Expert Advice on Creating your Social Media Marketing Strategy

Your company has to be on social media if you want to connect with your customers. But social media isn’t like little league, you don’t get a trophy just for showing up.- You need a social media marketing strategy that will increase brand awareness, grow your audience, and ultimately turn follows into sales.

As a long-time Social Media Manager, I’ve helped companies from small startups to international organizations create engaging content, launch successful campaigns, and exponentially grow their follower count and engagement rates. I’m now a Social Media Manager at Similarweb and thought I would give some tips and advice from my own experience.

If you want to make your content more accessible and create lasting relationships with customers, read on and I’ll tell you exactly how to do it.

What is social media marketing?

Social media marketing (SMM) is exactly what it sounds like: using social media channels to market a company or product to an online audience. The definition is straightforward, but the execution is less so. There are a million forms of social media marketing, which is great because you can find the form that authentically represents you and your brand and helps you connect with the right community in the right space.

Done correctly, social media marketing will help you:

• Increase brand awareness
• Build engaged communities of followers
• Improve communication with your audience
• Measure your reputation
• Enhance your overall marketing activities
• Advertise to the right communities
• Sell more products or services

Social media is something you don’t want to miss out on. Why? 71% of consumers are on social media and 91% of consumers say they will jump from social media to a company’s website when they want to learn more, according to a 2021 report. Additionally, 33% of consumers say that social media is their preferred way to engage with brands (over email, website, or customer service channels). These numbers are too high to be ignored.

What is a social media marketing strategy?

Like every other type of strategy you develop, for content creation or SEO, a social media strategy helps you answer the BIG questions about what your goals are and how you plan to achieve them. Your social media marketing strategy should address:

• Who is your target audience
• What are your KPIs
• What tactics you will use
• How you will track success

Sound basic? It is. But the basics are important to building a strong foundation for your social media marketing strategy. If you want to get into social media marketing, don’t skip developing a strategy. Without it, you’re just posting content without purpose and likely missing out on the great benefits your content could bring.

You might have multiple different social media strategies if you’re using different social media platforms. For example, LinkedIn and TikTok have very different audiences and you might have different goals for these two platforms. One platform might be focused on lead generation, while the other is for brand awareness. It’s worthwhile to develop different strategies that address the individual platforms.

How to create a social media marketing strategy

Whether you’re a total newbie or you’ve been posting on social media for a while, following these steps can help you create a social media strategy that will pay off.

Step 1: Get to know your audience

Social media is all about conversations. Your content is a starting point for a conversation with your audience, so you want to make sure your content is something that your audience will find interesting and will want to respond to. You don’t want to be investing your efforts in creating something that your audience will think is a total snoozefest.

Before you do anything else, you need to get to know your target audience: who they are and what they’re interested in. Here’s what you need to figure out:

• Demographics: What are the ages, genders, locations, education levels, and even socio-economic statuses of your target audience? If you’re just getting started with social media, you can start by analyzing your website audience’s demographics to get an idea of who your potential audience is.
• Behavior: What are they interested in and how do they behave? You want to know whether they are looking for laughs or whether they consume content for personal growth. Audience behavior can tell you how they browse content and give you an idea of what to expect.
• Platforms: Where does your target audience hang out online? Depending on their demographics and behaviors, they might congregate in different places. They might focus on a specific social media platform like LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or TikTok, or maybe they are hanging out in more niche platforms that you need to explore.
• Content preferences: What type of content speaks to your audience? Do they like reading long posts? Watching videos? Do emojis turn them on or off? It’s important to know what content interests them and why they prefer that type of content.

As you’re getting to know your target audience, you should create personas. Personas help you to visualize a specific person in your target audience, making it easier for you to create conversational content. It’s much easier to start a conversation with a persona/specific person than it is to start a conversation with an entire audience.

Step 2: Set your goals

Why are you creating a social media strategy? Don’t answer “because everyone else is doing it!” Think carefully about what you want to accomplish with the social media channels you’ll use. You might have different goals for different channels. Possible goals could be:

• Increase brand awareness
• Create a loyal following
• Generate leads
• Drive traffic to your website
• Provide quick customer service
• Increase online mentions of your brand
• Understand what people think about your brand

When you’re brainstorming your goals, it’s important to make sure they are realistic and measurable. Creating impossible goals like “get a million followers in a week” only sets you up for failure. You also want to make sure your goals are measurable so you’ll know whether you succeeded. For example, you might set a goal of improving website referrals from social media by 10% or increasing your social media engagement rate by 20%.

Step 3: Plan and publish your content

What are you going to post about on social media? Based on who your audience is and what your goals are, plan the type of content you will publish and any themes, tones, or specific looks you’ll follow. For example, if your target audience is interested in funny content, focus on making your target audience laugh and use a tongue-in-cheek tone.

You can start with getting some inspiration by checking out your competitors’ social media pages. Look at what they are posting, how often, and how their followers are engaging. Do you notice a certain theme? How are followers reacting to their posts? Do specific types of posts generate more engagement? This can give you great insight into what’s working in your industry and give you ideas of what to post about.

Once you’re inspired, you should create a social media calendar to map out the posts you will publish in the upcoming week or month. This gives you a bird’s-eye-view on your posts to ensure you have diversity in the content, as well as cohesion.

Think of different types of posts that will go in your calendar and fit in with your themes. For example, every week, you might post:

• one meme
• one fun fact
• one post about your company’s office life
• one infographic
• a helpful tip
• one post about your product or service

You’ll have to decide the frequency of your posts. You don’t want to post so often that it feels like spam, but you also want to post often enough that your account is worth following.

We recommend creating an excel spreadsheet for your calendar. It should include:

• Text for the posts
• The image or video
• Any links or calls-to-action
• Hashtags
• The date and time for publishing

Don’t forget about the time! Timing your posts to the hour of the day when you have the most followers online ensures maximum engagement and will get your post noticed and shown to more followers. For example, many people are on social media during their commute to work, so commuting hours might be prime time for posting. Or if many of your followers are attending a specific event, you might want to time posts just before or after the event.

You could also include ‘stories’ in your social media calendar. While stories are generally more time-sensitive, you could still plan what you might post in them. Stories can be especially engaging because they usually give a more behind-the-scenes look at your company, which makes your brand more human to followers.

One mistake I often see is that companies tend to post too much about their own products and services. Generally, only 20% of your posts should be promoting your brand. The other 80% should focus on providing useful and interesting information to your followers. If you write too much about your own brand, your posts might feel less authentic and your audience might feel like you’re just advertising to them. Remember, social media marketing is more about engaging than selling! Which brings me to my next point…

Step 4: Listen and engage

You started the conversation, now it’s your chance to keep it going. There are many ways you can do this:

• Read and respond to comments on your posts. This is a great way to see what people think about your content. Are they writing encouraging messages? Asking questions? Responding negatively? Every comment deserves a response, even a simple “thanks for commenting” can go a long way.
• Respond to all direct messages. Followers send direct messages because they want a response. Ignoring these messages can anger your followers and cause you to lose them as a customer. Sending a thoughtful response shows you’re interested in what they have to say.
• Reply to reviews or posts published on your accounts. People are posting these to get your attention and to tell others about their experience with your company. Responding shows that you care and keeps people engaged.
• Respond to any posts that tag your company or use your brand as a hashtag. It’s exciting when a brand engages with you on your own content! If someone posts about your product and you respond, you’ll earn instant bonus points for how this person views your brand. They’ll be happy to see you’re listening and might even post more about you in the future, which is great for increasing brand awareness.

Many companies today forget this step in their social media marketing plan. In fact, only about 47% of messages sent to brands are responded to on a daily basis. No one likes getting ignored, so if you want to create a positive human relationship, this is a great opportunity to do it.

Another benefit of engaging on social media is improving your company’s customer service. In fact, Twitter has become one of the main platforms for providing prompt customer service. Some organizations have dedicated Twitter handles just for support requests. This is a great way to show customers that you have taken special efforts to listen and help them. But be aware that customers using this channel expect extremely quick results (as quick as 15 minutes even) so be sure to post on your dedicated Twitter your service hours.

Here are a few more tips for listening and engaging:

• Prepare responses ahead of time. You probably have a good idea of the types of messages and comments people will send you. You can prepare responses in advance and tailor as necessary. This will save you tons of time if you get many similar messages from customers.
• Sound human. People don’t want to feel like they are talking to a robot! They’re looking for a personal connection with you, so make sure that is what you’re providing. Even if you create canned responses, they shouldn’t sound canned.
• Respond the same way customers reached out. If someone comments, reply to their comment, don’t send them a direct message (unless there is a specific reason to.) People started the conversation in one place and keeping it there will get you top engagement.
• Use hashtags. This could be especially useful when engaging for support purposes. If you have multiple support requests for a similar topic, a hashtag could make it easier for future customers to get the answers they need without sending you another message.

Step 5: Learn from your analytics and reporting

A lot of social media marketing is trial and error. This means you need to constantly monitor your activities to see what’s working and where you can improve. You want to know which types of content are getting the best engagement, whether the timing of your posts makes a difference, which hashtags are bringing you new followers, and whether you’re doing a good job engaging with your followers.

You can start doing this by tracking data from each one of your posts. Remember the social media calendar you created? Once you’ve published a post you can add data here about the responses and engagement the post received. You can also use dedicated tools for collecting and analyzing social media data such as:

• Hootsuite
• Buffer
• Socialbakers
• Sprout Social
• Keyhole

Once you have all your data, you can create a social media report to analyze the data. You’ll look at your overall account to analyze follower growth and learn about how people are talking about you on social media and dive into each individual post to see what’s working. You can also look at these social media benchmarks to give you a few more ideas to analyze.

You should review your social media activities weekly and create larger reports every quarter. It’s important to keep your finger on the pulse so you can make quick changes to improve your activities.

Step 6: Optimize

It’s time to re-evaluate and adjust your strategy. Based on the data you collected in your reporting, you have to decide what you’ll post on social media next. Maybe you found that video clips gained a lot more engagement than images or that a specific hashtag led to a jump in new followers. It’s time to tweak and take advantage of these valuable insights! You can post more videos to see if these continuously get more engagement and use that hashtag again to see if it leads to more followers.

Optimizing your social media strategy is a never-ending process. Something that worked amazingly one week could be less successful the next. You’ll never know unless you continuously track and make changes based on your findings. Reacting quickly to any changes is the best way to get the most out of your social media marketing.

Social media marketing strategy template

There’s a lot that goes into creating a social media marketing strategy. Here’s a quick template to make sure you don’t forget anything:

1. Who is your target audience? Include your marketing personas!
2. What are your goals with social media? How will you measure whether you’ve reached your goals?
3. What and when are you posting on social media? Include your CTAs, hashtags, and any other information about the planned posts.
4. Engage! Listen to what people are saying about you and respond to any posts, comments, or messages.
5. Analyze and report. Collect all your data and organize it so you can extract key findings and create action items to improve.
6. Optimize! Make changes and see how your followers react.

Time to get social!

There you have it! As a long-time social media manager, these are the steps I follow whenever I create a strategy for a company looking to blow up its social media activities. If you follow these steps, you’re sure to see your follower count grow, your engagement improves, and you’ll get to know your customers better.

Great social media marketing impacts all areas of your business. From lead generation, sales, customer service, and human resources, to even product and R&D departments, everyone will benefit from your social activities.

So it’s time to get out there and be social!