How to Create An Effective Social Media Content Strategy

Creating your social media marketing strategy doesn’t need to be painful. With over two decades of experience under our belt, we’ve learned that simplicity is the best for social media content strategy. If you understand the basics correctly, then you’re already on your way to success. A social media content strategy for your local business ensures that your hard work in social media marketing supports your overall business goals. To get started, here are the simple steps to create your social media content strategy for your local business:

1. Plan your social media marketing goals according to your business goals

By establishing clear social media goals, you’ll be able to align the rest of your strategy, define the key metrics you’ll be measuring and increase the chance of social media success. To get the best results for your local business, align your social media goals with your overall business goals. Use these goals to determine the type of content you will create. In general, there are nine social media goals that will maximise your social profits:

1. Increase brand awareness.
2. Drive traffic to your website or landing page.
3. Generate new leads.
4. Grow revenue (by increasing signups or sales).
5. Build a community around your business.
6. Boost brand engagement.
7. Increase media mentions.
8. Boost your social customer service satisfaction.
9. Increase positive conversations about your brand.

We recommend keeping your social media marketing simple by focusing on two to three goals – whichever are most aligned with what your business needs right now. For example, a new skincare brand that specialises in vegan and cruelty-free products for Generation Z and younger women might want to focus on building an audience if they’re starting from scratch. So their goal might be to use social media to increase brand awareness. Whatever goal you choose, make sure it really aligns with your business goals. Otherwise, it can be easy to ignore social media and see it as ineffective when in reality, the strategy isn’t. Social media strategy just needs to be adjusted to suit the business strategy as a whole.

2. Identify your target audience

Everything is better if you can speak directly in the language your target audience uses and understands. Perhaps you can even say what they thought before or told a friend. A good way of defining your target audience for social media is by creating personas. Personas are fictional, descriptive profiles of people who belong to your target market. If you’ve never built out personas a bit it might feel like writing fiction. But these can be really powerful tools when you’re looking for what kind of content most resonates with your audience. When creating a buyer persona, start by looking at the demographic information of your potential customers (age range, location, occupation, income, etc.) and their psychographic information (behaviours, attitudes, lifestyle preferences, personality types, interests, hobbies, etc.). Be sure to also include their needs and challenges for an added layer of depth. You can further develop your target audience profile by checking out the complete guide to marketing personas to help you further develop your target audience profile. These personas remind you and your team of the people behind the data and help to tweak your content to suit them.

3. Find out the best social networks for your business

It’s normal to see large businesses and large corporations with accounts on all social networks but what about local businesses with only a few teams? That would be difficult. Instead of trying to be on every social network, focus on the networks where your target audience is. You can connect with your audience by choosing the right social media platform and customising important messages for each platform. In addition to knowing where your audience is spending their time, your brand identity and the types of products and services you offer can help you determine which social media platform will have the most impact on your business. It’s worth noting into consideration how each social media platform has its own unique features and characteristics suited to certain types of content. Twitter is great for conversations and trending topics, while LinkedIn is more suited to sharing professional and career-related information. So keep that in mind when you make your selection.

4. Plan and create content

Creating high-quality content that resonates with your audience is fundamental to a successful social media strategy. The content you create plays an important role in achieving your business and social media goals. Your social media posts should be aligned with the purpose of each social platform and its audience. And again, it helps to get a good understanding of your target audience will help with this. Look at your buyer personas and consider:

• What are their goals and challenges?
• How can you help to solve them?

When it comes to content planning, we can’t stress enough the positive impact that using a social content calendar can have on planning your posts. This allows you to refine the details of what you post and make sure everything is working to support your business goals. Content calendars can also help you plan your posts in advance. You can also fine-tune the timing of posts so that viewers are most likely to see them and get involved.

5. Monitor and measure performance

It is important not to skip this step. Once you’ve started creating and submitting content, you can monitor your analysis to see which content most resonates with your audience and helps you achieve social media. Goal. For example, you may find that video assets perform better than photos, or vice versa, and you can make changes to your content strategy based on the data you observe. There are so many metrics available, instead of looking at them all, focus on the ones that support your goals. For example. If your goal is to drive traffic to your blog posts, it doesn’t make sense to focus on Instagram likes. Here are some general social media metrics you can use to track your performance:

• Reach: An estimate of how many people viewed your content at least once in a given time period.
• Click-through rate (CTR): The percentage of people who clicked on your content, social media profiles, or links.
• Engagement rate: The total number of interactions (likes, comments, shares, etc.) divided by the total number of followers on your account.
• Hashtag performance: If you plan to use hashtags in your content or social media marketing campaigns, by monitoring the performance of your hashtags, and how those hashtags affect your reach and engagement rates. For example, you can look at your most-used hashtags or at posts with hashtags that are associated with the highest reach and engagement rates.

Each social media network has its own set of insights and analytical tools that can be used to measure these metrics. Analytics is also integrated with Buffer, integrating all social metrics and KPIs into one platform to simplify the process of measuring and analyzing data. We also recommend using Google Analytics to see which social media platforms are driving the most referral traffic to your website. Our social media experts have got a list of meaningful Google Analytics reports to help you boost your social media marketing plan.

Final takeaways

The key to any successful strategy is its adaptability. Social media is evolving rapidly, with new tools and features being released on a regular basis. While the above tips can help you with the basics, it’s important to review and adjust your social media content strategy throughout the year to better reflect your new goals, tools, or plans. This involves constantly tracking and measuring performance and making tweaks along the way based on insights. And while it may seem overwhelming, using a social media management tool can help you get more done in less time by allowing you to create, schedule, and analyse your posts on a single platform, as well as interact with your audience.

How we can help

As a business owner, it is important to engage with your prospect and existing customers on several platforms to let them discover your business. There are a variety of platforms available, each with its own set of adjustments and updates. And every now and then, a new platform or strategy appears to be dubbed the next great thing. Trying to keep up with them is difficult, especially when you’re running your own business every day. Why not reach out to our social media experts? Whether you’re looking to establish brand awareness or simply market your business on multiple social media networks, you can rely on our social media services to succeed on social media. View a full list of deliverables and pricing for our social media marketing services or contact our social media strategists to get a free social media marketing consultation!