What is Social Media Content Marketing?
The core of engaging with a desired audience is to teach them about your brand, expertise, products or services. You should always think about why you are creating content, who you are supporting and how you can reach your business goals and objectives. Did you know 70% of marketers actively invested in content marketing in 2020? A consistent strategy helps save time by knowing what you’ll do before you start. With our quick guide below, we will inform you how to create an efficient social media content strategy and how you can start to better resonate with your audience.
1. Set your goals and objectives
The first step of defining your social media content strategy is to understand your goals and objectives. Some examples could be to increase your brand awareness, brand presence, or to generate leads. This will help you shape and establish what you want to achieve from your strategic planning.
2. Know your audience
Now that you’ve figured out your goals, you need to be clear on who your audience is so you can target them effectively. At WSA we like to flesh out user personas -a semi-fictitious representation of an anticipated target audience, by establishing goals, characteristics, interests and skills. This process ensures everybody involved is on the same page and will help you produce relevant and valuable content that the core readers/viewers you have identified will be interested in and will engage with.
3. Content Audit
The number of social media users in the United Kingdom increased by 2.3million between 2020 and 2021 so it’s clearly very important to evolve and improve your strategy as time progresses. You will need to conduct a content audit of your brand understand and acknowledge the pros and cons of existing content, if any information is outdated and needs to be revised, what types of content is engaging the best with your audience, the types of content that are missing, what networks followers engage with the most, etc. This will help develop a cohesive strategy.
4. Content Channels
The key objective is to focus on what platforms your existing audience engages with the most and ensure the platforms are most popular with your user persona profiles. It is known to be more effective when targeting one area than trying to be present on all platforms. You can push out content on platforms such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. From a social media marketing perspective, Facebook is the most important channel for both B2C (68%) and B2B (48%) marketers.
5. Content Types
All content should have the same look, feel and tone of voice before being pushed out on various platforms. LinkedIn is primarily a B2B platform so the tone of voice will naturally have a more professional tone to it, whereas Instagram is a visual platform that is more conversational because of the types of audience that resonate with this type of content. Various content types such as static images, infographics, video, GIFs and polls will help engage with your audience and prevent your posts from becoming repetitive or unimaginative.
6. Social Management System
Adopting a social management system that includes a content calendar is an important tool to use as this will allow you to stay accountable for everything that is going out on social platforms. It also ensures posts are spaced out appropriately and are published at the best times to post. You can plan, publish and measure your social activity results all in one place to monitor the content that has gone out throughout the weeks/months. Popular CMS tools are Sprout, HubSpot and Hootsuite.
7. Measuring Success
The final step of an effective social media content strategy is measuring results for each platform. This takes you back to your first step of setting your goals and objectives. If you compare results month by month, you’ll know if your strategy is working or if it needs to be tweaked and re-evaluated by A/B split testing content. The types of metrics you can measure and identify include impressions, engagements, conversions and follower growth. The reporting will guide your strategy ensuring your business is maximising every opportunity for success.
