Most businesses, big or small, struggle with a common issue: creating a social media strategy suitable for them. Either they don’t know where to start or feel the need for guidance, or they create strategies that don’t resonate with their business requirements, yielding net results zero.
This blog will walk you through a 12-step plan to create a winning social media strategy that will work for you in the long run, helping you handle this problem and giving you a clear understanding of why you should include what.
1. Work Out a Realistic Budget
A good starting point is to allocate a realistic budget for your social media strategy to understand what you can include and what you can’t. Determine your spending on tools, advertising, content creation, and any other expenses.
This is because social media management pricing can vary, and you need to align your budget with your business goals.
If you have the budget ready from the very beginning, mapping your further business requirements becomes easy to plan, so you can execute your strategy effectively without overspending.
2. Analyze Your Industry and Competitors
Once your budget is fixed, conduct thorough research on your industry and competitors. The purpose of this is to have clarity from the very beginning and not try everything that is not needed for your business.
Besides, analyzing the industry landscape helps you understand where competitors excel and where they fall short so you can set social media targets and identify opportunities.
For instance, if XYZ dominates Facebook but neglects Instagram or Twitter, focus on these underutilized platforms. This approach lets you engage an underserved audience, minimizing direct competition and maximizing your reach.
3. Figure out Your Target Audience
To create a foolproof social media strategy, understanding your target audience is another important step that you can’t skip. To figure out whom to target, check their demographics, psychographics, age, gender, interests, location, language, and other relevant factors.
You can either use platform analytics or social media tools for this. This will help you notice your audience’s behavior across different socials. For instance, your Instagram audience’s interests will be different from that of Facebook’s. Study that and then move ahead with strategic content creation.
4. Focus on Social Channels That Matter
Once you have mapped out your target audience, this step is simple. Focus on where your target audience is. Just because there are so many social channels out there, it doesn’t mean you should be everywhere. Focus on what matters to your audience.
Start small, take baby steps, and build your presence and credibility as a brand there. Explore and experiment with different ways of engaging with your audience and observe what works. Take McDonald’s experiment on X, for example.
Don’t imitate other brands, as what might work for them might not work for you. Plus, it’s good to carve your own brand journey.
5. Thorough Audit of Past Performance
Before building a carefully thought-out social media strategy, take a step back and analyze your past performance. It will help you dodge the mistakes you have been making before and give you a clear perspective of what you should do now.
Star by examining each profile as if you’re seeing it for the first time. Review your analytics and data, assessing whether you met your initial goals.
Compare your presence with competitors, noting similarities, differences, and their engagement strategies. Identify areas where you’re lacking and note them. This audit will clarify each social’s purpose so that your current strategy can do better.
6. Set Aligned Goals with Business Objectives
Now that you have a clear perspective of what, why, and how, you can set your SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound) goals that align with your business objectives.
Examples include increasing brand awareness, generating leads and sales, growing your social audience, and providing prompt customer care. Each goal should guide your investment of time and resources, helping you track meaningful metrics like engagement, click-through rates, conversions, etc.
This alignment ensures your social media efforts directly contribute to your overall marketing ROI and business success.
7. Find Inspiration for Content Creation
As you proceed to plan your content strategy, there’s no harm in taking inspiration from brands who are doing great work. But be mindful of the thin line between taking inspiration and blatantly copying.
What you can do is study the popular brands from your niche or any that you feel are great on social. You can study their case studies, track their social posts and see what the audience likes about it, or even monitor what your target customers talking about online.
Trust the process; you can learn a lot about their wants and needs and then curate content accordingly.
8. Opt for a Social Media Content Calendar
As you start creating content, you will definitely need a social media calendar in the long run to organize, track, and schedule.
While you can definitely do this in a manual Excel sheet, that will require a lot of time and full-time dedication on your part, which might be difficult for both bigger and smaller brands.
Hence, it is better to opt for a social media tool whose content calendar will automate manual tasks and give you a clear view of what is going on each day/week/ month. With an organized social media calendar, you won’t be creating repetitive content anymore and make changes if required.
9. Boost with Ads
Did you know that businesses spend around $28 on ads per user worldwide on social media, and 77% of marketers use retargeting ads as part of their Facebook and Instagram advertising strategies?
While organic reach on social media depends on a lot of factors done right, paid advertising can be a valuable strategy for boosting your brand visibility.
What you can do is, while deciding your budget, allocate a portion to social media ads to reach a broader audience and promote specific content to drive conversions.
When you want to make your mark on social and reach the maximum number of people, experiment with different ad formats and targeting options to maximize your ROI.
10. Leverage the Reach of Influencers
If you don’t incorporate collaboration with influencers into your social media strategy, you might miss out on many benefits. Influencers connect with their audience on a grassroots level.
You can leverage this connection to reach your audience on a deeper level and build a loyal audience. For example, check how Nike collaborates with influencers.
You just have to find the right influencers who align with your brand values and have a genuine connection with your target audience, leverage their reach and credibility, and amplify your social media efforts.
11. Ensure Customer Support
As you are almost ready with your social strategy frame, remember to integrate customer service into your social media strategy by deciding how you’ll use each channel for support.
Consider creating a dedicated customer service account or setting up auto-replies for messages so that no negative/ positive feedback goes unnoticed. This is because if the company’s customer service is excellent, 75% of consumers will do business with them again, even after making a mistake.
So, ensure you have a plan for addressing inquiries, either through self-service portals or self-service chatbots. Also, including working hours in your support page’s bio helps manage expectations for response times.
12. Track and Adjust
The last but most important step will always involve tracking what you did and adjusting if it’s not working. To grow your social media presence, you need to continuously evolve your strategy and analyze your brand performance (posts/content/campaigns) to understand whether it’s yielding results.
Social platforms offer native analytics; you can use that or a social media tool for better insights. Monitor and track metrics like reach, engagement, hashtag performance, organic and paid likes, impressions, clicks, follower count, etc, to identify top performers and set benchmarks.
Make small, regular adjustments to your strategy instead of waiting for large, periodic changes. This constant evolution helps you stay on top of trends and improve strategically.
Key Takeaway
It may seem like a lot of information to process, but you just need to start from somewhere. This blog is just a roadmap to help you out with that. Take it step by step and understand the significance/necessity of each.
Just remember, whatever you do and however you do it, leave room for trial and error, and for best results, involve your team for diverse inputs and faster completion.