How to Create a Social Media Strategy for Brand Growth in 8 Easy Steps
A social media strategy is a framework of how your brand should use social media to fulfil its marketing and sales objectives. It helps you outline your goals and objectives and provide a basis for creating a detailed plan that you can implement to then grow your business or brand online.
But how do you go about creating a social media strategy? That’s exactly what we will cover in this blog. Here’s what we will talk about:
- 8 steps to help you create a social media strategy for your brand in 2022
- 5 Pro tips to help you create a killer social media strategy
Pro Tip: Videos are an integral part of any brand’s social media marketing strategy and you can capitalize on that by using a tool like InVideo that lets you create stunning videos for all your social media channels in minutes.
Let’s dive right in.
8 steps to help you create a social media strategy for your brand in 2022
Step 1: Figure out the objectives you want to fulfil using social media
Alignment with your goals is the first step. What are you looking to achieve? Is it more brand awareness, is it more sales, is it more leads? And how do these tie in with the overall marketing goals of your company?
Without setting these goals you have no way of measuring your return on investment. But you don’t just want to set goals arbitrarily. One way to go about it is to use the S.M.A.R.T method, which means ensuring that your goals are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound.
For instance, if you’re an education brand that sells online courses and you’ve just entered the market, your first goal will be to make your prospects aware of your services. In this case, a S.M.A.R.T goal will look something like this:
- Generate 1,00,000 website visits in the first quarter
- Create 5,00,000 social media impressions in the first quarter
Now both these goals are specific, they’re measurable, relevant to your particular service, and time-bound. The attainability of these will depend upon the resources you have, including workforce and money.
Step 2: Learn everything you can about your target audience’s online behaviour
Once your goals are set, you then need to understand your target audience before you can start marketing to them. No matter what your product or service is, you cannot sell to everyone.
This means that you will first need to identify who your target audience is and then do a detailed analysis to understand their pain points, what problems they’re facing and how your product or service fits into the mix. A lot of this already takes place at the product development stage. But at this stage, you specifically need to focus on your audience from a communication point of view — how will you help them understand how you solve the problem they’re facing?
Here are three ways you can do a solid analysis of how your target audience behaves online so that you can align your messaging in a way that feels home to them.
1. Spy on your competitors’ networks
The best place is to start with your competitors. This gives you ready research — who are the people who are interacting with their content, what questions are they asking, and are their queries getting resolved? Scour through reviews, and comments, and understand how people are reacting to their social media content.
2. Define your buyer persona
Defining a buyer persona helps you understand your audience’s demographics, psychographics, behaviour, and how they surf the internet. Here’s what these terms mean:
- Demographics: Factors worth considering here are age, profession, income, education, marital status, group membership, and more.
- Psychographics: Values, desires, interests, lifestyle choices, and beliefs provide data to understand their psychological and emotional motivations. And helps in tailoring your messages that resonate with them. Data like this can be acquired by interviews, surveys, or digging into your website's analytics.
- Firmographics: Dividing customers into groups based on shared company or organization attributes like industry, job title, company size, etc. helps you understand their needs and wants. This is especially critical if you’re targeting B2-B buyers on professional platforms like Linkedin.
Here’s a detailed guide on how you can go about creating your buyer persona:
3. Gather data
You must use the insights collected from social media analytics to understand your target audience, their online behaviour and their likings in depth. This helps you target them better with personalized offers. The data gathered can be also used to design further campaigns effectively.
Once you have your audience analysis down pat, you can tailor your content and communication to appeal to that persona and target a very specific set of people. But no matter what your audience demographic looks like, make sure that videos are a part of your content mix as they tend to give the maximum engagement and ROI. You can easily create videos using InVideo’s video maker.
Step 3: Set up a social media presence
As of October 2021, 4.55 billion people are active on social media and 86% of social media users follow at least one brand. Setting up your social media presence and optimizing it for success is a no-brainer. Here’s how you can do that
1. Decide which social media networks to use
Choosing the right social media is imperative to reach the right target audience. So, when choosing the social media channel for your brand, choose the one where your target audience is most active. Use the data collected from audience analysis to make a decision. You don’t want to have dead accounts, so ensure you only create profiles on social media platforms that you can actively maintain.
2. Set up your profile
Your first step should be setting up your social media profile. Add your profile picture, and the right bio, and ensure your profile resonates with your branding. Add a company video to your profile so people understand what your brand stands for and what you do. Take a look at how Chaco Footwear has optimized its Instagram profile:
Of course, coupled with consistent content, your profile will become an important part of your brand identity.
Step 4: Understand your competitors
As we saw in the earlier point, studying your competitors can give you a detailed insight into your target audience’s behaviour. But in addition to that, competitor study and analysis can help you identify potential threats, set performance benchmarks, and help you understand how you can differentiate your brand. So, here are 3 steps to understand your competition better.
1. Identification
Your competitors can be of two kinds. Direct competition is any company that offers the same product or service as you while indirect competition refers to a business whose products or services are different from yours but potentially could satisfy the same need and reach the same goal.
You can locate your competitors by studying the market, searching on Google as well as social media platforms, and accessing business directories (both online and offline)
2. Deep dive into their activities
After identifying ‘who’ your competitors are, you’ve got to find out ‘what’ they are up to. So, open their social media profiles and find out the following:
- What platforms they are most active on and why
- Follower count and the rate at which they are growing
- Top hashtags and the number of hashtags they use
- Frequency of posting
- Engagement rate
You can also use intelligence monitoring tools like Sprout Social to monitor your competition.
3. Gauge your competitor’s strengths and weaknesses
Analyzing your competition’s strengths and weaknesses should give you an idea of what’s lacking in your social media strategy and how you can improve.
For example, if you found that your competition isn’t leveraging video marketing, you can fill in the gap by posting videos and getting better reach. And to do so, you can use InVideo’s online editor to make professional and engaging videos in minutes.
Step 5: Create a social media content calendar
Creating content on the fly leaves you prone to making mistakes and compromising the quality of the posts. That’s why you should create a social media calendar beforehand and decide what you’re going to post.
A social media calendar is an overview of what you’re going to post during a specific period. Often these are created on a monthly or weekly basis. This means you plan and create all your content for that period ahead of time and then schedule your posts to go live on specific days and times.
The posts you plan should create a mix of different content formats such as images, graphics, and videos that achieve different goals such as promoting your products, entertaining or educating your audience, and are likely shared over a few different social media platforms. You can easily batch create all of this content, including videos by using a tool like a video.
There are two components of a social media calendar — regular posts that go out daily depending on your goals and strategies, and special-occasion posts that go out on specific days such as Christmas or Valentine’s Day. Both of these are necessary. The regular posts are a way for your business to build engagement, and keep your audience’s interest piqued while posts on special occasions help you get into the limelight and cash in on trends.
Here’s a detailed video that talks about how you can use a free tool like Trello to create your social media calendar:
Step 6: Create compelling content
Once you have a content plan in place, and you know what you want to post, now comes the time to sit down and create the content you’ve planned. You can take several approaches here depending on the time you have. If you’re a full-time content creator, you can create this content on an ongoing basis, but for a brand or business, it makes more sense to batch-create content to stay consistent with their posting.
Here are the things you want to focus on to create compelling content:
1. Make thumb-stopping videos
A study by Hubspot also shows that 77% of marketers plan to use video as a part of their content strategy. The reason for this is that video is often more engaging than static images and text-based content. Just ensure that you script your videos to make them more engaging and keep your editing crisp and to the point. You can use a tool like InVideo to help you with editing.
Check out this detailed guide to learn how you can make videos for your social media.
2. Focus on grabbing your audience’s attention quickly
With shortening attention spans, if your content cannot hook your audience within the first 3-5 seconds, chances are that it won’t be seen by people. Here’s a video from Gopro’s Instagram page that is a perfect example of an engaging video:
3. Follow the Pareto principle
80% of your content should provide value while the other 20% can be promotional. This helps you build authority in your field and helps your audience trust you more — both of which are super important in building a loyal, long-term customer base.
For instance, look at this guide to successful marketing campaigns. The entire article is about providing valuable tips and examples with the promotional content being limited to less than 20%.
4. Pay attention to your copy
On social media, your words are your weapon. You can use them wisely to effectively communicate your brand’s message or you can get lost in oblivion. Effective copywriting can help you get more engagement, generate more leads, and sell more.
5. Repurpose and reuse
You do not have to create fresh content pieces for every channel. Prioritize one channel, ideally a channel where you can post long-form content like Youtube or SEO blogs, and then you can repurpose the content to suit different platforms. For instance, you can take the content of YouTube videos and create teasers in TikTok, Instagram reels, LinkedIn, etc. that link back to the original post and even create a blog post.
Step 7: Create a plan for paid advertising
Every business needs to combine organic social media strategies with paid advertising to make the most out of social media and amplify their online exposure. We have detailed guides on advertising for different platforms including Facebook, Instagram, and eCommerce. But to give you a brief overview here, to start running paid ads, you need to first create a plan based on the following parameters:
1. Define your goal
Simply put: what would you like your campaign to accomplish? Do you want more engagement in the form of likes and comments to accomplish your brand awareness objective? Or do you want to generate leads to get more sales? Answering these questions will help you define your goal.
2. Choose your platforms
Ideally, you should choose platforms that your target audience frequents and will help you fulfil your goal. For example, if you want to generate more brand awareness and your analysis shows that your target audience spends most of their time on YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram, you should run video ads on these platforms.
3. Outline your budget
You’ve already defined your goals, mapped out your target audience, chosen your marketing channels, and studied your competitors. Now, use this information to work out how much you’ll need to spend on your campaigns. For example, if you’re using Facebook ads to gain new followers and your competition spent about 50 cents to acquire a new follower, you’ll have to set aside 50 dollars to acquire 100 followers.
4. Provide an overview
Your team and the stakeholders should have a clear idea of what you’re trying to accomplish and how you’ll do it. So, specify the campaign name and description, your target audience, the platforms you’ll be using, the goals you aim to achieve, and the expected ROI.
5. Create your ads
Once you’ve outlined the strategy to your team and stakeholders, put your plan into action and start creating your ads. You want to do A/B testing to figure out the ads that are working best for your brand. And make sure you focus significant resources on running video ads because they can give you higher ROI and engagement compared to other types of ads. You can make video ads easily and quickly using InVideo online ad maker.
To learn how to create video ads that will help you sell, check out this in-depth tutorial:
Step 8: Track performance and create a feedback loop
Your social media strategy and plan are not set in stone. You cannot create it once and forget about it. Since there are so many variable factors, you need to constantly keep studying what is working and then updating your strategy accordingly.
To track the success of your social media marketing strategy, you will need to keep track of the metrics that show you how well something has performed. The metrics you use will depend on the goals you wanted to achieve with a particular strategy.
For instance, if increased brand awareness was your goal, the metrics you can look at are the number of impressions on social media, increase in the number of website visits, and the number of views on your content. If your goal was to increase the number of sales, you will look at the number of people who took action on the ads you ran — the number of clicks, people who went to the checkout page, and so on.
If the numbers rose as per your initial assessment, this means your strategy is working and you should double down on it. If some indicator is off and not working as per your expectation, this means you need to go back and see what can be changed to help you get back on track.
To get a better understanding 0f the social media metrics you shouldn’t overlook, check out this video by Neil Patel:
5 Pro tips to help you create a killer social media strategy
Now that you know how to create your social media strategy, there are some pitfalls that you need to be aware of before you get started. So, here are 5 pro tips for you to keep in mind to ensure your social media works effectively:
Tip #1 - Don’t skip out on video marketing
In 2020, 96% of consumers increased their online video consumption, and 9 out of 10 viewers said that they wanted to see more videos from brands and businesses. In fact, as of 2022, an average person is predicted to spend 100 minutes per day watching online videos.
You cannot do without video marketing in your social media strategy. Videos are more engaging, have better retention, and provide better conversion as compared to any other form of content on the web. And if you’re still sceptical because creating videos is tedious and time-consuming, a tool like InVideo can help you change that perception
Tip #2 - Treat every channel uniquely
As you're mapping out your social media strategy, it's important to remember that each channel is unique. While the overall goal of your strategy may be to get people to visit your website, each channel will require different approaches and content.
Even when you are repurposing content, you cannot use the same content on different social media channels. This is because people consume content on different platforms differently. Twitter is meant for small, pithy texts. Youtube is better for long-form videos. Instagram reels and Tiktok are meant for small form videos. This separation means that you need to approach content creation differently for each platform.
For instance, even if you’re switching between short-form content platforms like Instagram Reels and YouTube shorts, you cannot just post a reel you created on YT shorts. You need to understand how the algorithm here works. Check out this video to understand how to repurpose Reels and Tiktoks for shorts:
You can easily repurpose video content using InVideo’s online video maker, which allows you to change the aspect ratio of your videos quickly and seamlessly and also provides a robust video-editing suite that caters to every social media platform out there.
Tip #3 - Focus on getting your content mix right
As a brand, you want to promote your products and services but people don’t want to consume promotional content. Then, how can you go about achieving your content marketing objectives? Simply by creating a content mix by following the 80-20 rule or the Pareto principle.
This means you want to create educational, entertaining and engaging content 80% of the time and create promotional content the remaining 20% of the time. This allows you to build connection and trust with your audience and as a result, they don’t mind consuming promotional content created by you. In fact, they will respond better to it.
In addition to the Pareto principle, you also want to focus on distributing content as per the goals you want to achieve through your social media strategy. If for instance, your goals are to increase website traffic, grow your social media followers and at the same time also increase the number of leads you generate, you will need to divide content accordingly — spreading it out between content that allows you to increase traffic and followers and content that helps you generate leads.
Tip #4 - Automate posting and scheduling
Batch creating content and then automating the posting is a boon when you need to stay consistent and optimize your content to align with your goals. It can help you save time and utilize it better to brainstorm future content. It can help you optimize your posting time. You want to post when your audience is online and that might not necessarily overlap with your office hours. You can either go crazy trying to post at odd times or simply schedule your posts to get the job done.
You can use tools like Buffer, Hootsuite, Planoly etc to schedule your content.
Tip #5 - Humanize your brand
When your audience understands who you are and what you stand for, they'll be more likely to connect with your brand. Also, people like to connect with people and not nameless, faceless entities that are trying to sell their products and services. So, humanize your brand by creating relatable content that helps people feel more connected. Don’t be afraid to share opinions, ideas, and your own principles.
Another great way to do this is by showcasing the people behind the brand: employees and customers alike. Showcase these human beings by using photos of them in action or other relevant content. For example, add an employee as a moderator for a Facebook group or Twitter chat or post with a personal profile on LinkedIn vs using a company page.
Wrapping up
Having a well-documented strategy for your social media isn’t enough. Neither is it a once-written and done thing. You have to execute the strategies consistently and create a feedback loop from all your social activities. But the steps and pro tips we’ve shared should give a direction on how to go about the process.
If you want to learn more about how you can use videos to amplify your brand on social media, check out this blog. If you learn better through videos, check out our YouTube channel for daily tips and tricks.
