Although we find ourselves a few months into 2021, it’s never too late to either refresh your current social media strategy or start from the ground up and develop a completely new strategy based on your business objectives for the year. With so many businesses moving online this past year, it’s even more critical for small businesses and organizations to have a solid social strategy to attract and engage audiences. If you’re looking to up your social media game this year, follow our steps for success:
1. Identify your goals
Before creating your social media strategy, you’ll want to ask yourself these four questions:
Who is your target audience?
Your target audience will consist of your ideal customers – those who will help your company grow. Some examples of defining factors are age range, gender, geographic location, hobbies and interests. Identifying your audience demographics will help you select the most effective social media platforms to market your company. For example, if you’re targeting professionals interested in expanding their job skills, LinkedIn would be a natural choice. If you’re marketing a product to people within an 18 to 35-year age range, Twitter or Instagram would be your ideal social media platforms. Looking to make an impression with GenZ then TikTok or YouTube might be the right fit.
What are your business and social media goals?
Establish clear and concise goals for your social media efforts. Are you looking to grow your followers in hopes of generating new leads? Expand your email list? Drive traffic to your website? Promote your company or executives as thought leaders? Determining your goals up front will help you define your mission and ensure overall success on social media.
How will your brand personality shine through on social media?
Next, you’ll need to decide how your company’s brand personality will translate on social media. A great way to determine your company’s personality is to imagine it as a person and think about a few key phrases that describe it. Are you sophisticated? Trustworthy? Playful? Then, think about what your company’s relationship with your audience and how it compares and stands out versus other companies with similar personalities. Identifying those key points will allow you to cultivate a specific voice and tone in your social media marketing. And at the end of the day, you want to be authentic in how you engage with users and being true to your company’s personality is crucial part of that. Great social media content gives your followers an immediate sense of who you are and why they would want to engage with you.
Who will oversee the social channels?
Whether you, someone else on your team, or an outside agency is managing your social media channels, it’s essential to designate one person to oversee the channels. That person can delegate tasks such as content curation or scheduling posts. Ultimately, whoever oversees the social media efforts should be able to create and carry out a cohesive strategy across all channels.
2. Content creation
Once you have asked and answered those four questions, you will need to determine what kind of content you want to create, curate, and post on your social media channels. If you are unfamiliar with the different types of content, here are some that typically perform well on different social media platforms:
Original content:
Do you have any thoughts, musings, or insights that no one has shared before? Are you an expert in your field and want to share digestible nuggets of information in an aesthetically pleasing way? Original content may be the way to go. The most common examples of this type of content are blog posts, social graphics, or videos. Here are some ideas to get you started:
Third-party content:
This type of content comes from an outside source and provides value to your audience. When curating third-party content, you want to make sure you are finding reputable sources, which may vary by industry. We have found that sources, like Forbes, Entrepreneur, and Sprout Social are great for finding digital marketing content.
Evergreen content:
The best type of content you can either create or curate for your social media strategy is evergreen content. Evergreen content is search-optimized content that stays relevant long past its publication date. As the name implies, the content will stay fresh for your readers over the span of months, or even years. This type of content can improve your search engine rankings, drive prospects to your sales funnel, and continually drive traffic to you website.
Not sure what evergreen content should look like? Check out our four favorite types of evergreen content that can help boost your SEO:
https://doubleshotcreative.com/blog/4-types-of-evergreen-content-to-boost-your-seo/
3. Scheduling your posts
Knowing when to post on every social platform is an important way to stay a step ahead and make sense of the content overload that seems to be occurring on many social media channels. That being said, figuring out the best time to post on social media can be a stressful and tedious task. Fortunately, there are many resources that have collected data over the years to determine when the best times to post on social media are. As for scheduling tools, don’t fret! At DoubleShot creative, we’ve found these tools to be the best for scheduling and finding optimal posting times.
4. Staying engaged
Once you have curated your content and scheduled them to go out at the most optimal times, you may think that the work is done. One of the most crucial parts of having a strong social media strategy is engagement. Engagement can look like responding to comments, retweeting or sharing your audience’s content, or interacting with accounts similar to yours. Putting your focus into building your social media engagement will help your company benefit from a better marketing reach, greater brand awareness, and improved ROI.
5. Metrics & analytics
This aspect may be the most overlooked, but it is also the most important part of building your social media strategy. As part of your goal setting make sure to identify your key metrics and KPIs that will help you know if you are moving the needle—follower growth, impressions, engagement rate etc. Tracking metrics allows you to quantify the effects of making a change to your strategy, which is crucial to the process of improving and optimizing online marketing campaigns. The biggest benefit of utilizing proper analytics is being able to identify strengths and weaknesses, implementing them into improving your strategy
The biggest benefit of utilizing proper analytics is being able to identify strengths and weaknesses.
6. SEO
When you are searching for a dentist or hair salon, you are more likely to click on the top results, which is where SEO comes into play. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, which is the process of improving the quality and quantity of website traffic to a website or web page from search engines. SEO targets unpaid traffic rather than direct traffic or paid traffic. Some ways to improve your SEO can be using quality content created specifically for your intended user to increase site traffic, which improves your site’s authority and relevance. Identify and target a specific keyword phrase for each page on your website. Regularly updated content is viewed as one of the best indicators of a site’s relevancy. For blog posts and emails, using descriptive likes by linking keywords in the text is another great way to improve SEO.
It can be difficult to find your bearings as you begin your social media journey, however, once you’ve mastered all these skills, you will be unstoppable. The beauty of social media marketing is no one right way to do it – every brand is different and unique; you just have to find the best strategy for you.
