8 Tips for Creating an Iconic Social Media Marketing Strategy

What’s a Social Media Marketing Strategy?

A social media marketing strategy is essentially a summary of everything you desire to achieve on social media and how you plan to do it. Your strategy guides your actions and lets you know whether you’re hitting or missing your goals.

Creating a social media marketing strategy may seem like an easy task that requires little thought, but that’s not the case. A lot goes into both the creation and execution of a successful strategy. Below are some helpful tips for creating an iconic social media marketing strategy for your company.

Have a Goal in Mind

Before creating a social media marketing strategy, take a step back and make sure you know what you’re actually trying to accomplish. Do you want to position your company as a thought leader, or are you looking to improve your overall brand awareness? Either way, you should have a set goal (or goals) in mind. Tip: Use the S.M.A.R.T. goal framework to help you create meaningful goals for your social media marketing strategy.

Conduct a Social Media Audit

Whether you’re creating a brand-spanking-new social media strategy or you’re looking to refine your current one, conduct a thorough social media audit. This gives you a chance to look at your past and current efforts to see what’s working and what’s not. A social media audit also shows you what efforts need a little refining to make them legendary.

Know Your Audience and What They Like

What’s the point of planning a social media marketing strategy if you aren’t thinking of your target audience? To create a successful social media strategy, you have to have your dream customer top of mind, much like when developing any business strategy.

A good place to start is knowing your buyer personas like the back of your hand. These personas are the people who will be following you on social platforms and are the ones who can actually give you business. Don’t just look at their age or company title; look at the industry they’re in or even common industries they work with. Here are a few other things to take note of when looking into your target social media personas:

• What are their goals? What are they hoping to get out of a social platform like Facebook or Instagram?
• What channels are they commonly active on? Do they prefer to spend their time on a professional platform like LinkedIn? Don’t just make assumptions. Look at the data given by each platform and see where they are spending their time.
• What are their interests?
• What motivates your persona? What interests your personas to take the next step and actually click or react to a social post?
• What content do they resonate with? What posts do they commonly engage with?

Once you’ve taken a closer look at your personas and their psyche, take note of common trends you’re seeing. These will be vital in going forward with the creation of your social media marketing strategy.

Look at the Competition

Once you have a solid idea of your personas and what they’re hoping to accomplish on social media, look at your competition and what they’re doing successfully on social. Do they have a consistent posting cadence? Are they posting videos instead of industry articles? Do they post about their team members more than their case studies? After you analyze your competition’s social efforts, take this information back to your team to better refine your social media marketing strategy.

You Better Work!

Nowadays, it isn’t good enough to stick to the status quo when creating social media content. Long gone are the days where a simple sentence and link will get you 100-plus engagements in an hour. Audiences on social platforms are making you work for their attention! You only have seconds, maybe less, to stop someone mid-scroll. Your content needs to draw someone in visually then make them stay with your caption.

So, the question remains. How are you planning to step up your social media content? Here are a few recommendations:

Include a Link in Your Posts

When formulating your social media marketing plan of action, account for adding links to your posts. Best practices will tell you to have a link in every single post, which is a good rule of thumb, but not all posts need it.

For example, your co-worker got a new puppy (a common occurrence here at SyncShow), and your team has named the puppy as your company’s unofficial mascot. You may want to share that news with the world because the majority of people, aside from cat people like myself, love a good dog post.

Now, where are you supposed to link that post to? PetSmart? The Animal Protective League (APL)? Probably not, unless you’re running a dog-specific campaign at your company. Moral of the story here: Include links only when they’re valuable and support your social post and strategy! Link to engaging content like a video or even an interactive guide. Links like that are sure to draw in a following.

Show Your Culture

Instead of constantly promoting your bottom-of-the-funnel (BOTF) offers on social, consider incorporating a variety of culture posts into your social media marketing strategy. Not only do culture-related posts give your team members the recognition they deserve, but they give your brand a voice and a personality. People engage with people. It’s a simple fact. Check out a few of the posts we love to share at SyncShow:

• Birthdays
• Company anniversaries
• Company outings
• Team lunches
• Office pets
• Employee of the Month
• Special holidays. Check out how our team celebrated our fur babies on National Love Your Pet Day this year!

Put out Engaging Content

Your content needs to draw someone in visually then make them stay with your caption. Custom images are a great place to start. Consider adding other forms of content to your social media marketing strategy.

• Videos
• Motion graphics
• User-generated content
• Interactive content
• Flipbooks
• Infographics

Content pieces, like the mini infographic featured above, tend to have a higher number of both impressions and engagement. When building your social media marketing strategy, account for extra time to create these visually appealing materials for your social posts.

Don’t Silo Yourself

Though you may be the expert or unofficial expert of social media in your company, it’s important to include other members of your team in the creation of your social media marketing strategy. This will allow you to hear your team’s feedback and comments on things that can assist you in the conception of your final strategy.

Stay up to Date

Stay up to date with emerging news in the social media and digital industry. Sign up for newsletters, read blogs and scroll through social channels each day to stay in the know. Social platforms and their regulations can change in no time, so it’s vital that you’re following along. If monumental news is announced, you can refine your social strategy further to accommodate these updates.

Don’t Forget to Include Paid Social Media!

Before you check “Create social strategy” off your to-do list, be sure you included paid social media! Sure, there is a lot of potential for success with organic social media, but as the social landscape becomes more competitive, it’s beneficial to put some money behind your top pieces of content to expand their reach and boost the possibility of leads coming in.

Phew. That was a lot! Creating a social media marketing strategy takes time and commitment, but once it’s in place, it’ll all be worth it.