7 Things You Need in Every Social Media Marketing Strategy

Writing down goals for yourself and your business can be both motivating and reassuring seeing step by step what needs to be done in order to achieve them. When you give yourself a guide, it's easy to see exactly what needs to be done daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly to get there. This same practice should also be applied to your social media marketing strategy.

For many, social media is a huge part of our business, which is why a social strategy should be high on our to-do list. It's easy to get overwhelmed by all things you could or should be doing on social media this year. Instead, carve a few hours out of your workday to sit down at your laptop, open up Powerpoint, and put together a strategy based on what makes the most sense for you and your business goals using this guide.

1. Competitor Analysis

It's important to analyze your competitors or accounts you admire to see what strategies they have in place and what seems to be working and what isn't. Take detailed notes about similarities between their top-performing posts, trends in the hashtags they're using, how often they're posting, what networks they are active on, and any other relevant things that may be contributing to their social media success.

2. Analyze Your Own Strategies

Approach your accounts similar to how you did your competitors. How do you compare? What seems to be working for them that you aren't doing? Are some things working for them that aren't for you, why do you think that is? What are you doing or could you be doing to differentiate yourself from your competitors? These are all questions to ask yourself as you navigate this section of your social strategy.

3. Audience Analysis

Determine who your target audience is in as much detail as possible and who your current audience is. We encourage you to go as far as randomly selecting people from your followers list and analyzing their profiles. What are they posting? What are their hobbies and interests? Where do they live? What accounts are they following? How old are they? Are your followers mostly female or male? Are they married? Do they have kids?

It's important to understand that these are real people behind these accounts. Having a deep understanding of who you're talking to is the key to any good social media marketing strategy. Brands that focus on too broad of an audience often have difficulty reaching their goals, especially on social media. If you have multiple target audiences, you may choose to have a very different strategy on each network based on the audience that is more active on that network.

4. Campaigns

Create a list of all upcoming Holidays and National Days related to your brand that you may want to center a campaign around or you want to create a post around. Follow this with campaign ideas and goals for those campaigns. For example, you may want to run a Valentine's special for a week leading up to Valentine's Day. Your goal for this campaign would be to increase sales, therefore you're going to want clear Call to Action's, conversion-focused captions, and to set goals based on reach, link clicks, landing page views, and, finally, conversions. Next, you'll want to think of creative brand-related content you'll need in order to help you achieve those goals. Include all of these details for each campaign.

5. Content Strategy

Based on the information you've discovered through steps 1-4 you should have a good idea of the type of content you'll be creating for each social media network. Summarize the content you'll need and how you'll create it within this section of your social media marketing strategy. Plan and put together shot lists and mood boards for yourself and for any photographers, videographers, and/or graphic designers you will be working with.

Complete this section by putting together a content calendar summarizing this strategy. For example, note that you want to post an Instagram Reel every Wednesday, a product flatlay every Thursday, Valentine's campaign Feb 8-14, and anything else you can reference as you schedule out your content week-to-week or month-to-month.

6. Engagement Strategy

Another important element of a good strategy is the engagement piece. In this section, you'll want to include hashtags, locations, keywords, job titles, and other tactics you'll use to reach and engage with your target audience. Then summarize how you will execute this engagement strategy per social media network. For example, you might include a list of groups to join on Facebook and spend 30 minutes a week engaging with people in those groups. Or, you may go down the list of hashtags you've included and engage with your target audience 15 min per day using those hashtags on Instagram and Twitter.

7. Goals

You can't call it a strategy without goals! To conclude your social media marketing strategy, you'll want to determine the KPI's (key performance indicators) that make the most sense for your brand and set realistic goals based on what you've outlined in the slides above. If your calculating month-to-month be sure to consider campaigns you plan to run that month and other trends, for example, January might be a consistently slower month for you so goals that month should differ from the following months.

We hope you find this guide useful in creating your own social media marketing strategies! We encourage you to create quarterly or 6-month strategies versus monthly or yearly. A lot can change on social media when it comes to new features, trends, or things you've uncovered through A/B testing. A strategy is meant to be referenced frequently and adjusted as needed. It also acts as a blueprint to help you stay focused so you can start reaching those marketing goals!

If you need help getting started on a social media marketing strategy for your brand or simply don't have the time to do it yourself, we offer customized social media strategies to help you reach your goals. CLICK HERE to let us know you're interested in a customized strategy for your business and we'll get back to you with more details.