Hubspot is a great asset to use for gaining information on building a social media marketing strategy for any business, big or small. Allie Decker did a fantastic job breaking down some essential pieces in her article here.
An important thing to remember when starting to market on social media is that it can be overwhelming without a solid plan and process. As a result, building one should be the first thing you do.
Firstly, what is a social media strategy? It is a summary of the content your business is and is going to post, what your team will be responsible for, and the channels your team will use.
It is the master plan behind your creations, your posts, and your engagements. It encompasses guidelines, cadence, campaigns, plans and strategies. It is your teams Holy Book.
There is a massive amount of companies that use social media to connect directly with their customers. Because of that, strategies can differ. Social media is, in a way, the voice of your organization, which means it will be unique to you and what it represents.
Some themes businesses like T-Mobile and Hersheys use are humour and “big picture thinking” (International Womens Day to promote Celebrate SHE)
Why You Need a Strategy
the biggest challenges you will face is reach, ROI, and reaching the goals you set. Creating a strategy eliminates those challenges.
Creating a strategy helps you set goals AND guardrails.
- A good strategy establishes clear expectations and goals for your business’ efforts, whether its for awareness, buzz for an event, even a rebranding campaign. Your strategy will give you a blueprint your team can follow to keep it consistent and relevant.
You will gain the ability to track your performance.
- you cant just create a goal, you need to track its progress also. a good strategy will include Key Performance Indicators you can analyze to monitor your businesses progress towards its goals.
Your strategy will help you tweak your benchmarks over time.
- By benchmarking your marketing strategy it will allow you to track metrics and current performance compared to the industry standards, your competitors, and your own past performance. Over time, with data, you will determine elements of your social media marketing that need improvement to ensure your goals are exceeded.
If your want to set expectations for broader team involvement on what they should and should not be spending their time on, a strategy is what you are looking for.
The How
The steps you need on how to create your Social Media Strategy
- Define your audience
- Define the demographics that are going to care. Examples are age, gender, occupation, hobbies, and so on. The reason you need to define this is simple: to meet your consumers needs. Consider their challenges, and your daily solutions that you can provide for them.
- Start
- Fresh content is your campaigns best friend, commit to creating it. How you can is compile a list of common questions from prospect you already have and find approaches to address these questions with at least one of these a week. As an extra step, if you can combine your blog and strategy your content can reach a much larger audience!
- Create educational content
- Downloaded content is your ally, Ebooks, checklists, videos, and even inforgraphics that address and solve your buyers pains. The more beneficial your content means the more shares and interactions you will receive which will extend your reach.
- Focus on a few key channels
- Most smaller businesses lack a fundamental piece needed for growth: Bandwidth. Social media is a perfect tool to create it. Make sure you start small, and research key networks to learn where your target audience is coming from. Once that is established, you can focus on building your community on those channels your audience is coming from.
- Develop a recipe card to guide you
- One problem with social media is its volatility. It will never work the exact same for every business, or even the same business but different divisions. Thats where your recipe card is going to come in handy. A recipe card is a schedule that keeps your team on track and consistent. Once you develop a recipe card that you can reliably follow, set your goals for frequency and hold yourself accountable to that card
- Measure your results
- The amount of data that is coming in from your channels is going to be a LOT. A good place to start before you get overwhelmed is traffic; see how many people are engaging and what they’re engaging with. Social media platforms offer tools to help like Meta’s account and page insights, and LinkedIn’s visitor Analytics. Once you have an idea of your average traffic you will be able to set those goals and create a scorecard to measure your progress.
- Adjust your tactics
- One of the hardest parts of social media is it is not going to be overnight. Establishing your following, stabilizing your brand, and seeing results will take time. experimenting with combinations of channels, content and the messages you send will be a great place to start. Over time your recipe card content and personas will change which in turn is going to help your get consistent and useful results.
Social Media is a lot, and that is ok! Rome wasn’t built in a day, but that is why we remember it. These tools Hubspot gave us have and will continue to work. Remember, consistency and enthusiasm are your friends, and they are contagious. Use them to your advantage and your socials will be the talk of not only the town, but of the country and beyond!
Thanks for the read!
Your friends,
Hybrid Advertising