How to create a successful Social Media Marketing Strategy

With so many eyes scrolling through social platforms each day, having a social media marketing strategy is essential in your business. Gone are the days of renting a single billboard in a sad, little paddock on the side of the highway. Instead, imagine social media as a paddock full of billboards with people coming to it voluntarily, and happily wandering through it multiple times a day.

With paid social media advertising, you can spend on getting your “billboard” AKA your post seen first. However, if you would like to naturally attract people to your posts and build a community who will keep visiting your account, then focusing on an organic social media marketing strategy is key.

What is organic social media marketing?

Organic social media marketing is posting on your social media channels for free, without any budget spent on advertising or promotion to increase reach and conversions. Instead the focus is to build an engaged audience and relationships with your community, as well as generating brand awareness. This will translate into more leads, conversions and greater customer retention.

Organic social media marketing is a great way to maximize your social media channels’ audience and to drive traffic to your website. Here are 5 tips to help you on your way to creating a successful organic social media marketing strategy.

Know your customer

Before you even begin putting together your social media marketing plan, it’s essential to know who your target audience is.

Identify 3-4 different types of customers your business already attracts and perhaps some that you would like to attract moving forward. What stage of the buyer journey are they in? Which online platforms do they spend their time on? Do they interact with videos, images or written formats more?

By spending time building your customer personas for your business, you’ll have a much clearer direction when it comes to creating your social media marketing strategy. It will help you to create content and write captions that will resonate with the right people.

Know your brand

How does your branding align with your services/products, your vision for your business and your social media presence? Are you a business that is able to capture a lot of video to portray your services or products? Do you actually need a TikTok presence if your audience age bracket is 40-60 years old?

Your branding plays a huge role in attracting your ideal customers and helps provide direction for a social media marketing strategy. By knowing your brand and where your customers and target audience spend their time online, you can focus on the channels that will perform best for you.

Social media content ideas & topics

Build out a content bank that has a list of ideas for your social media posts. Start to add in the buyer stage, brand pillar, format and live date for the post. Note which one of your customer personas it relates to and the problem this post may help them to solve. Remember, your content isn’t always about your brand - it’s about providing value to your audience.

Build out your social media content strategy to also include the key performance indicator (KPI) for each post and how you will measure its success. For example, will the purpose be to drive traffic to your website/link in bio, or is the post aiming to boost social media engagement ie saves and shares. This is very important as it will help you measure the post’s success at the end of the month and will help you to shape your social media content strategy for the following month.

Start planning and creating content

Start to plan your ideas into a calendar for the week or month ahead. This will help you see any repetition, or topics you haven’t yet covered. Try to stick to a weekly or monthly theme to create consistency across all of your marketing, from social media channels to email marketing and blogs, which then makes it easy for your audience to digest the key messaging.

Be platform specific when creating content, use the latest features available to each of the social media platforms and post regularly. Don’t forget to be ‘social’ and engage with your audience on your posts, replying to comments and direct messages.

A social media content plan will also help you to become more efficient by bulk creating content, which saves you time and keeps your team on the same page. It really is a win-win!

Time to analyse

Set some time aside each week or each month to check your social media and website analytics. There’s no point in doing all of this work if you’re not going to check which posts performed well.

By reviewing your data, you will gain insight into your social media audience, their behaviours, who you’re really attracting into your community, and perhaps even get new service/product ideas! You’ll learn which methods get more traffic to your website and where the roadblocks might be in your customer journey. Taking the time to review the performance of your content will also help to make the planning process much smoother the following month.

Try incorporating some of these tips the next time you build out your social media marketing strategy and let me know how you go! If you would like further direction specific to your business, check out my social media marketing services and contact me.