Create a winner social media content strategy

If your marketing efforts include content creation and social media use, we'll show you some steps to develop a successful strategy for your business!

Did you know there are 4.6 billion active social media users - that's nearly 60 percent of the world's population? (Digital 2022: Global Overview Report)! And we need a plan to find our target audience and engage them! Not so easy!

Source: Smartinsights.

What is a social media content strategy?

We don't have to dig too deep to understand that a social media content strategy is the content plan we should follow to determine what content we create, how we distribute it, and how we track it.

This doesn't have to mean thinking a year in advance about all the content you want to share and writing posts like crazy but understanding on a general level the tactics you want to use to determine the content you want to share on your social media channels.

Why should you have a social media content strategy?

It is clear to all of us that it is vital to have a marketing strategy, that includes the goals we have, the tactics we'll use, the channels we'll test, and how we'll test those channels. But often the content lacks a strategy that we can follow.

Many companies decide in their marketing strategy to post once a week without researching when the best times to do so are. They schedule their content based on other departments like emails, events, etc.

Then we don't underestand why a campaign gets so many likes and worse: how we can repeat it!

With a social media content strategy you can:

• Define the criteria for selecting the content to share.
• Conduct the tests to determine the best time slots to publish your content.
• Align your company and team with the brand image we want to convey.
• Develop a story that aligns with your audience's goals.
• Personalize content for your target.
• Create opportunities with content influencers.
• Promote content that is likely to go viral.
• Properly measure the performance of your strategies.

How do I create a successful social media content strategy?

Step 1: Determine who should be involved

Before getting down to work to establish what we want, it's interesting to stop and see what we have.

Remember that social media campaigns imply a social culture. What does this mean? Obviously, we are not going to look at how many posts our employees make! But it is important to take care of your image on social networks, the people who write to you on these channels, involve your employees so that they share the content and let them know the strategy you are following.

What departments can be involved?

• Social Media Strategist, to monitor performance and post content.
• Content Strategist, to create content that you can optimize for social networks.
• Designer, to adapt these pieces to social media.
• Sales, to share this content with our target.
• Customer success, to support the dissemination of this content with our customers.
• Product, to validate that the content is aligned with the product.
• Etc.

Keeping in mind which departments will be involved, will help you see the timelines and the investment. No one said it would be easy or cheap!

Step 2: Set realistic goals that match your brand strategy 🎯

Next, we need to determine what we want to use this channel for:

• Do we want conversions? More sales? Gain more leads?
• Do we want to engage with our customers? Get people to interact with our content? Go viral?
• Do we just want to improve our brand image? Work on our brand awareness?

It's not necessary to focus on a single objective, there can be several, but then we need to split content strategies for each goal.

Source: sproutsocial.

It's common to find companies that make a product post, focused on conversion, and share the same week a photo of their team baking cookies, which focuses on brand image. All should be included in our content strategy plan!

Check out a few examples of some social media goals for inspiration!

Step 4. Analyze your Audience to define your social media channels

Now it's time to analyze your target audience to find out where they hang out, what their communication style is, what kind of information they consume, how they consume that information, and how they relate to their environment.

Even with the necessary analysis and hours of research, we may choose the wrong channel. Trial and error must be set in stone to succeed, and won't be easy!

You can analyze your customers by analyzing their behavior, creating questionnaires, conducting face-to-face interviews, internally asking departments that are in touch with your target audience, etc.

Step 4. Determine the metrics to track

This step is very important! Once we have established our goals and the channel we want to move in, we focus on determining what we want to measure.

Depending on the goals we set, we'll review one metric or another. Let's look at the most important ones for each of the above goals:

• Goal focused on Conversions -> email sign-ups, lead magnet downloads, sales from social media, and clicks that came from social media.
• Goal focused on Branding --> number of followers, post shares, post mentions, and post reach or impressions.
• Goal focused on Engagement --> likes, comments, shares per post, replies, or mentions.

Step 5. Optimize your profile on your social media channels

Easy peasy! We must have profiles with complete information about the company and images of our products or services in the channels where we want to share content.

It can be interesting to look at competitor profiles: What information do they usually display? Do they have a product video? Do they have devices linked? Do they have pictures?

This can help inspire you, but the most important thing is always to define the information that needs to be there according to the goals you set in step 2!

Step 6. Plan your content in a calendar

Now it's time to choose the topics and type of content you want to share! We have three sub-steps here:

1. Find out wich topics are relevant

You can undertake active listening by asking your customers directly what they want through surveys, phone calls, face-to-face meetings, etc. But you can also listen passively by observing how they engage with your material, other content they consume, trends, and news.

Or use passive search with tools like Semrush or Google Keyword Planner, which let you search for keywords. Or with answersocrates to find the most searched questions for a keyword.

Buzzsumo is another very useful tool to identify trends. However, with all these tools you can't filter by your target, so you have to combine strategies.

2. Set up the content Calendar

If you post regularly, you'll have more chances to achieve your goals, but more isn't always better!

There are many ways to set up this calendar: You can create weekly topics, try to cover one topic every month, or publish content for specific celebrations. For this, it's important that you know your strategy and start brainstorming using the conclusions you got from the previous research.

If you need a content calendar, we recommend this one from Hootsuite!

3. Publishing schedule

Check the dayparting 🎉That’s a funny word! Dayparting usually applies to ads, but we can export it. It's the programming grid of your ads when we send or show them.

Did you know that it works better to publish content on LinkedIn from Tuesday to Thursday, either early, mid-morning, or early afternoon and the best time is between 10 and 11 a.m. on Tuesdays (according to a HubSpot study), while on Twitter, according to Hootsuite’s data, it's recommended to publish early in the morning on weekdays, preferably at 8 a.m. on Mondays and Thursdays?

So here are our tips for finding your dayparting time:

1. Listen! 👂🏼 Research market trends and what experts have to say. 
2. Watch! 👀 Examine your target behaviors.
3. Ask! 🗣 Get in touch with your target audience.
4. Test! 💪Test and test again until you have enough data to validate your hypothesis and choose the ideal days and times to post.

Step 7. Analyze your social media content performance

Did you know that it takes at least 6 months to determine if a social media plan is effective when we focus on branding?

We all tend to make mistakes and discard good strategies prematurely, especially if we don't know how long it'll take for the chosen channel to validate a strategy.

Take the time necessary to find out if your campaigns are achieving the goals you set, and do a thorough analysis to determine if you may be having issues with targeting, lack of reach, lack of engagement, etc.

Done! But if you still want more...

I hope this guide gives you a clear idea of where you can improve your content strategy.

If you still feel like you need more help, we recommend finding mentors to help you with specific campaigns, questions, or guides. Some are paid, but there are also some free groups, like 6sense, that meet every Friday to discuss topics chosen by the community of marketers.