Guest blog: 7 steps to creating a successful social media strategy for your business

Michelle Sklar, Marketing Manager, Boosted

No matter what industry you’re in – in 2020, having a successful social media marketing strategy is key for business growth. If you’re marketing your products or services online, social media should be at the forefront of your overall marketing approach.

As with any effective strategy, you’ll need to start with a solid plan a plan. Properly researching and preparing your social media strategy will ensure that your business receives the ROI it deserves. As a business owner, you’ll feel secure that the hours and funds that you’re investing in your social media accounts are paying off.

Here are 7 steps to creating a successful social media marketing strategy for your brand:

1. Get to know your target audience

Knowing which audience you want to reach is the first step to any successful marketing strategy. Focus on the people in your niche; the ones who would be most interested in your product or service.

Collect as much information as you can about your current customer base. Here are some questions to consider:

• Age – Which stage of life are your customers in? Should you be targeting Gen. Z or will your business be better off marketing to millennials?
• Where are they located? Find out your audience’s location, time zone as well as which language(s) they speak.
• What are their interests? What do they do in their free time? Which other businesses are they loyal to?

The more specific you are when building your target audience, the more effectively you’ll be able to reach them on social media.

2. Focus on your goals

Once you’ve identified your target audience, it’s time to set some concrete objectives for your social media strategy. What is it you’re hoping to achieve with your social media accounts over the next month, quarter or year? Currently, the 5 most popular social media goals are (source):

1. Build brand awareness
2. Manage brand reputation
3. Build and manage an engaged community
4. Increase conversions/sales
5. Gain customer/market insights

Focus on one or two objectives that appear to be the most valuable to your brand’s greater marketing strategy. Make sure that you continually track your progress – it’s a great practice to set a meeting at the end of each month to check in and see if your brand is reaching its social media marketing goals.

3. Pick your platforms

Here are the top 5 social media platforms of 2020 that you should consider implementing into your social media strategy:

1. Facebook – 2.38 billion active monthly users
2. Instagram – 1 billion monthly active users
3. YouTube – 2 billion monthly active users
4. TikTok – 800 million monthly active users
5. Twitter – 330 million monthly active users
6. LinkedIn – 310 million monthly active users

Focus on selecting the platforms where your target audience is most likely to be scrolling. If you attempt to be active across all forms of social media, you’re likely to get overwhelmed (fast!) and it will prove to be quite difficult to create the right type of content for every platform.

Do some research on what the main demographics of each platform are and focus on the ones that are the best match for your business.

4. Brainstorm some content

Once you know which platforms you’ll be investing in – it’s time to get creative! Set aside an hour or two for a content brainstorm.  Here are a few quick, productive ways to brainstorm social media content for your brand:

• Check out what your competitors are doing. Are they producing more images or more videos? What are they doing well, and what can be improved? Look to their pages for inspiration, not replication – always be sure that your content is original. It’s a good practice to check out influencers in your space as well.
• Look up hashtags in your niche – this is especially relevant for Instagram, TikTok and Twitter. Incorporate the most relevant ones to your content.
• Think big! Don’t be afraid of conjuring up original, out of the box ideas for your brand.

As your social media strategy gets set in motion, it’s a beneficial practice to set aside time for a content brainstorm on a monthly basis to ensure that you’ll never run out of ideas.

5. Create your content

Once you’ve brainstormed a host of content ideas, here are two useful tips to keep in mind when creating your content:

• Focus on high-quality content – Your social media accounts are the public persona of your brand. Make sure that the content you post is professional-looking and reflects your business’ personality.  For images, Unsplash is a great resource for free, high-quality images that you can share across social media. Pexels is also an excellent resource, and offers free stock videos in addition to photos.
• Optimie your content – If you want your viewers to fully enjoy the content you’ve created for them, you need to ensure that all of your assets (both photos & videos) are the right sizes. For example, the ideal dimensions for IGTV are 1080×1920 pixels, whereas the ideal video size for YouTube is 1920×1080 pixels. It’s best practice to look up the ideal dimensions before creating your content.

6. Implement video

92% percent of marketers recently stated that video is an important part of their marketing strategy (source).

As you decide which type of content to create, it is highly recommended to keep video top of mind. Video dominates across all social platforms – not just on video-first sites like YouTube or TikTok. Video can engage customers with short attention spans, evoke powerful emotions, build brand awareness and much more.

It’s a common myth that video content creation is reserved only for the professionals. If you don’t have a video pro in-house, have no fear – there are many easy-to-use tools out there (think: Boosted) for creating professional, engaging video content that can be optimized for any social platform.

7. Batch your content

Once you’re ready to write the copy for your posts, as well as schedule out your content – consider content batching.

This method involves planning out all of your content in one sitting. Block out a day in your calendar and plan out your copy, along with your accompanying visuals, for your selected amount of time (generally 1 week, 2 weeks or 1 month). Then, create a content calendar to map out when you’d like to post the content. To create your content calendar, you can use a project management tool like Trello, Google Sheets, HubSpot’s Social Media Calendar Template or you can write it out by hand. Finally, you can use a social media scheduler to automatically post your content at your desired dates and times.

Many marketers and small business owners find this to be a much more productive system than creating content every day or ‘when they find the time to get around to it.’⁠

It takes time, as well as some trial and error to learn how to create a social media content strategy that works for your business. To make the process even smoother, try out Boosted Premium for 3 months, for just $5.