How many of us spend more than an hour per month planning content for our social media platforms?
If you are anything like me or I should say how I was in the past 😉 I had all these great ideas and topics I wanted to talk about, pictures I would want to stage, videos I wanted to shoot, blogs I wanted to write, the list goes on, and then I would get caught up in work & life! Yep, and forget to implement all these awesome ideas.
In today’s day and age, it is so important for your business to have a clear and consistent plan with social media. As we all know social media is always changing or adjusting something if you don’t have a clear plan it is easy to get lost in mess.
It’s easy to say you are going to block time and put together your strategy for the year, but honestly, does that happen?
Each year I love to check out what the social media trends are going to be for the new year, and what the experts think will change, or what will be needed. We then as a team take that advice or tips and implement them it into our own marketing strategy.
But, did you get into business to follow social media trends? I don’t think so, that’s why you are here reading this blog now!
Your social media content strategy is something that does take time to plan, I am not saying it is going to be easy or happen in an hour, it does take a little leg work up front to really dive deep into your brand/business to identify which direction you need to go in. Listening to your audience, monitoring insights, analytics, and talking to your customers and/or clients.
Each social media platform has its own personality and your audience will engage with you differently on each platform. So it’s important to look at each platform as its own entity and create a content strategy around that platform. Now, some content will be able to go across multiple platforms, but if you do that, put that content out on different days.
I am not a huge fan of the same post going out at the same time to Facebook, Instagram, Linked, and Twitter you see it 4 times and that doesn’t give your audience any true value.
If you are sharing a blog post create a few different posts that you can put out to the social media platforms.
Before we dive into the 4 ways to create a strong social media content strategy, I wanted to talk a little bit about blogging and how that feeds into your social media content. This is a piece that is often overlooked, below we talk about setting goals, one area is building website traffic. If you are not blogging about valuable content on your website, what entices people to want to click over to your site?
We have put together a FREE Blog Sharing Checklist that you will also be able to implement into your social media content strategy.
So, let’s get started, today, we will be covering 4 areas to create a clear and consistent content strategy for your social media.
Let’s start with Goal setting
When it comes time to create your goals for your social media, you can think of SMART goals
- Specific: Your goals should be clear, simple and defined.
- Measurable: This is where analytics come in. You want a goal that has one or more metrics.
- Achievable: Is it achievable or is it not possible within your resources?
- Realistic: With your current resources of time and money, is it possible to achieve your goals?
- Time-sensitive: Every goal needs a time frame, whether it’s one year or several months.
We recommend you look at monthly, quarterly, and annual goals. You want to think of these different areas:
- Brand awareness – with over a billion people on social media daily, yes daily, you can check those stats here, it can be a little difficult to stand out from the crowd. Looking at social media to help build brand awareness is a great idea. There are a few components to building brand awareness that we want to think about when writing down our goals.
- Identifying your target market
- Building a good experience for your audience
- Increasing engagement
- Creating conversations with your audience
- New Leads – When it comes to social media people are always looking for the ROI, the key factor is what does ROI mean to you and your business? New leads can be new email signups, new clients, people that are looking at your shopping cart, subscribed to a content upgrade, or even blog followers. This is where the SMART goal setting comes into play, it’s important to be very clear on what the new leads mean to you.
- Traffic to the website – This is a piece I love to monitor each month, it’s amazing how much traffic we get from our social media platforms. If you have Google Analytics on your website it monitors the traffic sources so you can see where people are coming to your website from. When it comes to setting a goal for website traffic, it helps to use % like I want my website traffic to grow by 35% of views coming from just social media platforms, or I want my website traffic to increase by 50% from sharing my blog posts to Pinterest etc.
- Building community and brand authenticity – This is a big trend for social media right now, and I shouldn’t call it a trend but more of a value. It has been brought to the attention of business owners and brands all over that people/your audience want to know WHO you are. What your business or brand stands for, being a transparent and authentic business or brand allows you to create a loyal community. At the end of the day, our social media platforms are our online communities. I always think of social media as an online networking event. It takes time to build relationships and it’s a two-way street. You need to engage with your audience, ask questions, active listening, and much more to build this community. What does an authentic business or brand look like for you? How would a strong and loyal online community benefit you?
Content Strategy
Now, that you have your goals defined, it’s time to put the content together that your audience is looking for. With social media platforms saturated with all different types of content and updating less than every second, it can make it difficult to stick out from the crowd.
You want to give your audience value, content that leaves them wanting more, you are the expert in your industry and people want to do business with YOU!
How do you create a clear content strategy?
We must first define your brand’s voice:
- Look at your company’s core values
- What important to you?
- What is your demographic, and how do they speak?
Then we can move into how to bring that voice into storytelling, let’s be real, people love stories! Every good business and brand has a good story behind it!
- Humanize your brand
- Share stories about your brand
- Work on connecting with your audience on a deeper level
- Share relevant content that relates back to your core values and brand
Now, we dive into keyword research and finding the pain points of your target audience. Finding out this information is NOT to create a bait and switch strategy, but again, to really connect with your audience on a deeper level and find out where their struggles are at so you can create valuable content around their needs.
Here are a few tools to help with keyword research:
- How to do keyword research for SEO: A beginner’s guide from Hubspot
- Moz – SEO software, Tools, and resources
How to find your audience’s pain points for you to solve:
- Ask your current customers/clients
- Create a survey and send to your email list
- Ask your social media followers
You always want to have a good mix for your social media content strategy and being consistent. It’s great if you take the time to craft together this amazing post that gets a TON of engagement and then you post NOTHING for over a week, that one badass post serves NO purpose now.
Going back to the point I made earlier, keep your audience wanting more!
Types of content you want to create
You can do this by getting creative with your content.
2- Products
3- Videos
4- Company personality
5- Curated content or industry news
6- Gifs
7- Events or networking events
8- Original photos
9- Testimonials
10- FAQ
11- Content upgrades or free resources
12- Podcast or books
13- Company milestones
14- Inspirational quotes
15- Fan content
16- Infographics
17 – Employee/Owner stories
18- Power/Referral partners
19- Product reviews
20- National observances days, Nation # day, National Awareness day
I love getting creative and providing our audience with awesome content that they can implement into their business.
Content Calendar – bringing it all together
The fun part is creating the content, thinking of all the different topics, ideas, videos, pictures, etc you want to use for your social media strategy. The hard part is being consistent and having a plan. As you can see this is a process and it takes time.
Take some time and find a system that works for you, there are plenty of tools out there that we have used and recommend to help you and your team stay on the same page.
Tools to look at:
Tips to thriving with your social media content strategy:
- Being consistent – set a plan of posting every day, 2x a day, 3x per week, find that formula that works for you.
- Knowing the best days and times to post on each platform
We have created a simple Google Sheets content calendar that allows us to stay organized. Content Calendar Template – Content Calendar
So, I did a little research
When I started on this blog I did a little research to a few bloggers/influencers to see where their struggles were with digital marketing and how they have overcome them.
I asked these 3 questions:
2) How have you found Social Media and Blogging to help your business?
3) Where do you feel you need to most support with your marketing on a monthly basis?
- Fit Bottomed Girls said the top 3 struggles they have faced in the digital marketing world have been – Getting through the digital noise and clutter, Defining a clear budget for marketing, and Converting readers to customers of our own products.
Since their business IS blogging social media and blogging play the most important role in their business, it has allowed them to establish a brand, a community, a voice, and a platform!
Where they said they needed the most support was driving in new traffic and sales copy.
Jennipher Walters CEO/Co-founder, Fit Bottomed World LLC jenn@fitbottomedgirls.com | http://fitbottomedgirls.com/ - Tabitha Blue with Fresh Mommy Blog said her top 3 struggles she has faced in digital marketing is time – making the time for everything, putting all the ideas together and keeping it consistent, Once she writes the blog post, now what with writing captions for sharing blog posts to social – eye-grabbing and appealing that makes people want to click through to full blog, and lastly figuring out the right topics people want to learn about.
Again, this is a lifestyle blogger and her business revolves around her and the brand she has created. She has been able to empower mothers all over the world with her content.
Where she said she could use the most support was creating systems for sharing blog posts, best times and days to post along with having a consistent social media strategy.
This is her happy place where motherhood, food, travel, design, and stylish little things collide. Tabitha is a certified life coach, mom of four and she wants to empower busy women + moms to feel organized to do more of what they love… and feel confident to do it in style! Website: https://freshmommyblog.com/ Email: hello@freshmommyblog.com - Dee Gautham Fitness said her top struggles with digital marketing are finding the balance between personal and business, writing posts around self-expression and still giving the reader enough value, writing purposeful content, and optimizing for revenue vs. followers and what’s that sweet spot.
Dee is a NASM Certified Personal Trainer, Nutritionist, Online Coach, published author, and speaker on women’s body image and self-confidence expert, she works with her clients in a group setting or one on one. She has found that Instagram has been the most beneficial to her brand and building brand awareness, really being able to connect and engage with her audience. She is only blogging twice per month but feels that is something that will grow as she grows more.
Where she said she needed the most support is having a consistent strategy with social media and blogging, self-expression and sales.
The mission of Dee Gautham Fitness is to help women get in the best shape of their lives – physically AND mentally – so you can feel, look, and perform your best, and reach your highest potential in this world. https://deegautham.com/
Often marketing managers and business owners feel as though the content they are creating doesn’t drive the business towards a set goal.
Content is created in a haphazard manner and there isn’t enough accountability or guidance to make sure each aspect of a digital marketing plan is as effective and efficient as possible.
This is why we created the “Roadmap to Digital Marketing”
We’re experts in content creation, SEO, email marketing, sales funnels, WordPress development, and social media. We also have exclusive access to new cutting-edge resources and trends in digital marketing.
Our clients rest easy knowing that their marketing efforts are being handled in the most efficient and effective ways possible for their business. With monthly accountability coaching and quarterly content calendars, we help you to make sure your entire team is following best practices and has access to training materials and tutorials.
Would you like to set up a FREE 30-minute consultation to learn more about this solution for your business or to see what pointers we can give you on your strategy?
We hope you are as excited as we were to create your strategy!
xoxo
What Makes a Strong Social Media Content Strategy – SMART goals, brand awareness, building an authentic brand, and more!
