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[Webinar] How to Leverage Social Data to Drive Business Growth

Learn how to use social data to gain insights into your customers' behavior,
preferences, and needs.

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GUIDE


THE NO-NONSENSE GUIDE TO BUILDING A SOCIAL MEDIA STRATEGY


NEED A CLEAR AND EASY PATH FOR NAVIGATING SOCIAL MEDIA STRATEGY? YOU’VE COME TO
THE RIGHT PLACE.

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GUIDEThe No-Nonsense Guide to Building a Social Media Strategy
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Table of Contents
 * Introduction
 * Define your goals
   * S.M.A.R.T goals
 * Understand your target audience
 * Study the competition
 * Focus on the right channels
 * Create a content game plan
   * Brand voice 
 * Leverage helpful tools
 * Analyze and refine
 * Final thoughts
 * Experience the social suite of the future

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A good social media strategy is the difference between making some noise and
getting lost in it.

Social media is a complex and multifaceted realm. There’s an assortment of
different platforms, an expansive array of content formats and best practices,
and an ever-evolving set of trends to keep up with. And, every brand under the
sun is on social media competing for attention and engagement.

In such a dynamic setting, it’s crucial to develop a clear strategy to guide
your initiatives. Attempting to leverage social media without a well-defined
strategy is like trekking through a dense forest with no compass. In such a
case, you’re liable to get lost — or, at the very least, you’ll struggle to find
the most profitable path.

With a concrete social media strategy in place, your efforts will be more
decisive, efficient, consistent, and, ultimately, effective.

In this guide, we’ll cover the essential elements you need to create a robust
social media strategy:

 * Define your goals
 * Understand your target audience
 * Study the competition
 * Focus on the right channels
 * Create a content game plan
 * Leverage helpful tools
 * Analyse and refine


DEFINE YOUR GOALS

The legendary Yogi Berra once said, “If you don’t know where you’re going,
you’ll end up someplace else.” 

While this paradox was meant to be comedic, the notion rings true for both
business and life in general — which is why goal setting is the first step
toward building a social strategy.

Business goals are the foundation of any social media strategy. If you lack
clarity in your objectives, your strategy will be baseless.

So, let’s begin by reviewing six common goal categories you may choose to
pursue:

 * Awareness: positioning your brand in front of your target audience to
   establish familiarity 
 * Traffic: driving users to your website and/or social profiles to take further
   action
 * Engagement: spurring audience interaction to build trust and nurture
   relationships
 * Sentiment: shaping the public perception of your brand to win your audience
   over
 * Conversion: capturing subscribers, leads, and purchases to fuel your bottom
   line
 * Customer experience: turning your existing customer base into loyal
   supporters of your brand

Note how these categories are aligned with the stages of your marketing funnel.
So, for brands, the question becomes which segments of the marketing funnel will
we prioritize in our social media efforts?

Tip: The modern marketing funnel goes beyond the traditional stages of
awareness/consideration/conversion to include loyalty and advocacy after the
sale. In other words, happy customers can be one of your brand’s most valuable
assets.


S.M.A.R.T GOALS

Once you’ve considered your overarching goal categories, you’ll then need to dig
deeper by developing S.M.A.R.T goals.

A S.M.A.R.T goal is:

 * Specific: replacing general concepts with quantifiable outcomes
 * Measurable: using objective metrics that can be tracked
 * Attainable: setting ambitious but realistic aims
 * Relevant: understanding how the goal ties into the bigger picture
 * Time-bound: using dates and deadlines to stay accountable

To demonstrate, here’s an example of a S.M.A.R.T goal within the traffic
category: “Reach 5,000 unique visitors per month from social channels by June
2023.”

With your goals in place, the next step is to prepare to reach them — and that
starts with a combination of thoughtful reflection and diligent research.


UNDERSTAND YOUR TARGET AUDIENCE

To resonate on social media, you need to know who you’re talking to.

This involves identifying, researching, and listening to your target audience to
craft content and messaging that’s relevant to them.

Customer personas are a primary method for defining target audience segments. A
customer persona is a fictitious character you create to represent the key
traits and characteristics found within your audience.

A complete customer persona will include a detailed profile with information
such as:

Demographics:

 * Age
 * Gender
 * Location
 * Occupation
 * Income
 * Marital status
 * Education

Psychographics:

 * Personality traits
 * Values
 * Attitudes
 * Interests
 * Behavioral tendencies

Those detailed profiles will allow you to tailor your content accordingly,
maximizing its relevance and effectiveness. But, a potential pitfall with
customer personas is the temptation to create them based on intuition rather
than data. This results in a set of personas that reflect who you want your
audience to be — instead of who they actually are. The solution? Audience
research.


AUDIENCE RESEARCH

Unless your company just launched, you already have a rich source for audience
data: your existing customer base. To learn more about them, implement surveys
at various touchpoints (eg email, checkout pages, etc). 

You should also carefully analyze your brand’s online reviews, customer service
logs, and CRM data to gather insights about their preferences and challenges.

If you already have a social media following, you can use the built-in analytics
tools on each platform to assess your audience’s demographics and interests.

Brandwatch Social Panels is another way to learn about your target audience – it
helps brands listen to the conversation from specific groups of people and learn
about their interests, needs, and opinions.

You can also use public forums like Quora to research what questions people ask
about a particular topic. Those will often indicate what they’re struggling
with. 

Remember, your goal should not only be to know who your audience is — but to
understand what delights and challenges them.

Tip: For additional insight, check out your competitors’ online reviews to see
what their customers say. They’ll likely have a lot in common with your
audience.

READ MORE ON HOW TO DEFINE YOUR CUSTOMER PERSONAS.

Learn more


STUDY THE COMPETITION

You don’t have to reinvent the wheel from scratch, when you formulate your
social media strategy. Observe what other brands in your niche are doing (and
what’s working for them) to get a lay of the land and guide your own strategy.
You can try to beat them at their own game by doing it even better or find areas
to capitalize on.

Put together a list of 5-10 top competitors in your space. If you need help, use
Google and enter search terms related to your products/services. The results on
the first page will likely be from the leaders in the field.

When assessing your competitors, here are some key questions to be asking:

 * Which social channels are they most active and popular on?
 * What types of content are they posting? (video, images, stories, paid ads,
   etc)
 * How much engagement are they getting on various channels and content types?
 * What tone and aesthetic do they use in their content?

Avoid doing a competitive analysis to copy what others are doing. Take notes of
general principles, tactics, and trends you see with the goal of determining how
your brand can make its own unique splash in the space.

Tip: Use a sophisticated tool to gather and analyze the right information so you
can benchmark against your competitors. Here are some ideas on tools you can
consider for competitor analysis.

TO DIVE DEEP INTO COMPETITIVE INTELLIGENCE, YOU CAN READ OUR DEDICATED GUIDE.

Read more


FOCUS ON THE RIGHT CHANNELS

Once you have completed your customer personas and a competitive analysis, you
can decide on which platforms to concentrate on.

Factors to weigh include:

 * The platforms your audience is spending time
 * The differences between platforms
 * Your industry
 * Your goals

Here are some key highlights of the leading networks to consider:

 * Facebook
 * Instagram
 * Twitter
 * LinkedIn
 * TikTok
 * Pinterest
 * Snapchat

With your primary channels selected, the next step is to outline a plan for
publishing consistent, compelling content to engage your audience within each
channel.


CREATE A CONTENT GAME PLAN

Content is the lifeblood of social media, which is why everything we’ve covered
so far has been leading up to this critical section. 

At this point, you’ve now compiled a substantial set of useful information to
help guide your content creation:

 * You’ve pinpointed your goals, which should influence the content types and
   formats you use (eg branded images for awareness, stories, and polls for
   engagement, product images and demo videos for conversion, etc)
 * You’ve defined your customer personas, which should influence your messaging
   (eg speaking in a relatable way, celebrating the things they love, and
   calling out the pain points that bother them)
 * You’ve assessed the competition to see what tactics they’re using, what’s
   working for them (and what isn’t), and how your brand can differentiate
   itself
 * You’ve identified the social media channels which suit best your customer
   personas

By tying the above concepts together, you can develop a series of content
buckets to categorize the content you want to publish. These buckets will bring
organization, focus, and clarity to your content endevors on social media.

DISCOVER HOW TO BUILD YOUR CONTENT MARKETING STRATEGY ON SOCIAL MEDIA.

Learn more

Here’s a hypothetical content bucket for a fitness app company:




BRAND VOICE 

It’s good to have a diverse array of different content buckets. But one unifying
aspect that should be the same throughout all your content is your brand voice. 

Maintaining a consistent voice across social posts and channels is the key to
establishing a brand identity. So, ask yourself, if your brand was a person, how
would it sound? Would it be bold, quirky, playful, inspirational, dramatic,
thoughtful, professional? And you don’t have to select just one tone. You can
compile a collection of adjectives to paint a more holistic picture. 


SCHEDULING

Implement a content calendar to stay on top of your posting activities. In
addition to the day of the week, your publishing calendar should also consider
optimal social media posting times. 

You can put your calendar together manually or save time and resources using a
social media scheduling tool to streamline the process. 

LEARN MORE ON HOW TO IMPROVE YOUR CONTENT STRATEGY IN OUR GUIDE.

Read more


LEVERAGE HELPFUL TOOLS

We know what you must be thinking at this point. With all these different social
media channels, target audiences, SMART goals, and strategies, you’ll have to be
on social media around the clock to keep up. Nope!

There’s an abundance of social media tools out there to make your life a lot
easier—and you should take advantage. 

These could include tools that help with:

 * Scheduling tools
 * Social media inbox management
 * Performance monitoring
 * Benchmarking
 * Content ideation

CONTACT US FOR A SOLUTION TO MATCH YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA STRATEGY NEEDS.

Book a demo


ANALYZE AND REFINE

With the concepts and guidelines above, you have everything you need to create a
clear, robust social media strategy for your brand. This will allow you to be
more decisive, efficient, consistent, and effective on social media. 

Once you begin acting on your strategy, you should periodically review your
performance to learn from your successes and identify weak areas to improve.

When assessing your social media performance, the truth is in the data — which
means you’ll be digging into your KPIs and other metrics. Need some help? We’ve
got you covered!

CHECK OUT OUR GUIDE ON HOW TO MEASURE YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA ROI.

Read more

TO INSPIRE YOU



The following strategy is an example for a fictitious fitness app company.

Example: Goals Awareness: 15k new followers by April 2021 AND Conversion: 5k
new app downloads by April 2021 Customer personas Motivated Martin: male, age
30-38, urban area, corporate job, feels like he’s falling out of shape in his
30’s and is eager to reverse that. AND Busy Brenda: female, age 28-35, suburban
area, middle income, struggles to find time for fitness, balancing work, young
kids, etc. Primary platforms Instagram, Facebook Brand voice Upbeat,
motivational, understanding, with a dash of humor




FINAL THOUGHTS

Now you know what it takes to stand out and how to make social media work for
your business. 

You understand the ins and outs of SMART goals, psychographics, content game
plans, and brand voice — all invaluable when building a following with
scroll-stopping social media content.


EXPERIENCE THE SOCIAL SUITE OF THE FUTURE

Want to see how Brandwatch can help you better understand and engage with
your consumers?

Book a meeting
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