When done well, social media marketing has the power to build brand awareness, strengthen your relationship with your customers, and even increase leads. However, it can be hard to get started. It’s important to have a social media strategy before you get stuck in and, while this can be a daunting undertaking, we hope we can make it a little easier. Keep reading and follow our six steps to create a winning social media marketing strategy for your brand.
1. Set Your Social Media Strategy Goals
Before you really get started with your social media strategy, you’ll need to define your goals.
Your social media goals should align with your broader business goals, and your general marketing objectives. Are you looking to increase brand awareness, drive website traffic, or generate leads? Think about how social media can help you reach these goals. Having clear (and realistic) goals helps you measure and keep track of your success, as well as making it a lot easier to actually create your social media strategy.
Top Tip: Make your goals SMART!
SMART goals are goals which have been set using the SMART framework, with each letter standing for a trait your goal should have. It stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-Bound. Setting goals within these parameters can help ensure you’re setting realistic objectives, eliminating any guesswork and making it easier to track your progress along the way.
Here are a few examples of SMART goals for social media marketing you could take some inspiration from:
- Grow our brand’s online presence to attract more organic traffic, reaching 10,000 monthly visitors through organic search, by the end of 2023.
- Improve engagement on our Facebook page by 25% month-on-month.
- Increase our LinkedIn following by 100 by the end of 2023.
2. Understand Your Audience
The more you know about your audience, the more powerful your marketing efforts will be. By knowing who you’re hoping to sell to, you can make sure you’re not wasting your time and effort trying to appeal to everyone. To help you gain a better understanding of your target audience, we would recommend creating audience personas.
An audience persona (also known as a buyer persona or profile), is a representation of your ideal consumer, based on market research and data about your existing customer base. They are fictional profiles that represent groups of people within a target audience. Think of an audience you’d like to target on social media, then ask yourself these questions…
Top Tip: We always recommend giving your persona a name to make it easier to visualise them as a real person. It’s easier to discuss “Sandra” rather than “Persona A”!
3. Carry Out Competitor Research
A great way to get inspiration for your own social media content is to take a look at your competition, identifying areas you can do better in and gaps you could possibly fill. It’s a good starting point for crafting your strategy as it can give you an idea of what works and what doesn’t in your chosen industry. We recommend carrying out a competitor analysis!
Start by identifying a handful of your main direct competitors (direct competitors are the ones most similar to your own brand) and creating a spreadsheet or simple word doc to keep track of your findings. Then, work your way through each of their social media platforms and make a note of their activities, including things such as:
- What platforms are they present on?
- How frequently do they post on each platform?
- Do they interact with their community?
- What types of content see the highest levels of engagement?
What hashtags do they use?
Top Tip: While it’s very handy to carry out a social media competitor analysis when you’re starting to create your strategy, we actually recommend carrying them out regularly (at least twice a year). Make sure you’re keeping tabs on your competitors and keeping an eye on what’s going on in your industry!
4. Choose Your Social Media Platforms
There are so many social media platforms to choose from and it can often feel as though you need to stay on top of all of them as a brand. You end up stretching yourself too thin and sharing poor quality content. Selecting a few platforms and really focusing your efforts can help you get the most out of your social media strategy but how do you choose the best social media platforms for your business? Here are three easy steps:
Step 1: Understand Your Target Audience
Your first step is to understand where your audience actually spends time online. After all, there is little point in posting content to a platform that your audience doesn’t tend to use. Post your content to the places where it’ll have the biggest impact. Check to see where website referrals are coming from and identify the platform your audience already uses. Meet your audience where they are.
Step 2: Understand Various Social Media Platforms
Next, take a look at the uses, benefits and formats of each social media platform and determine how well suited your brand and content is to that channel. Dig into the demographics of each platform and see how they align with what you know about your target audience. You can find out a bit more about each social media platform in our handy blog about choosing the right platform for your brand.
Step 3: Understand Your Marketing Goals
You’ve already spent some time defining your overall business objectives and your marketing goals, and you’ve hopefully identified how social media can help you get there. Different social media platforms offer different benefits, and these benefits will help you reach your marketing goals. Use your insight into your marketing goals, combined with your knowledge of your target audience and your understanding of each social media platform to choose where to focus your attention.
5. Create A Content Calendar
Consistency is key when it comes to social media marketing and it’s much easier to stay on top of everything when you’re organised! Creating a social media content calendar can give you the perfect place to lay out all your upcoming content, keep track of previous content and create a consistent schedule. Give everyone responsible for social media in your business access to the calendar to make sure everyone’s on the same page.
Your content calendar should include each platform you’ll be posting to, the date of each post, your content pillars or common topics, post concept, copy, design and a space to keep track of where it is in the creation, approval and posting process.
Your posting schedule will differ depending on how big your business is, the platforms you’ve decided to post to, and how much time you have to dedicate to creating content. The most important thing to remember is that consistent, high-quality content is much better than super frequent, low-quality content. Choose a schedule you really believe you can adhere to long-term.
Top Tip: There are plenty of tools online for creating content calendars (Semrush has a great option), but there’s nothing wrong with a good old-fashioned Google Sheet!
6. Measure Your Performance
A common mistake brands make when they’re starting to tackle social media marketing is to treat it as “set and forget,” and failing to monitor performance as you go. There’s so much to learn from your social media metrics and the only way to improve along the way is to keep a close eye on how your content is performing. Set a reminder in your calendar to create a report on your brand’s social media performance at the end or beginning of each month, and take a look at your engagement, reach, impressions and follower growth.
As well as your monthly report, keep track of how content is working throughout the month. If a post or campaign isn’t getting the results you hoped for, don’t be scared to make some changes. It’s all about testing things out, whether it be types of content, different designs or posting times. You’ll find the winning formula for your brand in no time.
Top Tip: Learn from your mistakes and don’t get disheartened if something doesn’t perform as well as you hoped! Everything is a learning curve and by analysing your best and worst performing posts, you’ll be able to identify patterns and establish what your audience likes most.
Talk to Victress about Social Media Strategy
There’s no need to struggle with your social media strategy. We’ll take away the guesswork, make everything simpler, and help you to get better results. With our social media packages, you will understand where you need to be and what you need to say to make sure your social media efforts are never wasted again. Get in touch today for a free consultation with a member of our team!
