How to Create a Social Media Strategy for Brand Growth in 8 Easy Steps

A social media strategy is a framework of how your brand should use social media to fulfill its marketing and sales objectives. It helps you outline your goals and objectives and provide a basis for creating a detailed plan that you can implement to then grow your business or brand online.?

But how do you go about creating a social media strategy?

Figure out the objectives you want to fulfill using social media?

Alignment with your goals is the first step. What are you looking to achieve? Is it more brand awareness, is it more sales, is it more leads? And how do these tie in with the overall marketing goals of your company??

Without setting these goals you have no way of measuring your return on investment. But you don’t just want to set goals arbitrarily. One way to go about it is to use the S.M.A.R.T method, which means ensuring that your goals are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound.?

For instance, if you’re an education brand that sells online courses and you’ve just entered the market, your first goal will be to make your prospects aware of your services. In this case, a S.M.A.R.T goal will look something like this:?

- Generate 100,000 website visits in the first quarter?

- Create 500,000 social media impressions in the first quarter.

Now both these goals are specific, they’re measurable, relevant to your particular service, and time-bound. The attainability of these will depend upon the resources you have, including workforce and money.

Learn everything you can about your target audience’s online behavior

Once your goals are set, you then need to understand your target audience before you can start?marketing?to them. No matter what your product or service is, you cannot sell to everyone.?

This means that you will first need to identify who your target audience is and then do a detailed analysis to understand their pain points, what problems they’re facing and how your product or service fits into the mix. A lot of this already takes place at the product development stage. But at this stage, you specifically need to focus on your audience from a communication point of view — how will you help them understand how you solve the problem they’re facing??

Below are three ways you can do a solid analysis of how your target audience behaves online so that you can align your messaging in a way that feels home to them.?

1. Spy on your competitors’ networks

The best place is to start with your competitors. This gives you ready research — who are the people who are interacting with their content, what questions are they asking, and are their queries getting resolved? Scour through?reviews, and comments, and understand how people are reacting to their social media content.?

2. Define your buyer persona

Defining a buyer persona helps you understand your audience’s demographics, psychographics, behavior, and how they surf the internet. Here’s what these terms mean:

- Demographics:?Factors worth considering here are age, profession, income, education, marital status, group membership, and more.?

- Psychographics: Values, desires, interests, lifestyle choices, and beliefs provide data to understand their psychological and emotional motivations. And helps in tailoring your messages that resonates with them. Data like this can be acquired by interviews, surveys, or digging into your website's analytics.?

- Firmographics:?Dividing customers into groups based on shared company or organization attributes like industry, job title, company size, etc. helps you understand their needs and wants. This is especially critical if you’re targeting B2B buyers on professional platforms like?LinkedIn.

3. Gather data

You must use the insights collected from the social media analytics to understand your target audience, their online behavior and their likings in depth. This helps you target them better with personalized offers. The data gathered can be also used to design further campaigns effectively.

Once you have your audience analysis down pat, you can tailor your content and communication to appeal to that persona and target a very specific set of people. But no matter what your audience demographic looks like, make sure that videos are a part of your content mix as they tend to give the maximum engagement and ROI.

Set up a social media presence

As of October 2021, 4.55 billion?people are active on social media and 86% of social media users follow at least one brand.?Setting up your social media presence and optimizing it for success is a no-brainer. Here’s how you can do that:

1. Decide which social media networks to use

Choosing the right social media is imperative to reach the right target audience. So, when choosing the social media channel for your brand, choose the one where your target audience is most active. Use the data collected from audience analysis to make a decision. You don’t want to have dead accounts, so ensure you only create profiles on social media platform that you can actively maintain.?

2. Set up your profile

Your first step should be setting up your social media profile. Add your profile picture, the right bio, and ensure your profile resonates your branding. Add a company video?to your profile so people understand what your brand stands for and what you do. Take a look at how Chaco Footwear has optimized their Instagram profile:

Understand your competitors

1. Identification

Your competitors can be of two kinds. Direct competition is any company that offers the same product or service as you while indirect competition refers to a business whose products or services are different from yours but potentially could satisfy the same need and reach the same goal.

You can locate your competitors by studying the market, searching on Google as well as social media platforms, and accessing business directories (both online and offline).

2. Deep dive into their activities

After identifying ‘who’ your competitors are, you’ve got to find out ‘what’ they are up to. So, open their social media profiles and find out the following:

- What platforms they are most active on and why

- Follower count and the rate at which they are growing

- Top hashtags and the number of hashtags they use

- Frequency of posting

- Engagement rate

You can also use intelligence monitoring tools like Sprout Social to monitor your competition.

3. Gauge your competitor’s strengths and weaknesses

Analyzing your competition’s strengths and weaknesses should give you an idea of what’s lacking in your social media strategy and how you can improve.?

For example, if you found that your competition isn’t leveraging video marketing, you can fill in the gap by posting videos and getting better reach.

Create a social media content calendar

Creating content on the fly leaves you prone to making mistakes and compromising the quality of the posts. That’s why you should create a social media calendar beforehand and decide what you’re going to post.?

A social media calendar is an overview of what you’re going to post during a specific period of time. Often these are created on a monthly or weekly basis. This means you plan and create all your content for that period ahead of time and then schedule your posts to go live on specific days and times.?

The posts you plan should create a mix of different content formats such as images, graphics, and videos that achieve different goals such as promoting your products, entertaining or educating your audience, and are likely shared over a few different social media platforms.

There are two components of a social media calendar — regular posts that go out on a daily basis depending on your goals and strategies, and special-occasion posts that go out on specific days such as Christmas?or Valentine's Day. Both of these are necessary. The regular posts are a way for your business to build engagement, and keep your audience’s interest piqued while posts on special occasions help you get into the limelight and cash in on trends.?

Create compelling content

1. Make thumb-stopping and story-telling videos

A study by Hubspot shows that 77% of marketers plan to use video as a part of their content strategy. The reason for this is that video is often more engaging than static images and text-based content. Just ensure that you script your videos to make them more engaging and keep your editing crisp and to the point.

Here's a video of Starbucks, in which the video tells a reversed story from coffee bean to coffee cup.

2. Focus on grabbing your audience’s attention quickly

With shortening attention spans, if your content cannot hook your audience within the first 3-5 seconds, chances are that it won’t be seen by people.

3. Follow the Pareto principle

80% of your content should provide value while the other 20% can be promotional. This helps you build authority in your field and helps your audience trust you more — both of which are super important in building a loyal, long-term customer base.

4. Pay attention to your writing

On social media, your words are your weapon. You can use them wisely to effectively communicate your brand’s message or you can get lost in oblivion. Effective?copywriting can help you get more engagement, generate more leads, and sell more.

5. Repurpose and reuse

You do not have to create fresh content pieces for every channel. Prioritize one channel, ideally a channel where you can post long-form content like YouTube or SEO blogs, and then you can repurpose the content to suit different platforms. For instance, you can take the content of YouTube videos and create teasers on?TikTok,?Instagram Reels, LinkedIn, etc. that link back to the original post and even create a blog post.

Create a plan for paid advertising

Every business needs to combine organic social media strategies with paid advertising to make the most out of social media and amplify their online exposure. We have detailed guides on advertising for different platforms including Facebook, Instagram, and eCommerce. But to give you a brief overview here, to start running paid ads, you need to first create a plan based on the following parameters:?

1. Define your goal

Simply put: what would you like your campaign to accomplish? Do you want more engagement in the form of likes and comments to accomplish your brand awareness objective? Or do you want to generate leads to get more sales? Answering these questions will help you define your goal.?

2. Choose your platforms

Ideally, you should choose platforms that your target audience frequents and will help you fulfill your goal. For example, if you want to generate more brand awareness and your analysis shows that your target audience spends most of their time on?YouTube, Facebook and Instagram, you should run video ads on these platforms.?

3. Outline your Budget

You’ve already defined your goals, mapped out your target audience, chosen your marketing channels, and studied your competitors. Now, use this information to work out how much you’ll need to spend on your campaigns.

4. Provide an overview

Your team and the stakeholders should have a clear idea of what you’re trying to accomplish and how you’ll do it. Specify the campaign name and description, your target audience, the platforms you’ll be using, the goals you aim to achieve, and the expected ROI.?

5. Create your ads

Once you’ve outlined the strategy to your team and stakeholders, put your plan into action and start creating your ads. You may want to do A/B testing to figure out the ads that are working best for your brand. Furthermore, ensure you focus significant resources on running video ads because they can give you a higher ROI and engagement compared to other types of ads.

Track performance and create a feedback loop

Your social media strategy and plan are not set in stone. You cannot create it once and forget about it. Since there are so many variable factors, you need to constantly keep studying what is working and then updating your strategy accordingly.?

To track the success of your social media marketing strategy, you will need to keep track of the metrics that show you how well something has performed. The metrics you use will depend on the goals you want to achieve with a particular strategy.?

For instance, if increased brand awareness was your goal, the metrics you can look at are the number of impressions on social media, increase in the number of website visits, and the number of views on your content. If your goal was to increase number of sales, you should look at the number of people who took action on the ads you ran —?number of clicks, people who went to the checkout page, and so on.?

If the numbers rose as per your initial assessment, this means your strategy is working and you should double down on it. If some indicator is off and not working as per your expectation, this means you need to go back and see what can be changed to help you get back on track.?

5 Pro tips to help you create a killer social media strategy

Now that you know how to create your social media strategy, there are some pitfalls that you need to be aware of before you get started. Here are 5 pro tips for you to keep in mind to ensure your social media works effectively:?

Tip #1 - Don’t skip out on video marketing?

You cannot do without video marketing?in your social media strategy. Videos are more engaging, have better retention, and provide better conversion as compared to any other form of content on the web.

Tip #2 - Treat every channel uniquely

As you're mapping out your social media strategy, it's important to remember that each channel is unique. While the overall goal of your strategy may be to get people to visit your website, each channel will require different approaches and content.

When you are repurposing content, you cannot use the same content on different social media channels. This is because people consume content on different platforms differently. Twitter is meant for small, pithy texts. YouTube is better for long-form videos. Instagram Reels and TikTok are meant for small form videos. This separation means that you need to approach content creation differently for each platform.?

Tip #3 - Focus on getting your content mix right

As a brand you want to promote your products and services but people don’t want to consume promotional content. Then, how can you go about achieving your content marketing objectives? Simply by creating a content mix by following the 80-20 rule or the Pareto principle.?

This means you want to create educational, entertaining and engaging content 80% of the time and create promotional content the remaining 20% of the time. This allows you to build connection and trust with your audience and as a result they don’t mind consuming promotional content created by you. In fact, they will respond better to it.?

Tip #4 - Automate posting and scheduling

Batch creating content and then automating the posting is a boon when you need to stay consistent. It can help you save time and utilize it better to brainstorm future content. It can help you optimize your posting time. You may want to post when your audience is online and that might not necessarily overlap with your office hours. You can either go crazy trying to post at odd times or simply schedule your posts to get the job done.?

Tip #5 - Humanize your brand

When your audience understands who you are and what you stand for, they'll be more likely to connect with your brand. Also, people like to connect with people and not nameless, faceless entities that are trying to sell their products and services. So, humanize your brand by creating relatable content that helps people feel more connected. Don’t be afraid to share opinions, ideas, and your own principles.?

Another great way to do this is by showcasing the people behind the brand: employees and customers alike. Showcase these human beings by using photos of them in action or other relevant content. For example, add an employee as a moderator for a Facebook group or Twitter chat or post with a personal profile on?LinkedIn using a company page.?

Wrapping up

Having a well-documented strategy for your social media isn’t enough. Neither is it a once written and done thing. You have to execute the strategies consistently and create a feedback loop from all your social activities. But the steps and pro tips shared above should give a direction on how to go about the process.?