Remember, thinking logically, just like a scientist, and using scientific methods will allow you to separate facts from feelings, allowing the data to speak for itself. This will help you to develop a result-focused social media marketing game plan. So, let us go back to times like attending a school’s science class and review the steps involved in the scientific method.

Step #1: Ask a Question

It will be an easy method once you have figured out your objectives and marketing goals. The only question you should be asking at this point is how you can make those goals a reality using your social media platforms. For instance, let’s reevaluate the brand awareness KPI where we might ask the question, how can I use Instagram to increase brand awareness, or can I increase brand engagement by 30 over the next 90 days. 

Asking these simple questions will lead us to the next step in the scientific method. 

Step #2: Background Research

This is to conduct market research. Market research gathers information about a target audience to create an intuitive branded experience. It can come in a variety of forms. 

Market research can also come in varieties like:

• Surveys and Polls
• Organizing focus groups
• Engaging and listening
• Scheduling Phone Interviews with your target demographic
• Lurking on online forums

#3 How to build content that’s engaging and relatable?

The only way to connect to your customers is through content, and we all know that content is the king. But marketing is queen here. What your customers here need the most is your research to point to problems you can solve and value you directly can provide through your social media content, and this is how you get your followers to stick around.

Understanding the emotional drivers of a target audience is one of the most effective and powerful ways to connect with your audience. The best form of marketing is emotional. One Harvard study found out that we make 95% of our purchasing decisions emotionally, which means we are buying not based on logic but on our feelings. So, pay close attention to your target audience’s emotional drivers and motivators and create content found on the same. 

#4 Constructing and testing a hypothesis with an experiment

You’ve had a meaningful conversation with your target audience when you have established some measurable goals and audited your existing analytics on previously posted content. Now you have an idea about your customers’ requirements. Now, all the information that you have gathered, you will be using this to create this hypothesis or an educated assumption of what this audience would most likely like to see when it comes to your social media content. 

Let’s take an example of a hypothesis from an imaginary clothing brand.

Our target audience is a fashion-obsessed Gen Z interested in understanding the environmental impact created by the brands they purchase from. From the perspective of a social media scientist, we should be utilizing short-form video content across our social media channels to educate how our products divert waste from landfills and support an ethical work environment. 

Tapping into current video trends while sharing our values align with this demographic will increase our reach and drive our engagement. Using TikTok and Instagram reels to connect with our younger customers around the things that we all care about.

Here, the environment can stand as an expert idea if we increase our engagement. Of course, this example is just one hypothesis for a single objective. One thing that this imaginary brand wants to do is brand awareness to its Gen Z audience. 

Once done with research and creating different hypotheses, testing is again a vital part. These become experiments when a scientist gets to shine. It’s time to put those strategic ideas to the test by creating and publishing content. 

First, set aside a specific time for your experiment to start and end. For instance, based on the imaginary hypothesis mentioned above, eco-conscious clothing businesses might decide they want to post one piece of short-form video content per day and try to find out how to repurpose their video content and gather some intel on how the audience responses are on different platforms. This can help analyze where to place more of the marketing efforts in the future. 

Draw your conclusions based on the following questions:

1. Did your experiment go as well as you hoped?
2. Did the results meet your expectations?
3. Were there specific areas where your content has underperformed?

Top 5 Social Media Statistics You Must Know in 2022

1. Facebook usage and activity will be down to 33 minutes per day by 2022. (contrasting to 39 minutes daily in 2017).

2. Instagram outperforms other social streaming services (81 percent vs. 8% on Facebook) in terms of engagement.

3. LinkedIn boasts one of the top and most educated user populations on social networking sites, with 51 percent of members having a college diploma and half earning more than $75,000 per year.

4. The most frequent marketing hashtag among #ContentMarketing Tweets is “#DigitalMarketing” (48 percent), followed by “#SEO” (42 percent) and “#marketing” (38 percent).

5. Buyers are significantly more likely to buy from an official site that incorporates social media images (hint: don’t overlook UGC).

I hope that this article helped solve your query and you got to learn what you wanted to. 

Thanks for reading.

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