Without a social media strategy, your brand is like a car without a map (not even GoogleMaps). Your social media strategy is essentially your game plan when it comes to social media marketing. It denotes exactly why you’re doing what you’re doing, what you’re going to execute, and how you’ll make it all happen.
Strategy gives your marketing cohesiveness and direction. It’ll help you and your team stay on track towards your goals, or adjust your way back on track if you fall off course.
Here are the 8 steps to building your own social media strategy. Remember to be specific yet concise so that your plan is actionable and measurable.
8 Steps to Building Your Own Social Media Strategy
1. Define your goals
What are your goals and objectives for the upcoming 3 months, 6 months, or year? Do you want to boost sales, build brand awareness, or increase email subscribers? Your goals will act as your target throughout your strategy. Throughout each stage, you’ll circle back to your goals to ensure everything is aligned and moving in the right direction. So, make sure your goals are right for your brand right now, since they’ll act as the foundation for your social media strategy.
2. Understand your audience
Do you know everything you could possibly know about your target audience? What are their demographics (location, age/generation, education, gender, etc.) and psychographics (behaviors, hobbies, preferences, etc.)? What can the unique qualities about your audience tell you about how you want to market to them? For example, certain social media platforms, types of content, and tone are more widely used by certain generations. Create buyer-personas, research-based representations of potential customers.
Here’s your chance to do some serious social media stalking (for research purposes, of course). Seeing what and how your competitor brands are marketing their products and services can help show you what you want to be doing better (or, what you do not want to be doing).
4. Do a social media audit
A social media audit is a SWOT evaluation of your brand’s current social media presence. SWOT includes an assessment of Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats (competition). Take a close look at your content, performance metrics, engagement and interaction, consistency, branding, follower growth, and ROI.
5. Find inspiration
When it comes to social media, we’re fans of the rule of thirds: ⅓ of your content should share ideas about your industry, ⅓ should promote your business (and contribute to sales), and ⅓ should feature personal interactions with your audience). For brainstorming and outlining purposes, we like to employ content pillars, which are themes that your brand frequently discusses on social media. Use ChatGPT to help you come up with content ideas, captions, calls to action, and more.
6. Create a content calendar
We are masters of the content calendar. It’s the most effective and efficient way to plan out your weekly and monthly content (not only visuals but captions, hashtags, CTAs, and more). You can make your own content calendar in Excel or Google Sheets. But the best way to set up your content calendar—in our humble opinion—is to join our Content Calendar Club, an exclusive subscription service that delivers you new content concepts, prompts, and inspo every two weeks.
7. Create content
Now’s the time to get creative! Platforms like Photoshop and Canva have so many tools for creating aesthetic infographics, gifs, and carousels. But this step can take a lot of time and energy. Consider outsourcing your content creation to an independent contractor or digital agency like Media Á La Carte. Here are 5 questions to ask before outsourcing your social media.
8. Track performance and adjust game plan
Devising a social media strategy is not a one-and-done process. It’s continual and ever-evolving. Use additional social media audits and assessment of your social media analytics to measure your current strategy’s success and to make adjustments for the future. Here’s how to make sense of social media analytics. Do you have a strong call-to-action (CTA) on your posts? Are you putting out the right kinds of content on the right platforms? Do you really know your target audience? Keep asking questions to dive deeper into your strategic plan.
Coming up with a strong social media strategy is critical to successful branding. Need a guide? Book a discovery call with Media Á La Carte.
