A robust social media strategy is essential for any brand aiming to connect with its audience, build brand awareness, and drive growth or sales. Having a presence on social media platforms is no longer enough, it’s essential for brands to have a well-thought-out strategy that aligns with their business goals.
This guide will take you through the essential steps to develop a successful social media strategy.
From understanding your audience, setting goals, choosing the right platforms, and creating engaging content, you’ll be equipped with the tools needed to elevate your social media game.
What is a social media strategy?
A social media strategy is a strategic plan that outlines your goals for social media, the steps you’ll need to take to achieve them, and the KPIs to measure the performance. The more specific your plan is, the more effective it will be.
Your social media strategy will need to be tailored to your business as well as the best tools at your disposal. It doesn’t matter if you decide to use organic or paid social, as long as you have a plan.
Benefits of having a social media strategy
Having a good social media strategy means execution on the platforms will be more efficient and organised. Using a social media strategy means you’re well-equipped with all the information you need before posting.
CEEK have a wealth of experience with social media management and the team will always prioritise creating a strategy before any execution on the platforms.
What are the steps to create a social media strategy?
Follow our steps below to lay the groundwork for a successful social media strategy:
1) Setting goals
Begin creating your strategy by defining clear, measurable, and achievable goals, these goals should align with your overall business objectives.
Below are some examples of goals from our clients and how we managed to achieve them.
Increase brand awareness – As the oldest French restaurant in London, L’Escargot by no means lacks prestige or credibility but they needed to increase their digital brand awareness, CEEK’s organic social media approach included refreshing L’Escargot’s content creation to highlight every detail of the L’Escargot experience leading to over 5,000 new followers on Instagram in the first six months of the partnership.
Generate leads and/or sales – Mogu Mogu are a brand CEEK launched in the UK market, their goal was to create brand awareness and drive sales. Within a year, Mogu Mogu’s TikTok account reached 104k followers and they were the 3rd best-selling drink on TikTok after Prime and Lucozade.
Drive website traffic – Putt in the Park tasked CEEK with elevating the brand’s digital presence and increasing website traffic, by executing our carefully planned social media strategy, Putt in the Park had 6,000 new visitors to the website in the first month of working together.
2) User research
The next step is to understand the intended audience; this will educate you to make informed decisions on the content you share. You can use the social media platform’s analysis tools and Google Analytics to provide insight into your audience.
If you’re already running activity on social media platforms, then check out our guide to understand how to gain audience insights from performance analysis.
3) Competitor research
This is a crucial step that must not be skipped. You will need to find the answers to the following questions; which types of content are your competitors sharing and how often? Are their audiences engaging with the content they post? What’s their tone of voice and branding?
You want to understand exactly what your competitors are doing well whilst also finding out potential weaknesses that you can capitalise on.
4) Picking the right platforms
Choose the platforms where your target audience is most active and where your content would be best placed.
For example, Instagram is great for visual content with a young to middle-aged target audience but Facebook is better for a broader audience and is a great platform for community building and ads.
5) Create a content calendar
Creating a content calendar will ensure you stay organised with your posting schedule and allows you to balance different types of content. After analysing your audience you will know the time and day when your audience is most active on your chosen platform.
You will also be informed on the type of content you should be posting and where after completing your competitor research.
At CEEK we always agree on content pillars for our clients to ensure we keep the content we’re posting varied, for example, a hospitality client might have the following content pillars; Food, Drinks, Entertainment, Private Dining, and Group Dining.
6) Create great content
The type of content you’re creating will depend on your chosen platforms but you should always invest in creating great content. You must align with your brand voice and resonate with your target audience.
At CEEK we have bespoke strategies for content creation with experience across multiple platforms, we ensure that all content produced for clients elevates their brand message and is crafted with specific goals in mind.
Summary
Following these steps will help structure and strengthen your social media strategy, it is important to keep up to date with social media platforms as it’s inevitable that there’ll be new tools, channels, and trends.
But, CEEK will always be at the forefront of these updates so follow us on our social channels to be the first to know of any updates that could affect your social media strategy. Please contact us if you have any questions or need our specialised support for your brand!