Everyone spoke about social media strategy and how consistently showing up seems to work like magic.

But Alex has a problem. Her business has a social media presence, but there has been no measurable growth in her brand from that. Mostly because she hadn’t been measuring the results of her social media content.

If this sounds familiar and you are also slowly ramping up your social media marketing, you have come to the right place. 

With 4.5 billion users worldwide, as one of the most preferred channels to reach brands today, Social Media Platforms can truly work wonders for your brand. 

But, you can’t just post haphazardly when you have an announcement. Or when an idea strikes you. Building and executing a social media strategy is not a sprint; it is a marathon. And a rewarding one at that. 

What exactly is a social media strategy?

Your social media strategy is your game plan for everything related to social media and social media marketing.

It is a framework that details the social media platforms you’re active on, as well as your content marketing, content distribution, and engagement strategies. And the tools you use to make it all work seamlessly. This also accounts for feedback from customers and analytics to close the loop while making tweaks and updates. 

A social media strategy is a workflow that brings cohesion and consistency to your social media marketing campaigns.

The catch with using social media networks for your brand is that it can be daunting for a small business and extremely complex for an established brand to leverage all the features social media has. 

To address Alex’s problem, it was the lack of a social media strategy that let her down. 

But can having a strategy in place make such a big difference? Yes. A full-fledged strategy brings a lot of benefits to the table, and they are all quite significant. 

So, what are they, you may be asking? And how can you know when you need a social media strategy? Let’s find out.

Why do you need a social media strategy? 

Everything works better when you have a plan. It takes the pressure off and ensures you don’t stray away from your path. 

Specifically, a social media strategy enables your brand to grow by: 

• Building a framework and guideline for a consistent content marketing plan. This way you can rely on your plan instead of waiting for inspiration to find you. 
• Improving productivity by building workflows that allow automation. 
• Helping your SEO efforts. Showing up consistently on social media and posting relevant content can be very helpful for overall SEO campaigns. 
• Creating a brand voice and content that has a cohesive message for your audience and builds brand awareness. 
• Allowing you to gain social currency and merit behind your social media postings.
• Giving you insights into what works well with your audience via engagement and analytics so you can fine-tune your future campaigns.

Now that we’ve got the “why” out of the way, let’s take a look at the “how”. As in how to create your very own social media strategy. 

Creating a High-Impact Social Media Strategy 

We said this before but for emphasis, let us mention it again. Social media marketing is not a sprint, it is a marathon. It is also one of the most important aspects of running a business in the world we live in today.

A social media strategy is for everyone who manages a brand or wants to build a stellar personal brand online.

So, let’s get this show on the road.

Define your goals and objectives 

We called this section – “Creating a high-impact social media strategy”. The words high-impact are not a coincidence. Understanding and measuring the impact you make on your brand via social media is very significant.

And setting your goals for your social media marketing as early as possible will help you in achieving them. 

Your business has many obligations and objectives to achieve every month, quarter, and year. When you sit down to create a social media strategy, you have to begin with what you aim to achieve via these efforts.

These objectives can look like:

• Improved Brand awareness
• Strengthening brand and visual identity 
• Generating traffic to your website, ecommerce store, or physical store 
• Converting more followers into subscribers or customers 
• Promoting a particular product or service 
• Building a community or heightening existing community engagement

Based on where you land on these objectives, set KPIs (Key performance indicators) for your social media marketing campaigns. Also, be SMART about them. 

SMART goals are:

• Specific to a particular objective and not broad to muddy the waters.
• Measurable such as follower gain, conversion ratios, or ROI. 
• Attainable so that you don’t set yourself up for disappointment. 
• Relevant to your business and business objectives so that the campaigns are meaningful. 
• Time-bound so that you have a defined period to analyze the results in. Social media is a marathon, but there are small pockets where you stop and assess the progress to define the rest of the journey. 

Having these goals allows you to define your budget for investing in content creation, and ads, build consistency, and understand the bigger picture even when you start from scratch. 

Choosing platforms to establish a presence 

While there are more than 100+ social media sites, a lot of them are very niche-specific and can be limited in their applications. This is why brands across the board tend to turn to the likes of Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, Tiktok, and Pinterest to accelerate brand building. 

So, how do you settle on one? Also, should you settle on one? Find answers to these burning questions by following these easy steps: 

Social Media Audit 

• If you have existing profiles, run analytics to understand your top-performing platform and best performing content. Both of these metrics are vital in deciding which platforms you should invest in and the types of content your audience prefers. 
• You also must see what your direct competitors are doing on social media. What are their best-performing posts? Which platforms are they targeting? 

Content and Capacity Analysis

Zero in on the type of content you want to produce. But don’t just decide based on your preferences or instincts. This has to come from your target demographic research and your industry best-practices. 

Social media audits can help you realize what content resonates with your current audience, and research can tell you what the general population you are targeting will prefer to engage with.

Spend time in assessing: 

• How much time you have to dedicate to social media management to decide how many platforms you can work on simultaneously. Try to stick to about three to avoid stretching yourself thin.
• Whether you have the resources to cater to the platforms’ demands. This is where aspiration meets reality. You potentially need a writer, editor, graphic designer, video designer, and so much more based on what platform you choose. Make a decision based on what you can realistically execute (Remember the Smart goals?) 

For example, Snapchat has a younger audience and is a highly visual platform with photo and video content. TikTok is a purely video-based platform and has a mix of Genz and millennials. So, if that is the audience you seek or the content you want to promote, your choice is between Snapchat and TikTok. 

Kimp Tips: Choose compatible platforms so that you can repurpose content between them easily. By getting the Kimp Graphics + Video subscription, you get all the design services you need under one roof, for a flat monthly fee. So, if you really like a platform, go for it. We are here for you!  

Create a complete profile 

Once you choose the platforms you want to be on, let’s just say the hard part is almost over. With clear goals and pathways in hand, let’s get down to action. 

It is time for your brand to have a completed profile that is in line with your brand. Your social media profile has two parts: 

Visual 

This includes your profile picture in the broad sense. If you choose LinkedIn, Facebook, or Twitter as a primary social media platform, you also must concentrate on a header/cover photo.

As this is the first thing customers will see when they come across your profile or post, get it absolutely in line with your branding. Choose a professional design that clearly communicates your brand personality and business objectives. 

Textual 

This includes everything from your company description, links, official updates such as location, contact details, and Bio. 

On Instagram, the Bio is a very crucial space to showcase all the important information to your customer. So, ensure you make good use of it. The content and tone you use will define your personality to the customer. Take time and get it right.

Actually, the voice and tone of your content are quite crucial to your social media strategy itself. So let’s explore that in detail.

Define your Brand Voice  

Social media is the best way to stand out from the crowd and develop a close relationship with your audience. For this, you need a brand voice. 

What is your brand voice? Your brand voice is your unique language and communication model. And it helps your customers instantly recognize your brand anywhere it’s represented.

To arrive at this, start with your brand personality. Ask yourself, if your brand was an actual person: 

1. What are the adjectives you can use to describe it?
2. How will you define your relationship with the customer?
3. What is the major personality you have? (Check Kimp’s guide on brand personalities to get a little help defining this)
4. What is the perception you want to build for your customers?
5. Who are your customers and what is their expectation from your brand?

For example, consider Starbucks. The company has a dynamic audience and aims to build an emotional relationship with them. Hence, all their communication is expressive, passionate, and vibrant. Even the colors they use in their posts aim to bring out an emotional and deeper reaction from the audience. 

Kimp Tip: Your brand voice can also be visual if you choose a platform that demands that. You can leverage color psychology to express your brand personality and accordingly set the tone in all your messaging. Read more about that in our guide on brand personalities here.

Devise a content marketing strategy 

No matter what anyone tells you, content marketing drives growth on every social media platform. And that includes both content creation and content distribution. 

Content Creation 

So, how do you finalize the content creation strategy? Well, you start at the beginning, as always with the objectives. What do you aim to achieve with your content? Is it education, engagement, or entertainment? Choose one or rank multiple goals in order of importance and begin.

Define your niche and then sub-niches to create a ton of content ideas. Choose a combination of promotional content and user-generated content to provide variety in your content. 

As a best practice, content pieces can be in the form of images, videos, links, quotes, reshares, or purely textual. But keep in mind that social media algorithms and public sentiment favor video a lot, especially on Instagram and Facebook. 

The major platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram support a combination of these post types in one way or the other. What you need in the initial stages is a healthy mix of what the platform demands and what you wish to do. 

Eventually, public feedback and analytics will lead you down the right path so that you optimize your strategy. 

Content Distribution  

Some experts get into heavy arguments on what is more important – creation or distribution. We believe it is a bit of both. Facebook recently featured GoPro on their business site, and the brand had a simple message – showing up consistently and finding the right time to post is game-changing. 

So, that’s what you need. 

Make the following decisions to make your content distribution and life easier: 

• Frequency of posts 
• Timing of each post 
• How often do you share your posts on the same platform and other platforms?
• Do you have a content-wise schedule or a platform-wise schedule? 

Best Practices: 

• As much as possible, choose visual content or prioritize visual elements in your content. 
• Repurpose your long-form content into bite-sized content like Instagram Reels, videos, infographics, or carousel posts for maximum reach. 
• Quality brings you results, so ensure that the images, videos, and content you post are of the best quality (i.e. high res and well designed).

Kimp Tip: People notice the quality of videos and images very quickly and judge your brand based on this. Show that you put effort into these content pieces and ensure the quality never slips. Enlist the service of a professional design team with Kimp Graphics and Kimp Videos to stop worrying about these issues altogether.

6) Engagement 

Social media is a two-way street. That’s what makes social media marketing so different from any other method of promotion. You get instant feedback and can immediately gauge the validity of your efforts. 

Engagement is a huge part of your social media strategy’s success. Successful social brands ensure they use this channel to engage with their audience, build a community, and/or provide customer service. 

A prominent example here is Domino’s Pizza. The brand is quick to respond to both positive and negative feedback, while also featuring a ton of user-generated content on their handles. 

Kimp Tip: Create content that invites engagement across platforms such as puzzles, quizzes, and questions. You can get a lot of user insight while building engagement too. 

7) Analytics 

Like any process, feedback loops play a huge role in ensuring the success of your social media marketing. This feedback comes from two places:

Customers 

Social listening can help your brand immensely. Following your brand hashtags, mentions, and tags can tell you what your customers are saying about you. You understand what is working, what is not working, and what you can do in the future from these sources. 

Analytical tools 

Well, not everyone is vocal on social media. Some choose to just unfollow, unlike, block, or just ignore your posts. That is critical feedback too. And social media analytical tools can give you insight into that.

You can see what time works better, your top-performing content, and what is the overall reaction from a particular content on your profile with these tools.

With this feedback, you can improve, innovate, and course-correct as needed. Social media platforms will have their own analytics you can consult. But if you use a scheduling tool, don’t forget to check in on the analytics reported there as well.

8) Automation 

The best part of having such a detailed plan is that it paves the way to automation. We discussed how the timing, frequency, sharing plan, and type of content are crucial to your social media marketing. 

So, why leave it open to human errors or schedule conflicts? Make your life easier with automation tools that handle your content calendar, allowing you to ideate, grow your business, and solve problems that matter the most. 

These tools will also ramp up your productivity by forcing you to have a monthly schedule and a posting plan. So, win-win!

Enhance your Social Media Strategy with Kimp’s Design Subscriptions 

Creating, executing, and monitoring your social media strategy is a long process. And for this long, complicated, and significant process to bear fruit – you need help.

Especially in the design department. Social media is highly visual. And this is no coincidence. People engage better when they see high-quality images and videos. These high-quality visuals allow you to express your ideas and personality effectively.

With Kimp Graphics and Kimp Video subscription plans, you get unlimited design requests to grow your social media at an unprecedented rate. 

You keep ideating, we will keep creating. All at an affordable flat monthly rate.

Sign up for the free trial today and ace your social media game!