5 top tips for rethinking your social strategy

Summary:

Many businesses are facing the same dilemma when it comes to their social media marketing; the objectives which once provided focus and direction have been replaced by untimely content, driven by which internal stakeholder shouts loudest:

“This promotion isn’t getting results. We need the message on social, and quickly”

“Can you set up that new social channel? I’ve heard it’s great and gets results”

“We’ve only added 3 followers this month? Next month we need 100!” 

Before you know it, social channels become a dumping ground for irrelevant promotional content with no relevance to the target audience, and businesses alienate the very people they’ve spent a considerable amount of time targeting and nurturing.

Based on a proven approach, this article offers five key considerations for building your business’ social media marketing strategy and staying focused while others are nudging you off course.

Tip 1 – Be a business enabler

Many brands do not have a clear strategy when it comes to social media marketing and businesses often manage their social activity in complete isolation.

Yet, handled right, it can be an essential contributor to success. By aligning it to wider business and marketing objectives, social media becomes a critical pillar in any marketing plan.

Before implementing any activity or change in approach, make sure there is a clear strategy in place for exactly how social media will contribute to your business growth. This will not only help drive meaningful, measurable actions from the outset, but it will give your social media marketing the focus and recognition it deserves. 

Tip 2 – Be ready for everything

Once you’re confident that your social media actions align with wider marketing and business objectives, you still want to avoid a ‘spray and pray’ approach. Ask yourself the following questions to clarify your audience and engagement tactics before starting any activity:

• Do we have sufficient insight to understand what our target audience needs or will need? 
• How can this develop into a concise and managed content calendar that’s fully supported? How much budget can be allocated to amplify the most valuable or engaging content through paid activity?
• How are we going to measure success, and what does success look like? Make sure measurement is SMART
• How are we going to resist internal pressure to have instant, vanity-driven results? Is there senior management support?
• When does the analytical review take place? Be sure to put milestones in place and review activity, engagement, evolving audience profile, and where there are new opportunities, both from existing channels and an expanded ecosystem

This planning process will help your activity get off to the best possible start and you can control its evolution.

However, content development remains the single biggest contributing factor to how successful social media marketing can be. Applying an insight driven marketing approach will ensure that the value proposition is evident across all relevant content and, as you already know what your persona’s needs are, the content development cycles become highly efficient and effective.

As social media marketing often has no defined home within a business’ hierarchy, it’s often left to marketing executives or managers to oversee this activity. Before allocating ownership, part of your preparation should be to detail just how much value it will provide to the business and the appropriate resources social media marketing requires.

Tip 3 – Be advocates for individuality; use your internal influencers

We all know people are the most valuable asset of any business. The key is to identify those individuals who can add real value to the different aspects of social media marketing.

There are several key considerations when utilising employees:

• Who has a following and profile that can contribute to the success of your social media marketing objectives? 
• Do their followers align with the target personas?
• Who can best amplify the messages?
• Which profiles can be a pillar of activity over the long-term (12-24 months)?

Give the individual employee the autonomy to amplify the business message and their personality across LinkedIn groups, trending relevant subject matters on Twitter, or contribute to Reddit conversations. If this process is well managed, you will see value on both an individual and collective level.

People still buy from people, not businesses. And social media marketing can harness this to great effect. By having an opinion, by being a specialist on a subject matter, and by being personable across social media, individuals can really boost a business’ efforts and expand message reach beyond base expectations.

Make sure that your business taps into the potential of your social media advocates and uses it to influence new customer opportunities.

Tip 4 – Be open to failure

You’ve probably noticed that your LinkedIn feed is full of success stories, with posts from people who are proud of their achievements. Yet behind every success has been multiple failures. Some are major, some less so, but success comes from learning what went wrong and why.

Even with all of your business alignment and early planning, always be prepared for your social media marketing to be a bumpy ride. Expect one or all of the following:

• The target audience is not engaging with the content in the numbers you wanted or across the channels you had anticipated
• The plans for user generated content (UGC) have not produced the required results, leading to a content mix that isn’t deep or varied enough
• Your business is spending a disproportionate amount of time on community management, rather than seizing new opportunities
• Negative communications around your business are affecting brand score and value, which in turn, is impacting your social media engagement
• Your business’ response to a follower’s comment has created negative PR

Failures or setbacks are to be expected and each one requires an individual solution. But provided that you gained senior manager buy-in as part of the early planning phase, take this opportunity to embrace the challenge, follow the learning curve and revise your approach to stay on track with the wider business and marketing objectives.

Tip 5 – Be willing to evolve

Just think about the many new opportunities and channels that have appeared on your business’ radar over the last few years, including TikTok (which didn’t exist five years ago), Snapchat and WhatsApp. 

Given this pace of change, it’s vital to assess where your target audience is, how they’re consuming content, and the form that content takes. The insights that inspired your initial direction and strategy should be continually evaluated, based on evidence of engagement and audience profiling.

If your target audience is starting to engage on a new network, make sure your business is there to greet them. But don’t recycle your content. Always develop specific content for the specific needs of your audience on that specific channel.

The 80/20 rule was often applied to social media marketing, with 80% of a business’ content being focused on thought leadership and 20% for brand and promotion. This has also evolved, and is a keen reminder that your social strategy should never remain static or be applied as a ‘one size fits all’ approach.

Always choose the right mix of content for the right audience. Do they react best to user generated content, to exclusive promotions or personalisation? Perhaps to content that empowers them when liaising with their peers? Understanding your audience’s motivations and preferences is critical.

Define your path, but also deploy social listening to monitor ongoing conversations about your brand across social media, and react to changing trends around content consumption. Remember to make sure that your revised strategy still aligns to your business goals.

If you would like to discuss your social media marketing strategy, please connect with me on or call me on +44 (0)1628 569000.