Social Media Strategy
By: Ivana Bosak
Tags: Social Media Marketing, Digital Marketing, Social Media Strategy, Social Media

The days when you could update your social media posts every few weeks without any plans are far behind us. If you want to stand out from your competition and do successful social media marketing, you need a social media strategy. How to create a social media strategy in a short time?

Photo by NordWood Themes on Unsplash

Firstly, you need to analyze your brand’s current situation. Both generally and on social media. There are a lot of methods that could be helpful. One of the most popular is the SWOT analysis, which shows you the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of your business.

Remember: stay honest to get the best of it.

After you finish analyzing your brand, pay attention to your competition. What are they doing, do they have a strategy? What can you learn from them? What are their weaknesses that you could potentially turn into your strengths?

Not that scary so far, right?

The next step is defining your goals. Hopefully, this step didn’t scare you, and you’re still reading this article.

Setting goals is one of the most important steps in creating a strategy of any kind. Oh, and if you thought that was a tough part, you were wrong. Your goals have to be SMART. In other words, they have to be specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and timely.

Here is an example of what the SMART goal should look like:

Gain 1 000 Instagram followers by the end of July.

P.S. Don’t forget to define the way you’ll measure your goals. What tools will you use? Which metrics will you measure? Think about it and write it down on paper.

Congrats, you have survived the hardest part! Let’s have some fun now.

Now, it is time for you to define your target audience. And no, your target audience cannot be everyone. Try to get into the details, because it will be easier for you to target them later.

Now that you have a clear picture of your target group, it is time to create your brand’s buyer personas. According to Hubspot, “Buyer personas (sometimes referred to as marketing personas) are fictional, generalized representations of your ideal customers.”

When creating a buyer persona, start with some general info: what is their name, how old are they, what is their marital status, their education, etc. Write about their job title, their finances, values, and fears. What are their goals? What are their problems, and how can you solve them? Be specific and precise.

Based on your buyer personas’ presence on social media channels, define the channels you will use to communicate with them. What kind of messages will you use in each phase of a customer journey? Write down the emotions you want to wake in your customers. Those emotions should comply with your brand. Use those emotions to get close to your audience.

Good job so far, we’re almost done!

If you’re a creative type, you will enjoy the next step.

As Benjamin Franklin said, “By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.” In other words, if you want your content to be consistent and engaging, you need to create a content plan then. And you should have it done at least a week in advance.

Make a table for each day of the week and define channels you will post on that day. In the next column, put a visual you will post and text you’ll use as a description.

Extra tip: try to make different content for each social media channel.

And lastly, strategy evaluation plan. People often skip this step in the process of planning a strategy. The strategy evaluation is looking back at the goals you defined and checking if you’ve accomplished it. Answer these questions:

Which of our goals have we completed?

Where we fell short of our targets, why did this happen?

Are our goals still relevant?

Which goals are no longer needed?

Are we closer to our vision?

And that’s it! You’re now ready to create your own social media strategy. Good luck!