6 Steps to Plan Your Social Media Content for 2023
Prodigy Digital Agency Inc.
We design and execute marketing funnel strategies for knowledge entrepreneurs.
If you’re a knowledge entrepreneur, course creator, or a coach who wants to boost brand awareness for your products and services online, showcase expertise in your field, and engage with your audience, social media is one of the best platforms to use.
In 2016, Social Media Examiner found that almost 90% of marketers claim their social marketing efforts have increased exposure for their brand and 75% say they’ve increased traffic. Meanwhile, 44% of local businesses depend on social media for brand awareness and 41% for revenue growth (eMarketer, 2016).
By consistently showing up on socials and giving value to your target audience, you can use the power of the?propinquity effect?to your advantage.
One way to do this is through social media content creation.
But it takes time, effort, and resources to sustainably create high-quality content that will help you achieve your business goals. You, my friend, need a plan.
A?social media content strategy?is a?dynamic?plan that determines the following:
???? ???Your target audience and how to reach them
???How your social media objectives align to your business goals
???The focus, format, and frequency of your content
While there are countless frameworks out there, it all boils down to a simple 6-step cyclical process:
Research
Do you really have to dance to get engagement on Reels and TikTok?
Should you even be on these platforms in the first place?
While it’s tempting to hop on every trend, be present on every platform, and chase cheat codes for going viral, following random tactics can be a waste of time and resources.
Creating content without a clear strategy is like throwing darts while blindfolded—hitting bullseye would be a miracle.
At Prodigy, we see marketing as the act of creating value for customers to capture value from them in return. And in content creation, we follow the same principle: we start with the customer. Because without knowing who your target market is, you’ll struggle coming up with content that resonate with them or help them solve a problem. The catchphrase “know your customer” sounds basic and vague, though. How do you know and understand your target market?
This is what the first step of social media content planning is all about: Research.
Remember your buyer persona? This is the time to use it!
While buyer personas may come in different formats, ideally they contain these buyer insights that help you create relevant and interesting content for your dream customer. ????
Pain Points
What problem is your dream customer trying to solve? What would trigger them to finally invest in a product or service like yours? What pain are they trying to ease?
Through this information, you can come up with content topics that bring real value to your audience and position you as someone qualified to help them.
Dream Results
What are they hoping to achieve when they work with you? What results are they expecting from your products or services?
When you know their desired future state, you can be strategic in selecting the customer reviews you share, as well as the features and benefits you highlight. You have to make them feel like their goal is achievable—better yet, show that others have achieved it through your offers.
Perceived Barriers
What are their doubts about you, your offer, or your industry in general?
You can address their objections through the stories, results, and stats that you weave into your content. Plus, you can inject little nuggets of assurance at every point of their customer journey so when the time to buy comes, all they’d need is a gentle nudge.
Buyer's Journey
Speaking of, the buyer’s journey is one of the crucial pieces you need when creating content.
It tells you who the decision makers (and influencers) are, how your customer prefers to consume industry content (Do they read newspapers, sign up for newsletters, or listen to podcasts?) and engage (Do they prefer phone calls over emails? Are they social media savvy?).
Mapping out your buyer’s journey helps you focus on the right channels and the best type of content for your target audience.
Deciding Factors
When comparing you with competitors, what factor are your customers considering the most? Is it price, convenience, or prestige?
When you know their non-negotiables, you can simplify your product’s value proposition and spotlight the benefits they care about.
Since buyer personas often start off as fictional profiles of our dream customers crafted based on limited data and loads of assumptions, they're not supposed to be static documents.
We have to continually gather feedback and update it as we get insights from our real clients and advocates.
We can do this through:
Intimidated? Here are 4 ways to start gathering data:
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Pore through customer reviews and mine for golden insights.
What are your ideal customers struggling with? What features or benefits are they looking for? Pick the remarkable and relevant phrases they use and incorporate those statements into your copy.
We recommend reading reviews from your own site or social media pages, your competitors, and online feedback on other products and services in your industry. Keep digging till you find something interesting!
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Think Quora, Reddit, Facebook Groups. Wherever your dream customers are hanging out, go there. Lean in. And listen to the conversations happening.
What are they asking? What are they curious about? How do brands in your industry fit into their life? What are their fears, doubts, or bad experiences with services or products like yours?
Then, answer their questions through the content you create!
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You might be surprised by how willing your loyal customers are to help you with your messaging—and how valuable their inputs are!
By interviewing real customers, you can verify the assumptions you made about them.
Maybe you thought your dream customer is always on the hunt for big discounts—only to find out they don’t mind shelling out more as long as they get what they pay for. So instead of always promoting heavy discounts, you can then focus on highlighting the benefits and features that make your offer look valuable and irresistible.
???Invest in tools
You can also invest in audience research tools like Sparktoro to quickly access important data on your target audience’s online behavior: where they hang out online, the influencers in your industry, the podcasts they tune into, and more. You can also explore Google analytics as well as the native analytics feature of the social media platforms you currently use to spot patterns.
P.S. Here are 5 customer discovery interview mistakes to avoid.
Reference: Revella, A. (2015).?Buyer Personas: How to Gain Insight Into Your Customer's Expectations, Align Your Marketing Strategies, and Win More Business. Hoboken, New Jersey: Wiley.
Plan
Targeting everyone is a?rookie mistake in marketing. So is being everywhere all at once, regardless of available resources.
Yet many entrepreneurs dabble in several social media channels, thinking the way to win is to spread oneself thin or be present in every platform for the sake of it.
Are you making the same mistake?
Let’s do a quick audit. ??
Choosing the right social media channels for your business can be tricky.
With more platforms sprouting on the internet, the audience is split into smaller fragments with varied online behavior.
Some consumers spend hours answering emails, while others scroll their TikTok feed every time they’re bored. Some spend more time on their desktops, while others prefer to get things done on the go through mobile phones. Some enjoy audio content, while others appreciate visuals more.
So with all these complexities in the consumer’s online behavior, how do you produce the most effective content type on the most appropriate platform for the right audience?
Start with WHY.
Not to sound to woo-woo here, but why do you want to show up on socials anyway?
What’s your top goal? Your?why?will influence how you build an effective social media content strategy, from setting up the right platforms to creating content in engaging formats.
领英推荐
Buffer?listed some social media goals that you can set for your business, and here’s a rundown:
You can check their article?here?for specific KPIs you can track for every goal you pick.
Note: We often hear business owners say, “Well I want to achieve ALL of that!” But the truth is, unless you have a huge budget for socials, you’re better off prioritizing one to three goals at a time.
Figure out the HOW.
After the?research phase and goal-setting, you now have the data to help you select the appropriate core and secondary social media channels for your business.
Here are the prompts to guide you in the right direction:
After you ponder these, you will be able to identify the best core channel and supporting platforms for your business.
Work on the WHAT.
What topics should you talk about? What formats should you follow? What channels should you use? Read the next section to find out!
Reference: Digital Marketing Institute,?Strategy & Planning
Create
Here comes the fun (yet sometimes dreaded) part: content creation.
Because this has a rabbit hole of its own, let's focus on the 3 F's of content creation:
Pick Your Focus
Content bucket, content pillar, content category—whatever you call it, let's establish that knowing what to focus on will make content creation (and your life, really) easier.
By identifying your content buckets, you won't waste your audience's time (and yours) with random posts. Instead, you can be intentional. You can create relevant content that attracts your target audience, asserts your expertise in the industry, and ultimately, converts social media followers into customers.
So how do you exactly pick a focus?
Based on the data you gathered during the first step (Research), choose 3 core content buckets. These will be the overarching categories of your content, so make sure these are the main topics that you want your brand to be known for and that your target audience finds interesting.
Let's say your company sells personal knowledge management courses to health and wellness content creators. Here are the content buckets you could have:
Select a Format
Do you enjoy sitting in front of the camera and sharing your ideas? Or do you prefer writing down your thoughts?
While you don't have to stick with only one content format, it's best to discover the type of content you enjoy creating and your target audience prefers consuming.
When you find that sweet spot (let's say it's video), you can then focus your energy and resources on creating high-quality video content that you can repurpose into other formats later on.
Note: If you have the resources and bandwidth to do all three? Go for it! Experiment and do more of what's working.
Use Proven Frameworks
If we examine the best performing content in the wild, they often follow foundational frameworks.
With frameworks, you can create several content pieces out of one idea.
For example, you want to write about marketing funnel tactics. By running that single idea through a framework, you can bank the following content ideas:
You don’t have to choose one framework to follow for all your content. Mix, match, and experiment with these frameworks to find out what resonates best with your audience.
Reference: Ship 30 for 30
Publish
We've met a lot of business owners who fuss over the when. They ask questions like, "How often should we post? What time of day would be best for engagement?"
Our role is to reduce their overwhelm and help them hone in on the essentials: value and consistency.
Pick a pace that makes sense for your goal, set a posting schedule, and stick to it.
It's not the one who posts very often who wins—it's the person who regularly shows up and helps their target audience win through the content they publish.
Pro tip: While consulting industry benchmarks for the ideal publishing cadence can be helpful, it’s better to observe your own audience and how they interact with your content, track the results, and adjust accordingly to serve more of what they’re responding to.
Now, let's talk about content distribution.
In the third step, we discussed finding the sweet spot: the type of content you delight in creating and your audience loves reading, watching, or listening to.
In mapping out your content distribution, we have to decide on your core content channel and supporting channels.
Here's an example:
Core Content Channel: YouTube Long-form Video (~20 minute videos)
Supporting Channels:
Measure
Don't post and forget.
Remember the goals you set in Step 2 (Plan)? This is where those will come in handy. Monitor your KPIs so you know when you're off-track. Remember: You can't improve what you can't measure.
Content plans are like maps — they help you see the big picture of where you’re going.
But don’t fall in love with them.
Let your audience’s response be the compass that guides you towards effective social media content marketing.
Analyze
Did you hit your goals?
What worked well? What didn’t? What are your insights and recommendations?
It's not enough to measure the results of your social media marketing efforts. You also have to make sense of the data, ponder on them, and generate thoughtful insights to inform your future content.
After this step, carry all that you've learned and start again with Step 1.
Rinse and repeat, until you see the results you desire.