A great social media strategy must have solid commercial goals at its heart or you’ll run the risk of spending money on the wrong things — like sending social traffic to the wrong landing page or promoting your brand on the wrong social media networks.
Conversions are an important KPI when it comes to any digital marketing campaign — but that’s especially true for social media.
Here are some top tips for a high-converting social media strategy. 
Strategy audit
First things first, you need to start with a social media strategy audit.
Have you documented your strategy up until now? Do you have an editorial calendar? This is a good place to begin reviewing how everything is going.
It might not be the most exciting of tasks, but it’s necessary to improve your social strategy. This is how you can figure out what is working well, and what definitely isn’t.
To stay organised, you need to keep a record of your data. You can either create your own audit document or download a free audit template online if you’re not sure how to start.
If you’re going to do your own, it’s up to you as to what you include, but these basics are a good place to start:
Profile information (e.g. handle and URL)
Key demographic information
Awareness metrics
Engagement metrics
Referral traffic
You should aim to audit each social profile that you have and compare and contrast your performance between them.
Create tangible goals
Once you’ve done an audit on your current social strategy, you need to create some tangible goals. We don’t just mean ‘get more likes’.
Creating goals is very important — what goals are you setting yourself as a business when it comes to your social media?
Here are some examples of goals, to get you thinking:
Increasing your follower count (a good initial starting point, but not a strong long-term strategic goal)
Direct referral traffic from social media — are you trying to drum up more web visitors from social media?
Social sales
Setting goals like this will help you to steer your social media usage in the right direction. It’s easy to think that you’re performing well because your most recent post got loads of likes, or your number of followers increased by 20 in a day, But this isn’t enough: you need to have long-term goals that link back to your overall business strategy. If those likes aren’t converting to customers buying your products or becoming brand advocates, then there isn’t much point.
Landing page alignment
When you’re planning your social strategy, you also need to think about how your social posts will link — and align — to your website.
A key question you need to ask yourself is: does the landing page live up to the promise of the social post?
Keep things consistent so that customers aren’t confused when they get to your site. This means maintaining the style and tone of voice that you have on your social media channels. You don’t want your brand voice to be unclear; this isn’t impressive to your visitors.
It also means keeping your promises to the visitors that clicked on your post to start with and followed your link. If you said you were going to lead them to a mobile phone sale, then you need to do that. If you said you were going to share some exclusive information on how to set up your own ecommerce store, then you need to do that.
This is applicable regardless of whether you are starting your own online store, or you have bought an existing ecommerce store that you are planning on rejuvenating. If you are not aligning your social posts with your landing pages, it will result in poor conversion rates — customers will end up frustrated and click away from your site. It’s a bad customer experience move that will cost you time and money.
For advice on how to do website design well, check out our post on 10 tips for web design that drives sales.
Create great clickable content
Looking for clicks? You need to give the user a reason.
Strong CTAs (call to actions) are important when planning your social media strategy.
There are a few things you need to remember when you’re adding CTAs into your social posts. Here are some easy ways to boost your CTAs:
Keep CTAs brief: you don’t want to lose your reader’s attention
Use verbs/action words (such as ‘try’ or ‘start’) these will motivate and inspire the reader into doing what you want them to do
Add a sense of urgency: if you add a timeframe like ‘Offer ends tomorrow!’ or ‘Buy now!’ then your audience is more likely to click because they think that they might not have the chance to get this information or deal again.
You can also try new content formats, like video, as a way of reeling your potential consumer in.
Be aware that you may also need to pay for social ads to really ramp up social media ROI and conversions. Social networks like Facebook are making organic social media reach harder and harder to achieve, so it’s probably worth investing some sequential Facebook ads.
Review your social analytics
From paid tools to free analytics on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, social media marketing has a wealth of data for you to use and refine your strategy. Features like UTM tracking in Google Analytics will help you to follow platform and channel growth.
This is one of the best ways of ensuring you have a successful social strategy that converts: by using the tools available to you to analyse your social performance.
Most good social media analytics tools will let you measure your performance on all channels from a single dashboard — ensuring you don’t have to keep going between scattered data. These tools will help you to understand your key demographic, when they use specific social channels, and how much they’re engaging with your content.
Creating a social strategy that successfully converts doesn’t have to be complicated.
Just follow these key steps:
• audit your existing strategy,
• create tangible goals, and
• align your landing pages.
If you create great content — and keep analysing your performance — you are sure to convert those leads into sales.
What did you think of our social strategy conversion tips? Let us know in the comments below.
Victoria Greene is a freelance writer and branding consultant who loves seeing small business owners grow and succeed with their ecommerce businesses. For all the latest on developments in marketing, ecommerce, and design, check out her blog, Victoria Ecommerce.
