Social media marketing is an essential part of online marketing for many businesses. In Canada, at least 96% of all internet users use social media on their mobile phones.
Considering the number of people that use social media on a daily basis, properly utilizing this channel can be highly lucrative. It can be a steady source of leads for your brand while also acting as a passive popularity booster.
But, while social media marketing can be useful and all, it only provides its full benefits when executed properly. To do that, you need to have a good social media marketing strategy in place. Without a proper plan, you can’t create goals, work to achieve them and then track the outcomes.
If you aren’t sure about how to come up with an effective social media strategy in Canada, don’t worry. In this post, we explain the marketing strategies we offer our clients on a monthly basis.
What is a Social Media Content and Marketing Strategy?
Social media content marketing is the type of marketing that involves utilizing social media platforms for the purpose of reaching potential customers and clients in order to market your products/services.
Now, keeping this definition in mind, we can simply understand a social media marketing strategy to be a plan or document that outlines the details of your marketing approach such as your target audience, preferred channels as well as your missions and goal.
With a plan in hand, you will be able to know the type of people you have to target as well as how you can target them. By shaping and defining your approach with a strategy, you will be able to keep your activities and efforts consistent.
Steps for Building a Social Media Marketing Strategy?
Moving on, let’s take a look at some steps following which you can come up with an effective social media marketing strategy across Canada.
- Define Realistic Goals
Before you get started with the strategy, you should have a plan. This process should start by outlining the goals you would like to achieve through social media marketing.
Setting down goals can sound simple enough, but this is actually where a lot of brands can go wrong. When defining your goals, you have to take care of the following:
- Make sure your goals aren’t too low. While it is not advisable to go overboard with ridiculously optimistic goals, you should take care not to go to the other extreme of the spectrum by setting them too low. You need to come up with goals that you know you are capable of achieving at the height of your capacity and ability.
- Make sure your goals aren’t unrealistic. Setting goals too high just means that you’ll get disappointed later on. You should take care to outline such objectives, achieving which is within the capacity of your brand.
- Make sure to set explicit goals (not general). Instead of setting the goal of ‘increasing leads’, you can set your goal like ‘increasing leads by 120%’. In other words, your objectives should be clear and explicit rather than in a general tenor.
- Perform Audience Research. This is probably the most important step that you have to take care of when making a social media marketing strategy.
Before you start creating and sharing content, you have to understand whom you are writing it for. You need to understand the type of channels and platforms your audience uses so that you can target them specifically.
You can also make user personas to classify and organize the different types of people that you have to target using your marketing approaches.
The main purpose of conducting audience research is basically to allow you to understand which channels and types of content you have to focus on. There are hundreds of social media platforms out there and you can’t focus on them all.
- Plan Your Content
Once you are done with researching your target audience, you have to go ahead to plan your content. ‘Content’ in this context brings within its ambit pretty much every material (i.e., be it messages, posts, visuals, graphics, etc.) that you have to put on your social media platforms.
When deciding your content, you basically have to consider your niche as well as your particular brand. Is your brand better explained through detailed posts or is it better advertised through short wordless visuals?
- Create a Publishing Schedule
Then, once your content is all thought-out, you have to move ahead to creating a publishing schedule or a content calendar. By creating a content calendar, you will be able to prepare and finalize your posts/blasts/messages, etc., before their time arrives.
Creating a calendar can also help you keep up a consistent flow of content without long pauses in between. Inconsistency can damage the effectiveness of your marketing approaches and they can put off your regular readers.
- Track Your Results
In a social media marketing strategy, your job doesn’t end once you publish content. You have to keep an eye on how well it performs so that you can adjust your strategy and fix the parts that you’re going wrong with.
To track the results of your social media marketing endeavours, you can calculate the total number of visitors and leads your website generates after each successive post. Similarly, you can check the number of views and shares to get an idea of what your readers like and what they don’t.
Francophone Advertising in Provinces
Since we’re talking about creating social media marketing strategies in Canada, we have to consider the difference in your marketing approach that you will have to apply in Francophone provinces, i.e., New Brunswick and Quebec.
New Brunswick and Quebec are the two major Canadian provinces that recognize French as an official language (along with English, of course).
When targeting users in these two areas, you have to tailor your content accordingly. In other words, you can provide content in French so that the users perceive your efforts to be targeted and personalized. This can be quite a game-changer, considering that 80% of customers are more likely to buy from a brand that gives them a tailored experience instead of a generic “one-size-fits-all” approach.
We see this with our QuebecKayak.com website, where we design an experience focused specifically on French speakers across Canada. Through this website, we advertise directly to French Canadians. This has produced a wealth of knowledge regarding the differences between French-speaking Canadians in Quebec 6,890,305 (85.4%), those in the only officially bilingual province (New Brunswick 234,055 (31.8%)), and the remaining Francophones (790,138) across the other provinces as recorded by Statistics Canada.
We study advertising in French-speaking Canada extensively and have observed benefits by adjusting our website experience accordingly. Just like in English, there is nuance in the language and a definite difference between writing in Quebec French VS France French. The differences in cultures between the French-speaking countries can be considered bigger than those between English-speaking Canada and US.
The French culture in Canada, including publications and media, can go completely unknown to the average non-french speaking Canadian. Understanding the nuances, differences, and similarities will make a major impact on the effectiveness of your Francophone advertising campaigns.
In Conclusion
Advertising in Canada is similar to the US in many ways. The cultures are similar enough that a lot of time can be saved by designing the same advertising campaign for both regions. You see a clear example of this anytime you turn on cable TV in Canada. However, Canada is very different from the US in many ways. Understanding the nuances of Canada and designing campaigns for this region, will result in visible charitable differences in metrics that matter, like click-through rates.
If you are still confused about where to start, consider our TikTok marketing ebook our Internet Marketing For Beginners ebook. Both are designed to get you started on the path of learning about social media marketing.
