Social media can skyrocket any brand’s success. In order to make this happen, you’ll need to have a rock-solid social media content strategy.
Successful social media marketing is not just about posting randomly across different channels. Instead, it’s about identifying goals, understanding the opportunities available on each channel, and strategically publishing content that grows your business.
Take the right steps in crafting your social media content strategy, and any brand can develop a powerful social media presence that actually contributes to business growth.
In this guide, we’ll cover some of the most important steps and tactics you need to take when developing your social media strategy.
- Set Goals
- Know Your Audience
- Use the Right Platforms
- Plan Your Social Content
- Experiment and be Flexible
- Know When to Post
- Create a Content Calendar
- Promote and Distribute Content
- Measure Your Content’s Performance
1. Set Goals
The first essential step in creating any social media content strategy is to set clear goals.
What do you want to achieve with social media?
Some common goals include:
- Increasing brand awareness
- Boosting sales or lead generation
- Increasing community engagement
- Growing your brand’s audience
- Using social media to drive more traffic to your website
The goals you set need to align with your overall marketing goals, your business objectives, as well as your target audience and their journey.
Try to make these goals as actionable and specific as possible. This way, each social media post you create will have some thought behind it, driving an overall purpose.
The last thing you want is to just dive onto social media and start blindly posting without having a clear idea of what you want to achieve. This is a major social media mistake that far too many businesses make.
When establishing goals for your social media marketing strategy, make sure that they are aligned with measurable KPIs. This will help you evaluate your social media performance.
For example, some goals and KPIs could include:
- Increase brand awareness: Number of followers, reach, likes, and shares
- Boosting sales: Number of sales. You can measure your customer paths from social media and look into your sales data to see which channels are driving sales. You can also try to sell directly from social media.
These are just two examples, but always make sure you understand how you will be able to measure and track your goal.
2. Know Your Audience
Any social media content strategy is only going to be effective if you have a clear understanding of your audience.
There is endless social media content out there, so if you don’t address your audience’s interests and desires, they will soon scroll past it – or not even discover it at all.
Creating social media content for your audience involves three steps:
- Understand your target audience by creating a detailed buyer persona
- Understand what audience you’re targeting on each social media platform
- Understand what type of content your audience wants to see on each specific platform
Let’s break this down…
First, you have to create a detailed buyer persona of your ideal target audience. This is essential for any solid content marketing strategy. The more detailed you get into your buyer persona, the better.
Establish things like the target audience demographics, interests, problems, and pain points. Understand the kind of questions they want to be answered and under what circumstances they would discover your brand during the customer journey.
Having all of this information available will help you create more meaningful content that matches your target audience’s interests.
Next, know what audience you’re targeting on each platform. You might have a very broad target audience, such as “small business owners” or “hungry office workers in downtown Vancouver.” In this case, your audience might span various demographics, although their interests and pain points remain the same.
Different social media platforms have different audiences. For example, TikTok is great for targeting a younger audience, while Facebook is better for an older audience. If you can break down your broad target audience into segments, understand which segment you will try to target on which channel.
Sure, you can always try to target your broad audience. However, the more specific you get, the more highly targeted your social media content strategy can become.
The third step is knowing what type of content your audience wants to see on each platform. We’ll get into more detail on this below, but the basic idea is that different types of content thrive on different platforms. Maybe the audience segment you’re targeting on TikTok will have totally different interests from the same audience you’re targeting on Facebook.
This is because people might join TikTok to laugh at something silly while they log into Facebook to access more useful information.
The more you understand your audience across your different channels, the more you can optimize your social media content strategy.
3. Use the Right Platforms
Your social media content strategy is only going to be as effective as the channels you use.
Developing a strong social media presence doesn’t necessarily mean you need to be on every channel; it just means you need to be on the right channels and use them effectively.
The best way forward with social media marketing is to choose the channels that are most valuable to your brand and focus on those. As your brand grows, you can always scale up your social media efforts with new channels. However, focusing on too many channels straight off the bat can result in spreading yourself too thin.
This can affect the quality of your content, which means no channel achieves its full potential.
Choosing the right social media channels should be based on three things:
- What channel is your audience most active on?
- What channel best aligns with your business objectives and goals?
- What are your strengths?
Social media marketing, like any form of inbound marketing, is all about meeting your customers where they are. There’s no point in spending hours posting on Pinterest if your customers don’t use the platform. So, go back to your buyer persona and try to align this with the most relevant social media sites.
Next, understand what platforms align with your business objectives. If you’re a B2B selling finance software, you probably won’t have huge success on TikTok. This is because your goal will be to develop trust with key business decision-makers – not to entertain people with funny dances.
If you’re a B2C (like this sponge company below) and want to build an audience and spread positive brand awareness, TikTok can be a great platform.
Finally, focus on your strengths. Maybe you have a funny personality and make hilarious Reels and TikToks. Maybe not. Whatever the case, consider focusing on channels that let you create the kind of content you’re best at.
At the end of the day, the best social media channel is the one you can create the most valuable content on.
4. Plan Your Social Content
You’ve done all the important background work; the next step is to actually plan your social media posts. This will involve aligning your social media content with:
- Your social media marketing strategy goals
- Your audience’s interests
- What does best on certain channels
A great way to start is by doing an audit of your current social media content. Look at your analytics to see what posts in the past have done the best and which posts have performed the worst. This will reveal an idea of what your audience is most interested in.
Next, look at your competitors. See what content of theirs is getting the most engagement and which content isn’t doing well. This can provide some useful insights for your own social media content strategy.
Whatever type of content or goals you choose to focus on, ensure that your social media strategy always follows the same consistent voice.
Social media is a great way to connect your brand directly to your audience. This means your brand on social media needs to have a clear voice and personality – something that should shine through in each post you do.
Maintaining a consistent brand identity in your social media content will help you achieve more consistent results from this content.
Planning out your social media content is an ongoing task. You can’t expect to get amazing results straight away, but you can continually improve your performance based on past results and by learning from previous posts.
This brings us to our next point…
5. Experiment and Be Flexible
You came here to develop a solid social media content strategy, and we’re telling you to experiment. Huh?
Here’s the thing – social media moves at a fast pace. It’s always changing, new trends are coming and going, and there’s loads of competition. This means your brand has to try to be as unique and authentic as possible in order to stand out from the rest.
Your social media content has a relatively short lifespan, so there’s no major risk if you publish a post that doesn’t perform well. The greater risk is sticking with the same boring strategy that isn’t generating results.
So, always be open to trying new ideas and new features, jumping onto new trends, and taking different angles with your social media content. The more you experiment, the more insights you’ll gain into what works and what doesn’t.
Being flexible is also a critical part of your social media strategy. While you can carefully plan out your content, it’s also important that you respond to any sudden events or changes in the world. If something big happens in the world, try to hop onto the social media trend straight away. This can help you gain a lot of topical exposure.
6. Know When to Post
An important element of any social media marketing strategy is knowing when to post. You might have great content, but you need to post it at the right time in order for it to have the best possible impact.
Let’s say you create a beautiful social media post and publish it while 90% of your audience is asleep. The post will get minimal engagement, which means social media algorithms will limit its reach. Fewer people will see your post, and it will soon disappear at the darkest depths of your audience’s social media feeds.
Post your content when your audience is most active, and you can expect maximum engagement straight away. This is important for helping your posts go viral.
To find the best time to post, go to your analytics and see where your audience is located. You should also be able to see what times they’re most active on the platform. For a more detailed guide on how to do this, check out the best times to post on TikTok and the best times to post on Instagram.
7. Create a Content Calendar
Your social media content strategy revolves around your content calendar.
This is where you plan and schedule your social media content. It’s the backbone of any well-organized social media marketing strategy.
Planning out your content calendar has many advantages.
First, it keeps you organized and ensures you always have a steady flow of social media content to post. When you start each day, you’ll know exactly what content you will post and when it will be scheduled.
A content calendar also ensures you create the right content for important dates. If there are any events or special occasions coming up, you can plan your content in advance to make the most of them.
While every social media content strategy will differ, it’s important that you post frequently and consistently. A content calendar helps with both of these.
Despite what many people may say, you don’t have to post on social media every day. Posting roughly three times per week is enough to create an impact. However, the important thing is to maintain consistency.
You can easily create a social media content calendar in a spreadsheet, where you map out a month’s worth of content. This should include your media (image or video), caption, hashtags, and the general aim of each post.
Of course, you can also use social media scheduling tools to schedule this content to be posted at the right time.
8. Promote and Distribute Content
Actually posting content on your channels is only a small part of your social media strategy. Once you post content, you want to get as many people as possible to see this content. This is where promotion and distribution are so important.
Find ways to actively distribute your content and send more people to your social media pages. This could include adding social media icons or CTAs in your email newsletters, on your blog, or on any other channels you promote your business. You can also repurpose your social media content on different channels to help you drive a greater impact from it.
One incredibly valuable area of content distribution and promotion is social proof. Don’t ever forget the “social” element of social media. If you want to increase the reach of your posts, try to increase engagement on them. The more people actively engage with your content, the more people will see it.
You could end social media posts asking a question, ensure you respond to all commenters to get conversations going, or run a giveaway that encourages users to engage.
Another important strategy is to look into partnerships with other brands and influencers. Influencer marketing is massive, and it can give your social media strategy a serious boost.
By collaborating with other brands on social media platforms, you increase brand awareness and visibility in a big way. This can drive more people to your social media pages and get more people engaging with your content.
Of course, boosting posts on social media is another way to promote your content – as long as you have the budget for it. Luckily, you can be very specific about how you target your audience on social media channels.
9. Measure Your Content’s Performance
Effective social media management is not just about creating and posting content – it’s also about keeping a sharp eye on the right metrics.
This goes back to the initial goals you set out for your social media content. Use the KPIs you already established and monitor them to track your content strategy’s success.
All social media platforms have their own analytics dashboards. You should start a business account to access these.
So, make sure you don’t just post and forget. Consistently review your strategy and measure your KPIs. See what worked, what didn’t work, and where opportunities lie. This will help you consistently improve your social media content strategy.
Wrapping Up
Social media success isn’t random. If you want to achieve great results on any social media network, then you need to take a strategic approach. Developing the right content strategy is vital for consistently growing your channels and using them to boost your business objectives.
The social media strategy template above covers some essential tactics and steps you need to follow when getting started with social media. Whether you’re starting a new business or optimizing your current strategy, these steps should help you make the best possible impact.
Looking for more social media inspiration? Check out our helpful guides below.
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