There is no doubt you would have heard this quote before “By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.” Thank you for your wisdom Benjamin Franklin!
I am sure you would agree this rings true when it comes to running a business as well as your marketing campaigns.
Social media is an important part of the marketing mix for many businesses to raise brand awareness, generate leads and website traffic, acquire customers and sales, yet many don’t have a documented plan on what they want to achieve, how they are going to get there, or how they will track their success.
To be truly successful with your social media marketing, and stand out from the crowd you need a strong strategy so you are clear on the expectations, content and timelines you are trying to deliver.
The full social media strategy has many elements but these are the top 4 that we want to focus on which we believe are imperative to your social media success:
- Clear goals and KPIs
- Comprehensive ‘Ideal Customer’ Avatars
- Content Pillars
- Budget & Resources
Now let’s take a more in-depth look at each of them…
1. Clear Goals and KPIs
To have what it takes to commit to a social media strategy, you first must ask…Why do you want your business to be on social media? Goals will help to identify the purpose of social media for your brand and will help to set clear benchmarks for results.
When putting together your social media goals and key performance indicators (KPIs) or metrics take into account your overall business goals to ensure they align.
You might want to classify your social media goals into different categories like raise brand awareness, generate leads and website traffic, acquire customers and sales.
But ensure they are SMART goals. Specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and timely. Having key performance metrics in your goals will keep you accountable and help you track your progress and results. Your key metrics might include followers, likes, engagement rate, website visits, LEADS and SALES.
Now let’s put that into practice. Say one of your business goals for the next quarter is to generate 60 sales of your product. The social media goal to support this might be to post product specific content that will drive 2,000 visits or more per month to your website’s product page to entice customers to purchase. Key metric for this goal is website visits.
In your weekly or monthly reporting you can track these key metrics to ensure you are meeting your social media goals.
2. Comprehensive ‘Ideal Customer’ Avatars
The second key element in the social media strategy is understanding your audience. You brand’s buyer persona information will provide the details about the ideal customer you want to target with your social media efforts.
A customer avatar is a detailed description of your ideal customer. It is not broken into groups like other target market profiling. The avatar focuses on one person (give them a name) and goes into greater detail about their:
- demographics (age, relationship status, education, employment and income level);
- psychographics (personality, online behaviours, lifestyle, interests, attitudes/beliefs); and
- pain points (in relation to using your type of product or service).
To put this into practice, if you are promoting a yoga studio, your primary ideal customer might be Tania who is female, 28 years old in a de facto relationship, she’s a middle class income earner, is renting in an affluent area and is tertiary educated.
Examples of Tania’s psychographics could be: places a huge importance on work-life balance and health and wellbeing, loves group training classes, meditates daily etc. Her pain points might be: finding a studio that is within walking distance to home, a studio that has enough time slots to fit her schedule etc.
3. Content Pillars
Content pillars are types of content your business should be posting across your social media channels. Content pillars can also be broken down into various topics and formats.
While content pillars, topics and formats might change overtime depending on your business and social media goals, it’s always important to guide your communication tone and voice using your brand values.
To put this into practice, we could use our agency as an example. Some of Victor & Flo’s content pillars are education, client appreciation and wins (case studies), promotional, brand values, FAQs and BTS (behind the scenes of our business).
These pillars are then broken down into a list of content topics to give us inspiration when creating our content. For example under ‘Education’ content pillar the list of the content topics are: PPC, Social Media, Email Marketing, Digital Marketing Strategy, and SEO.
Then the type of formats we would use to communicate these topics would be using: social media posts, Insta and Facebook stories, lead magnets, blog posts and video.
4. Budget & Resources
Whether you are coordinating your social media marketing in-house or outsourcing this service, it costs time and money, so preparing your budget and resources are key in executing your strategy successfully.
When it comes to the budget if you are doing social media marketing in-house these are the sort of things you would need to allocate funds towards:
- staff member’s time to do content creation, curation, engagement and reporting;
- advertising budget to help you reach your goals;
- creative content production like video or professional photography; and
- a subscription to a social media scheduling and posting platform (such as Hootsuite or Sprout Social) which eliminates the need for you to manually do it across each channel.
Resources that are imperative in executing your strategy in-house and will save you a lot of time are tools such as:
- weekly posting schedule so you know the days and times to post on each channel;
- content media schedule to plan and organise your content in advance; and
- a social media scheduling/posting platform as mentioned above.
If you are outsourcing most of your social media marketing, you will have to consider paying for things such as:
- strategy development,
- ongoing monthly fee for social media management which generally includes content creation, curation, engagement and reporting; and
- advertising funds if you are running campaigns as part of your strategy.
And there you have it! Four key elements of a social media strategy that are imperative in setting your brand up for success.
If you are still unsure on how to plan or execute any of these elements, we are always happy to go on a journey to educate, and help you with all your digital marketing needs. We are only a phone call or an email away. Let’s chat.