Your brand’s social media channels serve the purpose of being a branding, communications and marketing tool. It has immense potential to directly impact the masses and therefore, your business. Creating a social media strategy will allow you to achieve specific goals, whether conversion, community building or brand awareness.
1. Define Objectives for Your Social Media Strategy
For starters, begin by defining your objectives and goals for being present on social media. Why does your brand want to be on social media? Are there any specific commercial or branding objectives set out? The clearer your goals are, the better. Here are a few examples:
- To increase brand awareness, through content that shares details about your product history
- To generate traffic to your website, through promotional content that excites
The voices you know, the story you don’t.
The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart premieres December 12 on @hbomax and available internationally in select cinemas and on digital download #BeeGeesHBO pic.twitter.com/Qx0zgt2Xzo
— HBO Documentaries (@HBODocs) November 19, 2020
- To engage with consumers and build an online community, through relatable and engaging content
Once realistic key objectives and goals are defined, we need to look into measuring key metrics.
2. Define Key Metrics & Reporting Structure
To prove that your social media strategy works for your brand, results need to be evaluated regularly.
If you’ve set out conversion as a key objective on social, be sure to add in UTM codes into URLs to track all revenue derived from your organic or paid ads. Some metrics to look at may include cost per click (CPC), click through rate (CTR) and cost per 100 impressions (CPM).
If your priority is to drive brand awareness, you should be measuring your reach, impressions and follower growth.
Depending on your goals, put together a key list of metrics. Additionally, create a reporting structure that analyses content that works for your brand. Whether weekly, bi-weekly or monthly, social channels should regularly be analysed for improvement.
3. Channel Strategy
Now that you’ve set your social goals, your brand needs to narrow down social channels to be present on.
Key questions to answer that would help in this process includes:
- Who is your target audience?
- What channels are they most active on?
- Which days and at what times of the day do scroll through social media?
Many brands approach social media with the idea that the more platforms they are on, the greater the reach. While this concept may not be wrong, a more targetted approach will serve you well.
For example, a brand selling joint supplements for arthritis can be present on TikTok to share content in an informative and engaging manner. While the brand may generate some reach, the reality is that conversions would be much lower because your target market is an older consumer base.
Your channel strategy should also take into consideration the resources (human and financial) that you have to manage multiple channels.
4. Content Strategy
Similar to your Channel strategy, your Content strategy is heavily dependant on your target market. Here’s an in-depth breakdown of elements to consider when building a content strategy that is unique to your brand.
Within your social media strategy, executing social content will be a continuous process. Take into consideration the resources required for it, possibly through a digital marketing agency or an additional headcount.
5. Paid Social Media Advertising
Implementing a paid social component to your social media strategy will ensure that the right eyeballs land on your content. With the sheer amount of content floating around the web these days, a targeted approach allows your brand to cut through the noise.
Plan, execute, analyse and tweak your plan where necessary. With all strategies, leave room for change and improvement. And as we all know, social platforms are notorious for their change in algorithms. So, be nimble as your strategy set for this year may not work for 2022.
