Introduction
Building an effective social media content marketing strategy for every social media platform is very important to any small business. This will help to keep you organized and consistent when you’re trying to run so many different platforms. Here are seven different steps that will work for any social media platform and I advise you to do this with every social media platform that you plan to market on.
1. Define Your Audience
The first step is to define your audience. Based on the platform that you are doing these steps for will define what audience you should be targeting. On every different social media platform will be a different target audience that you are trying to reach. For instance, Pinterest will reach more girls than boys so you should use it to reach your girl target audience and Youtube reaches more guys so you should use it to reach more of your guy target audience. Some different ways that you can define your audience is through their age, gender, interests, and other things like this. This will allow you to figure out what content will register best with your audience and will drive the best results.
2. Set goals
After you have defined the audience that you want to reach, the next step is to set goals for each platform. These goals are going to be different for every platform because of the different expected outcomes. For twitter you should create a goal that focuses on retweets while other platforms like instagram you should create a goal that is to reach a certain amount of likes or followers by a certain date. These goals should be SMART goals which means Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound. Set multiple goals per platform and make sure that they are pushing your boundaries and forcing you to grow!
3. Plan Your Content Mix
The next step is to plan your content mix. For each platform your context mix is going to be different. Your content mix should include content that is sponsoring your business, informational content, entertaining content, and any other content that you can think of. A good rule to follow is the 80 20 rule. 80% of your content should be giving value to your audience while the other 20% should be focused on promoting your business or brand. This will allow you to keep the attention of your audience while also putting your products in front of them. The other part of planning your content strategy is planning when to post your content. When doing this you want to make sure and stay consistent with your content and try to train your audience to expect certain posts at certain times. Some different ideas that you could do are meme monday and tip tuesday. This will make your audience excited for these days and will keep them coming back for these posts. Be creative and find what works best for your audience.
4. Optimize your Page for Engagement
The next thing that you need to make sure of is that your page is optimized for engagement. This means that your entire page is set up to where anybody who finds your page can stay there and continually look at posts until they realize that they have wasted an hour scrolling. One of the best ways to do this is to constantly be creating content. When you are first starting to post as often as you can, it doesn’t matter if the content is good or not or how much effort you put into it. Just post it and you’ll be surprised. Some content that you put the least effort into and think might do the worst will actually sometimes be one of your most liked posts. You also want to make sure that you put your links to other social channels, your email, and whatever else the platform allows you to put about you. This will allow people to connect with you and will drive leads and visitors to your website. Just make sure that your channel is completely filled with the information the platform allows you to put.
5. Consider Using other Social Media Tools
Once you have set everything up, consider using other social media tools. Some of these tools could be Meta Business sweet, which allows you to pre schedule posts and other cool things on Facebook and Instagram or Hootsuite, which will allow you to schedule posts on almost any social channel. These two tools are a great way to make sure that you are staying consistent and up to day with the holidays and other trends that may be going on. The best way to use these tools is to try and schedule up to a month in advance. This will allow your content to still be up to date with trends while also making sure that you aren’t falling behind on posts and will give you time to add or change posts that may be irrelevant to the trends that are happening.
6. Incorporate Social Media Ads
After you have all of the organic side of social media set up, you can then incorporate social media ads. Ads cost different amounts based on the platform. LinkedIn is more expensive than instagram and Pinterest is more expensive than Facebook so you want to make sure that you are spending your money wisely. I would recommend to start running ads for top of funnel marketing or in other words brand awareness. These are ads that aren’t super targeted and are just to get your small business name out there. They will make people aware of your business and will help build a following that will soon turn into a bunch of conversions! As you progress through the funnel you can start to run more targeted ads for your products and services which is when the money starts to roll in. It’s called the long game strategy.
7. Track, Measure and Refine
The last step is to track, mesure, and refine. With everything marketing, this is always the last step. You want to look back at what you have done and figure out what is working and what is not. Continue doing the stuff that is working and stop doing the stuff that isn’t working. It’s that simple. Continue to try new things and compare it to what you have been doing. Who knows, you may just find a niche in the market that turns out to be your best target audience.
Conclusion
These 7 simple steps are a quick and easy way to start your social media marketing journey. They will work for any different channel and I promise the work you put in will pay off. Choose today to focus on one social channel and then when you have that one mastered add another and so forth. The marketing grind never stops you just keep growing.