Good social media marketing, like any part of your broader marketing, needs to be informed by a detailed strategy that will help you prioritize and execute tasks based on your business’s unique goals.
Having an effective strategy in place can make all the difference when it comes to making sure your resources are being used efficiently, that your approach to marketing is aligned with your target audience, and that you’re doing everything possible to achieve a high ROI through social media activities.
If you’re tackling social media marketing for the first time, or you’re revisiting your previous efforts to optimize your future results, here’s an overview of the essential elements of your strategy, and a handy social media strategy template you can adapt to your brand.
1. Your SMART Goals
To make sure you maintain a sense of direction while you develop and implement your social media strategy, it’s important to start with clear goals in mind which your social media activities will contribute towards.
When setting goals, it’s crucial to avoid falling into the trap of setting goals that are too vague or lofty, which is why we recommend using the SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound) framework to ensure your goals are as effective as possible.
An breakdown of a SMART goal to use in this part of your social media strategy template might be:
Goal: Increase website traffic from social media by 30% within three months.
- Specific: Increase website traffic from our active social media platforms.
- Measurable: Achieve a 30% increase in website traffic.
- Achievable: Previous analysis shows a 22% increase in website traffic from social media over the past quarter, making a 30% increase attainable with optimized content and ads.
- Relevant: Increased website traffic leads to higher lead generation and potential sales.
- Time-bound: Achieve the target increase within three months.
2. Your Target Audience Profile
Your social media strategy template also needs to include a placeholder for your target audience.
Knowing exactly who your target audience is when it comes to social media marketing will help you make more informed decisions on things like your content style guides, the USPs you’re going to be emphasizing, and the landing pages you’ll target in your campaigns.
Some of the key variables you’ll want to consider when you’re building a target audience profile include:
- Age range.
- Location.
- Income range.
- Industry.
- Profession (job title, responsibilities, and who they report to).
Remember that the more detailed the idea of your audience is, the more effectively you’ll be able to target your marketing initiatives. Consider segmenting your audience into even more specific subsets to add nuance to your strategy and ensure your content is getting in front of the right people.
3. Competitive Analysis
Next, you should take some time to analyze the close competitors in your social media niche.
Carrying out a social-focused competitive analysis will help you gain a better understanding of content standards in your industry, and also highlight the weaknesses in your competitors’ strategies that you can exploit.
Some key things to consider for this part of the social media strategy template include:
- Who your competitors are.
- The platforms where they’re most active.
- How often they post on their active platforms.
- The common threads between their most successful posts.
- The areas where they’re performing poorly, which you can target to undermine their market share.
4. Choose Your Channels
The social media channels you’re going to be targeting are another crucial variable to consider when you’re filling a social media strategy template.
Different social media channels favor different content formats and different brand identities, depending on the platform’s own audience focus. A B2B SaaS company targeting the senior leadership teams of large corporations isn’t going to have much success on TikTok, just as an ecommerce brand selling sustainable Gen Z fashion won’t have much luck when marketing on LinkedIn.
It should be easy enough to strike the social channels you’re not going to use from your shortlist. Past this, however, it’s important to consider certain variables like:
- The general demographics that use potential social media platforms.
- How much competitor activity is on each platform.
- Your current share of voice on each platform.
- The content forms and topics you’ll use for each platform.
5. Define your KPIs
KPIs stands for “key performance indicators”, and refers to the method you’ll use to objectively measure how effective your social media marketing is.
Like your SMART goals, your KPIs will help you turn a vague idea of success into something more quantifiable and concrete, making them especially important for measuring your performance over time and generating internal reports.
Here are some examples of the KPIs you may want to integrate into your social media strategy template. Remember that these should be adjusted depending on the channels you’re using and your unique goals.
- Impressions.
- Reactions.
- Shares.
- Comments.
- Engagement rate.
- Click-through rate.
- Follower growth rate.
- Social Media Audit
Once you’ve carried out the previous steps in populating your social media strategy template, you should have a pretty good idea of what your priorities are in each area and how you should focus your time and resources.
Your next step is to carry out a social media audit to collate key data points on your recent social media efforts, and give yourself a better idea of your starting point.
Your social media audit should cover all the KPIs you’ve opted to use as part of your ongoing reporting.
Aside from this, you may want to consider additional variables, such as:
- Your best-performing content types.
- Your current followers vs your competitor average.
- Social media sentiment.
- Your market share of voice.
Social Media Strategy Template
Now that you understand the different components that make up a social media strategy, here’s a look at a complete social media strategy template, and how it might look when filled by a fictional SaaS HR tool provider.
Remember that this is just a starting point, and should be expanded upon or edited based on your business’s specific goals and resources.
If you need any further support on analyzing your social media performance, identifying your strengths and weaknesses, or expediting content creation, be sure to sign up to Highperformr for free and discover all the great features that can make developing your strategy easier.
