A Step By Step Guide to Creating an Effective Social Media Strategy
There are endless social media platforms available today, with new competitors emerging every week.
Social media gives marketers the chance to engage directly with customers and potential customers, increase awareness of the brand and positive emotion, and build a community of loyal customers.
A strong social media strategy can stand out from your competitors and drive real results for your bottom line.
In this article, we’ll explore what a social media marketing strategy is and why you need one, in a step-by-step guide to creating your own strategy from scratch.
Steps to Create a Successful Social Media Strategy
- Set Clear, Measurable Goals
As with any other marketing approach, the first step to creating an effective social media strategy is to clearly define what you aim to achieve.
Start with “why.” Why do you want your brand to dive into the social media space, and what do you ultimately hope to achieve? These are the first questions you should ask yourself.
As you determine your answers, you should consider your brand’s larger goals, and think about how your goals align with or fit into them.
Do you want to boost brand awareness? Increase traffic to your website? New leads or conversions? Improve your brand reputation? Build a loyal customers?
You may have one specific goal or several, just make sure each one meets these three criteria:
- Achievable
- Measurable
- Relevant to your brand
Once you know why you’re doing this, you can start to get into more detail.
- Define Your Audience
Next, you’ll need to identify who you’re targeting on social media.
This is crucial, as success depends on creating content that interests and engages your audience, and that starts with knowing who they are.
One helpful step you can take is to develop customer personas that represent who you’ll be speaking to on social media, grouping together similar audience members.
These detailed personas can (and should) cover everything from their age and where they live to their interests, content preferences, and online behavior.
Be sure to include things like:
- Demographics: age, gender, job title, salary, location, etc.
- Interests: what type of content might interest them? What topics do they engage with? What are their hobbies and passions, both at work and at home?
- Their goals for your content: are they looking for a new job? To improve their fitness? To learn a skill? To find a software solution to save them time? To discover a delicious new ice cream brand? Think about how your brand, product, or service can serve as a solution to their goals.
- Where do they spend their time: What is their preferred social media platform? Is it on LinkedIn or TikTok? Or both?
- Content consumption: Are they more likely to watch videos or read text-based posts? What type of content do they seek out on social media? What other brands or individuals do they follow?
All of this information will be important in determining what content you create, where, and how it is delivered.
- Check Out the Competition
You probably have enough audience data by now to understand which platforms you might prioritize.
But before you make that decision, it’s worth taking a look at the social media activity of your competitors, or other businesses in similar industries.
There’s a good chance some of your competitors are already using social media marketing, which is great news because you can learn from them.
Dig deep into their profiles and content to see what strategies they use, what topics they cover, and what kind of engagement they get on different pieces of content. This will help you get an idea of what kind of content your audience loves and what they don’t.
Which platforms are your competitors active on, and which ones aren’t they? Where are they getting the best results, and where are they lacking engagement? Is it because your targets favor one platform over another, or are your peers missing out?
By studying your competitors profiles and social content, you can identify gaps and opportunities in the market, and collect important insights to guide your strategy.
- Choose your platforms
Now it’s time to choose the social media platforms your brand will focus on, at least at the beginning.
Before you go any further, keep in mind: Your brand doesn’t have to be on every social platform. In fact, your brand probably shouldn’t be on every social platform, especially if you’re just getting started with social media marketing.
Choosing the right platforms is a crucial step, and you should focus on the ones that most closely align with your target audience’s activity and preferences.
The most obvious options are the “big four” platforms: Facebook, X (Twitter before), Instagram, and LinkedIn. But not all of them may be a good fit for your brand, and there are plenty more to choose from, including TikTok, Pinterest, Snapchat, and more.
Ultimately, it’s all about who your audience is.
Are you targeting retirees? TikTok may not be the best option for you. But if you’re looking to reach a Gen Z audience, it’s probably there. If you’re a B2B brand, you’ll probably want to be on LinkedIn, but there are opportunities there for B2C brands as well.
Do some research on each platform to understand its strengths and weaknesses and how it can fit into your strategy.
- Define your brand voice and tone
In social media marketing, as with all forms of marketing, keeping your brand voice and tone consistent is key.
Before you start posting on social media and even before you develop your content strategy, you need to internally align with what you want your tone to be.
Will it be friendly? Will it be serious and helpful? Is it casual but educational? Is it sarcastic? Whatever you choose, make sure it makes sense to the person you’re talking to and that it’s infused consistently throughout your content.
- Optimize your profile
Your social media profiles are where your content is aggregated across each platform, and they’re the first place social media users go to learn more about your brand. That’s why it’s important to include all the necessary information up front.
Start by choosing a name that reflects your business. Then include your business name, contact details, some information about your company in your bio, and anything else visitors might need to know.
Here, you can use the keyword research tool to identify the words and phrases your customers are searching for and include them in your profile.
Visuals are key here. Make sure your branding is consistent and that you’re using images that are the right size and format so they appear as high quality as possible.
The goal is to make your brand instantly recognizable across all platforms.
- Develop Your Content Strategy
It’s time to build your content strategy, which will be the core of your social media marketing presence.
Before you do much, review your goals and the target audience information you gathered in the previous steps. This will help form the basis of your strategy and the content you plan to create.
Then think about the platforms you’ll be using and the trends you’ve noticed there in terms of content formats, types, and most popular topics.
Depending on the platform you’re using, your content might include educational videos, links to blog posts, memes, polls, or anything else your audience might find useful.
When you do this, your audience will usually be more engaged and involved than when you only focus on making purchases.
Make an effort to include a wide range of content types, including forms and helpful, entertaining, and brand-promoting content.
Just make sure that each piece of content reflects your brand’s voice and tone, serves your goals, and provides value to your audience.
- Create a Social Media Content Calendar
As mentioned, consistency is extremely important when it comes to social media marketing. You want to keep your audience engaged, which requires a steady stream of valuable content.
To do this, you need to create a content calendar that clearly outlines when and where you’ll post.
In the beginning, you may want to experiment with posting times and frequency to find what works best for your brand and audience. Ideally, you want to find a balance between posting too much (and annoying your audience) and posting too little (and forgetting about you).
Your goal is to grab the attention of as many people as possible and generate as much engagement as possible, this will vary depending on a number of factors, including your business, your audience, the time of year, different holidays, etc.
The great thing about a content calendar is that it will keep you organized and allow you to think ahead. With your calendar, you can plan for major events, holidays, and trends.
Is there a particular holiday that’s particularly relevant to your brand and audience? Start planning your content at least a few weeks in advance, so you’re ready to go.
- Track Your Performance
At this point, you should have started posting content on social media and it’s time to start analyzing your performance.
You may learn about what’s effective and begin identifying patterns through looking at the data you collect.
This is just another endless stage, but you should constantly assess how well your social media material is performing and make improvements in response to your findings.
Most social media platforms offer some analytics for business accounts, where you can view metrics like reach, impressions, engagement rate, click-through rates, and more. The metrics you focus on will depend on your goals and the KPIs you’ve set for yourself.
For example, if you’re looking to increase brand awareness, you’ll want to look at the number of impressions your posts are getting. If your goal is to increase engagement, you’ll want to track likes, comments, and shares. Or, if you’re using paid advertising, you might want to monitor your cost per click.
Examine the parallels between your most and least popular posts. This can help you determine what social media material should highlight and what kind to rely on.
Also, don’t forget to read (and respond to!) comments. Your audience’s comments can be extremely helpful and will help you understand the experience around what you’re posting.
- Always Improve Your Strategy
Social media is constantly evolving, and your marketing strategy should be too.
The field of social media marketing is not one-size-fits-all. Learning what works and how to be successful takes time.
But one thing is for sure: you won’t succeed by playing it safe and sticking to a static strategy.
Even after you feel confident that your content is on-brand and getting the right results for you, your strategy will still require regular changing based on changing preferences, trends, and audience needs.
Continue to look at your performance insights to find what’s working best, and adjust your content as needed.
Pay attention to the social platforms and what your competitors are doing.
The goal is to always be looking for new ways to maximize the impact of your social media presence.
While this is a never-ending task, over time you’ll gain a sense of what you’re doing, which will help you achieve more consistent results.
Finally, The world of social media marketing can feel stressful, and it’s easy to become bored or give up.
But persevere.
A well-thought-out social media marketing plan can substantially boost sales and expand your company’s reach, and the benefits are well worth the expense.
Remember to step back regularly and look at the bigger picture. Focus on creating valuable, engaging content that aligns with your brand goals.
In addition, having the courage to take risks, put money down, and accept the unknown. all with the goal of creating real relationships with your audience and promoting the growth of your company.
Your social media marketing plan could help you benefit your business by requiring you to put in the effort, be open-minded, and take calculated risks.
