How to create a social media marketing strategy
Okay, first things first: What are your goals? What are you hoping to gain from this strategy? For the first week of your 30-day social media plan, you need to:
Being able to establish and set clear goals for yourself is going to be extremely helpful in the long run when it comes to your social media plan. Are you wanting to get new leads? Raise brand awareness? Boost engagement and reach? Write down what your aims are to better help and hone in on your overall strategy. These goals may lead you to choose social media marketing software that best aligns with your objectives and helps you achieve measurable results. Additionally, using a Kanban board for marketing can help you organize these goals visually, track your progress, and ensure that each aspect of your strategy is moving forward effectively. Define your successes ✅
Now that you have specific goals in mind, how are you going to determine if you were actually successful at achieving those goals? What metrics are you going to track that will help you determine if something was a huge success or a huge flop?
If you’re going to define your successes off of analytics, finding an analytics tool that gives you a detailed report and dives further into each metric of your account is important.
List out any possible challenges 😬
Now, something that sucks to think about but you must really cover all of your bases—what are some of the biggest challenges you could face when coming up with this strategy?
Not creating good enough content?
Not having high enough engagement?
Not having enough time to engage with your audience?
List all of the challenges so you can see what things you need to figure out before you launch your social media plan.
Brainstorm how you can overcome the challenges ⚡️
With the list of challenges in your hand, try and come up with solutions on how you can tackle these challenges.
If you’re afraid you’re not going to create good enough content, is there someone on your team who can help you? Is there someone you can reach out to that can create something you’re looking for like a freelancer or a content creator?
If you’re afraid you’re not going to have high enough engagement on your posts, can you reach out to influencers to share the post and have their audience engage? Can you put money behind the post to get more reach and engagement?
If you’re afraid of not having enough time to engage with your audience, find someone on the team who can help you with liking, commenting, and overall engaging with the audience!
You can find solutions to almost any of the challenges, but you need to know what they are first before you can problem-solve.
Discover your competition 👀
We highly recommend checking out your competition. Especially those that are absolutely killing it in the online space. Check out what they’re doing right and what things could be improved on. What channels are they on? How do they talk to their audience?
Each of these insights, it can help you build out a strategy for your own content!
You’ve figured out what your competition is doing so now it’s time to start looking at your own content. Where are you successful? Is it in your overall content? Your captions? Engagement?
Ask your team what they like and dislike about the current content plan. Do they see anything that can be improved upon?
Write down everything you think is a pro and con with your own content.
Audit your content ✏️
Now for the big one: Auditing your profile!
Take a look through your profile and see what items get the most engagement. Does your feed look consistent and on-brand or are there posts that don’t make sense and could confuse your audience?
Take a peek at your bio. Does it sound like you and your brand?
Figure out your keywords/content pillars 🏛
Social media uses SEO practices, much like Google. And one of the best things to do when it comes to your social media strategy is to figure out your content pillars and keywords specific to your brand.
Brand voice 🗣
Oh, man! This is our favorite one. Brand voice. It’s so important to make sure that your voice remains consistent across all social media channels. If you’re not making it consistent, it’ll confuse your audience and make it seem like your brand doesn’t actually understand who they really are. Not. Good.
With the audit complete, it’s time to make sure that your account is actually optimized for what you need.
Check your profile picture. Is it a logo? Your face? Does it make sense for the overall brand look? Across all of your social media pages, make sure that the logo is consistent so people know exactly what they’re looking for and follow the right person/brand/business! If your logo needs an update, consider using a logo generator AI to create a design that aligns with your brand’s image. Make sure every single part of your profile is complete and filled out. Tell your brand’s story. Show off how you can help your audience. Explain why someone should follow you!
Much like Google, social media uses keywords to make yourself and your profile searchable, so use the specific keywords you chose above for your account to make it more searchable.
Check your demographics 👯♀️
It’s time to figure out who actually follows you currently. Audit your demographics and see who the heck your audience is. Is there a certain age group that follows you? Do you have an audience of mostly men or women or is split? Where do they live?
Knowing who you’re already chatting to is hugely important when it comes to building a social media strategy for your account.
You’ve figured out who your current audience is, but are they the people you want to target and reach for your campaign? Establishing your brand’s identity is important and having an image and idea of who your target audience is will help you break down how you’re going to approach your social media strategy.
But what does your audience want (what they really, really want)? Listening to your audience is *key* when it comes to creating a strategic social media marketing plan. Go through your DMs and comments and see which questions they are asking about the most. What are they saying when it comes to your brand, products, competitors, etc? How do they engage with your content?
Go through your social media and check in on some of your audience. Who do they follow? How do they engage with social media? Are they commenting on specific things? This will help you define what your followers actually want from you so you can put together a more defined social media plan.
Research what your competitors are doing ✍️
Another fun one, if you ask me. What are your competitors doing? How are they using social media to get people to engage? Do they have newsletters? Blogs? Working with content creators? Take a day to really research what others in your space are doing and how you can take what’s working really well for them and make it even better.
Not all social media channels are created equally and something that might be shocking for you? You don’t have to be on every. single. platform. Wild, I know.
Now that you know who your audience is, figure out which platforms they’re more likely to be on and just go on those platforms. Making content for only a few channels and not every single channel available out there will really help you hone in on your voice, be able to engage well, and not feel like you’re being stretched thin amongst all different areas.
Figure out a posting schedule 📅
This is SO important. When are you going to post?! Well, we recommend posting when your audience is actually online (duh!), but how do you figure that out?
There are a couple of ways, but checking in on your analytics will help you figure out which days and times your audience is more likely to be online and engaging with content.
Figure out your content types 📹
There are so many different types of content you can create to help you boost your account. Should you do a Facebook Live? Twitter Space? Instagram Reel? A series of TikToks?
The possibilities are endless … but your resources are not. So figure out what content is actually going to engage your audience! Here are some various content types you can add to your social media strategy:
Contests
Livestreams
Photos and videos
User-generated content
Memes (!!)
Infographics
Polls
Q+A
Before you start planning all your content, it’s important to figure out WHICH content types your audience would actually want. Go through past content and see what your audience engaged with and start making a plan from there.
Come up with content ideas 💡
It’s time to start gathering content ideas! What is something that you can create really well that your audience will actually enjoy? Because creating content just to create content is not the vibe around here. You need to make sure that the content is GOOD and will actually be enjoyed by your audience.
And if need be, ask your audience what they want from you!
💡
Flick’s Tip: Stuck trying to come up with content ideas for the month ahead? We’ve got you! Test out our AI Social Media Assistant to brainstorm content ideas in seconds along with the best
on-brand captions for your social media posts. Click the banner below to get started with a
7-day free trial of Flick! Figure out what you need to create the content 🧐
Once you have figured out what type of content you’re going to create, it’s time to get all the supplies and materials you need to create the content.
Are you going to be taking photos? Videos? Making graphics? All of these pieces require work on the front end so you have it all ready for your social media strategy. Don’t be that person who is scrambling last minute and asking people to drop their own work and help you!
Create the content 🎨
Like Britney says: “It’s time to work, B*!” Start building out the plan and creating the content for your marketing strategy.
Optimize your content 🙌
Can your video be broken up into smaller videos? Can you create Reels from the various pictures you took? Think about all the different ways you can use the same content in a variety of ways!
Something that a lot of people slap together, but should be taken very seriously is a caption! This is such a vital part of your marketing strategy and should not be done at the last minute!
We couldn’t be Flick without talking about hashtags and their importance when it comes to social strategy.
Hashtags are a way for most social media platforms to categorize what a certain piece of content is about. Using very specific, relevant Instagram hashtags for your content is an important component of any social media marketing plan. Figure out your unique hashtag strategy by using Flick today: Schedule out your content to ensure the best times to post ⏰
Scheduling is going to be your absolute savior when it comes to your social media plan. This way you can make sure that your content is actually going up during a time when your audience is engaged, plus you’re not scrambling because you forgot to post something.
Gather all of your content, captions, and hashtags and upload them to your scheduler. Drag and drop the content where you need and want it to be and save it! You won’t have to worry about a single thing.
Flick’s Scheduler is officially here and you can visually plan what your feed looks like before auto-scheduling. Plus, you can now schedule your Instagram carousel posts using Flick! Start your 7-day FREE trial today! Boost your content if needed through paid ads 💸
Notice that a certain post is doing better than another? We highly recommend boosting it. Helping extend the reach of a piece of content that is already doing well on your account will attract new followers, likes, and help grow your customers.
Engage, engage, engage 🥳
This is the secret sauce to having an engaged audience. You must engage back! If people are commenting on your post, respond! Answer their questions in your DMs.
Being active with your followers is important and a way to build brand trust and adds a bit of authenticity to your brand.
Track your analytics 📊
Okay, your social media marketing strategy has been released into the world, and now it’s time to start tracking your analytics and seeing what’s going on. What’s working? What’s not working?
The best way to do this is by checking your analytics on your social media pages. See which post is doing the best engagement-wise.
We recommend using Flick to track all of your analytics and see which content is actually doing the best and which ones could use a bit of a readjustment. Compare your results to goals 🤳
Go back to the very first day when you laid out your goals for your social media strategy. Where are you now with those goals? Are you hitting the engagement you wanted? Getting new leads?
Tracking your conversions is essential to make sure you’re actually tracking your results. If you’re looking for a tool to help you make sure you’re crossing off all the goals you’ve made for yourself, click here to read our essential tools for businesses.
Create a detailed report 📝
It’s time to make a report and show off all of your hard work! In the report, you can detail how much you’ve increased followers, engagement, and reach. You can highlight the number of leads you’ve landed. And you can even showcase what didn’t work and how you plan on tweaking it in the future.
Explain what you have learned during this time and how you can use this information to improve further marketing strategies.
Adjust your strategy if needed ♟
Is something just not working? Readjust! Take a look at your overall marketing goals and see if there is something you can tweak (whether it’s copy, your call-to-action, or the content itself), reapproach the strategy and make the necessary tweaks where needed.
Phew! Now that you’ve gotten through your 30 days, how do you feel? Ready to start implementing the most detailed and incredible social media strategy yourself? We think you’re ready. 😏