How To Create A Successful Social Media Strategy
You’ve probably heard this before, but we’ll say it again - without a strategy, your social media has no direction. The word “strategy” is such a buzzword that everyone uses, so we understand if you’re rolling your eyes right now, but it’s necessary to give you and your team direction when it comes to reaching your goals. Here are 7 steps that you need to take, in order, to build your social media strategy.
Step ( 1 ): Get clear on your brand.
Before outlining your goals, the first step is getting crystal clear on your branding. If you don’t already, this is the stage where you invest in your branding (our top pick is always Maison Audela). When we work with a client, we use your overall brand identity, core values, personality and tone of voice to influence our strategy. Without these essential and foundational aspects of a brand, we have lower success rates with your social media strategy.
Step ( 2 ): Conduct a competitor analysis.
Choose 5 competitors within your industry and note what they’re doing well and what they could improve on. Based on your initial observations, conduct a SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats), which will help you identify the gap in the market that you are able to fill. We also recommend putting all of this information into a visual chart that illustrates where they position themselves and also allows you to visualise where you want to position your brand in relation to them, further showing the gap you are filling in the market.
Step ( 3 ): Learn everything about your target audience.
We go about this in 2 stages; being, secondary and primary research. We start with secondary research, which is where we use Answer The Public, Instagram, TikTok, Quora and Reddit to understand what people are discussing regarding your industry and niche. We expect clients to have their primary research done (being, their market research) before working with us because this takes their understanding of their target audience to a whole other level.
The next step is compiling your primary and secondary research and creating 4 personas, which allows you to conceptualise who you are targeting and speaking to. Get as real as you can with this by finding images of this “person” on Pinterest, getting clear on their buyer type and what type of content they consume.
Step ( 4 ): Now, outline your goals.
Now that we’ve gone through the foundational steps, you can outline your goals and the KPIs (key performance indicators) for each one of them, which allows you to track them effectively. Alongside doing this, we like to create a timeline on what milestones to realistically expect for each goal and when to expect it, outlining this on a 3, 6, 9 and 12-month basis.
Step ( 5 ): Create a content funnel.
Based on the platforms you will be posting on, create a content funnel that helps you visualise…
how your audience will discover you,
where you will nurture them and lastly,
where you will direct them to.
Based on this, create pillars for EACH platform. Yes, separate content pillars for Instagram and TikTok. This is something we have implemented recently that has worked wonders because the type of content that performs well from both platforms is vastly different. Keep in mind there is almost always overlap, but the key here is that you are appealing to the standards for each platform, which means creating different types of content, for each platform.
Step ( 6 & 7 ): Profile Optimisation & Search Engine Optimisation
The last stage is optimising your profile, including your bio, highlights and new feed aesthetic that aligns with your new strategy. This is the fun part that includes putting everything into action! In this phase, we also research hashtags, short-form keywords and long-form keywords for each platform.
Step ( 7 ): Future Proof.
This is an extra step we like to take, which includes outlining the problems that we might face when executing this strategy (i.e. “not having enough content”) and creating a solution for it. This helps us tackle challenges straight on, rather than letting them unfold too late!
This is a very generic outline of our strategy process for our clients. In our 30+ page strategy document, there are far more charts, graphs and visuals that provide more detail and clarity of the “science behind social media” as we like to call it. If you’re not our client and you don’t have to budget to outsource - good news… we offer a 1-Off Strategy Curation service, in which you have us on your team for 3 weeks while we provide the blueprint for you and your team to execute. Get in touch with us about this via our Enquiry Form.
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