How to Create a Social Media Marketing Strategy From Scratch

Knowing what you want to achieve from your social media marketing presence is essential, as these goals will essentially be the foundations for your strategy. Your goals should also be closely aligned with your core business objectives, so if you need a bit of inspiration, reflect on these first before laying out what social media success will look like for you. Whether you want to see increased revenue, boost brand engagement, or drive more traffic to your website, pinning these goals down ahead of crafting your strategy is key. They’ll inform some of the choices you’ll make further down the line, too — from determining campaigns to fine tuning the tone of voice that you’ll use across your chosen platforms.

 

When it comes to platforms, choosing one that works for your business is a must.There’s a few elements to balance here too, and these include:

1. Demographic 

Determining the demographic of each platform and identifying where your target audience is in relation to this will give you the best grounds for generating an impactful social media strategy. When assessing each option, think about whether you can engage with your target audience on this platform naturally and if not, could an alternative platform lead you to your ideal customer? Researching demographics may sway you towards a platform that is better suited to reaching your audience, or it could give you a more distinct idea of the social media marketing tactics that you’ll need to utilise in order to resonate with your audience across different platforms. 
 

2. Functionality & purpose

Modern social media platforms have a myriad of capabilities and benefits. Understanding the benefits of social media marketing on a particular platform means identifying what it functions to serve your business with in terms of KPIs. For example, TikTok provides abundant opportunities to grow brand communities by starting conversations with its humanised, video snippets, whereas Pinterest can grow lead generation by providing aspirational ‘scrap-booking’ content for sectors such as clothing, interiors and food businesses. Facebook can be a hub for nurturing brand loyalty with its realms of forums and interest-specific groups, whereas Twitter is a prime spot for building your brands’ public relations profile. To get the most out of each platform, you’ll want to create and share content that complements the purpose of each channel. 

3. Downsides 

Due to the variety of options available, it can only be expected that some channels will have their limitations. For example, if you’re keen to use Linkedin but you don’t have the resources needed to create and publish in-depth articles and whitepapers, then you may not be attracting the types of leads you’d have hoped for. Likewise, if you’re looking to market technical, long-form content, then TikTok might not be compatible with your strategy goals. It’s worth keeping your business at the forefront and assessing how your sector and existing values could be translated into content for each channel, helping you to ensure that you’ve chosen the right platform to work with in the long run — rather than running off the back of one post that garnered a higher reach than usual!

Social media is an ‘always on’ environment, impacted by all aspects of life  — from politics to pop culture and reality television. In order to make sure you’re staying as relevant and up to date as possible, you’ll want to keep a tab on trends and breaking news. One of the most commonly used resources is a general social media calendar, where you can plot both annual ‘awareness’ days/weeks/months, as well as scheduling in some time to be reactive.

In terms of spotting these phenomenons, Google Trends is a great port of call. Simply search your topic and the site shows you real time data on search behaviour and ‘rising queries’ — these are the ones to jump on, reflecting spikes in user interest. Staying upto date with social media marketing trends can also mean observing the top performing, emerging content types, and trialling them to gauge how successful they are amongst your own audience.

Of course, a successful strategy must be measured and benchmarks have to be laid out consistently in order to see improvement. While there’s a plethora of options available, it’ll likely require some trial and error to determine which tool is right for your business. Contrary to many beliefs, social media marketing requires just as much data-driven reporting as SEO or PPC strategies, as this level of precision will allow you to pinpoint what is working —  and what isn’t. With our in-house expertise, we’re able to curate impactful social media marketing reports that are easily digested.