Having a content strategy in place is an essential element for any business to help reach their marketing objectives. A great content plan will capture the audience, platforms, goals and types of content needed to ensure any efforts put behind social media content is used effectively.
There are various factors which will feed into a content strategy and it is important to take the time to make sure marketing efforts are going in the right direction to reach your goals. The content calendar will differ for each business, to suit the audience and also the relevant social platforms.
In our blog post we will provide relevant tips and advice to help you plan your social media content strategy. It is worth taking the time and effort to make sure it is done correctly to maximise the opportunity when your audience are online on relevant social channels.
Gemma Finch
Social Media & Paid Ad Specialist at 1PCS Creative. Love engaging and impactful social content, family time with my little girl and helping companies grow and build their presence online.
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Business Objectives
Before planning any content for social media users to engage with, firstly our recommendation is to know and review your business objectives. This will directly feed into the marketing objectives and strategy. All of which directly will impact content planning.
Examples of likely objectives for social media strategy are:
Increasing brand awareness or brand recognition
Generate leads and sales either from existing customers or new customers
Build strong and loyal relationships with your target audience
Increase website traffic
There are many other smart social media goals you could have, but by defining what they are it will help to structure the content planning and help to ensure keeping on track with overall aims for your social media efforts.
Analysis
Taking time to assess both how your business has performed previously with a social media audit and looking at your competitors for your relevant industry across social media networks is a productive next step.
By looking at past social media campaigns or content previously posted to see any social media success which can be leveraged in future campaigns is a useful exercise.
Also looking at your competitors to see what has and what hasn’t worked well for them with how much engagement and interactions achieved, will help to give a steer on the type of content your audience are likely to find useful or relevant.
This should only give a reference point of inspiration, important to always create own unique content and completing background research of social media marketing happening in your industry across each platform, will help to ensure you stand out with your own social strategy and content.
Audience Research
Knowing what type of content and also which platforms your target audiences are interacting and engaging with is useful to understand to help with your own social media content plan. It could be certain post types, such as videos or articles with educational content which resonates with them the most.
There may be particular social channels they spend more time online with than others. For example, if targeting business to business, then LinkedIn is most likely social media platform spending their time on. Or for an Ecommerce brand your audience is more likely to be on Instagram, Facebook or TikTok.
Your target audience is a key part for any marketing strategy. To deep dive and understand the right demographics, behaviours and interests to help with planning your social content strategy.
It will help to decide the right brand voice and type of social media content which is going to be engaging and relevant for your audience to deliver the best results for your business.
Create Content
When it comes to creating content for each social media channel, once have deeper knowledge on your audience, this will help to plan relevant and engaging content.
For a successful social media strategy it is important to include a good mix of content. From educational content giving advice, tips and best practices relevant to your industry and business.
To including sales focused posts across multiple platforms such as new product launches or sales promotions looking to increase awareness with your audience. It is important to ensure not all posts are sales focused, social media users will want to see a variety of content to keep them engaged.
Not all content needs to be original content, it could be relevant for your business to post user generated content from your loyal customers sharing how much they love your product.
Also content can be repurposed to create multiple pieces of content to suit each social media channel or could work in existing format for multiple channels.
Depending on which social accounts using, take into account when putting together content ideas the formats that work best for each. For example, Instagram is highly visual so short form video or reels and standout imagery work well for high engagement on this platform. Whereas LinkedIn would expect to see more information to justify your expertise in the field.
Content Calendar
A content strategy will only work effectively if taking the time to post consistently and schedule posts. By having a well planned out social media calendar this will help to ensure there are consistent themes across your content plan.
It isn’t about each individual social media posts, but how they work together for your marketing campaign to reach your goals set out.
Aim to schedule social media posts at least a month in advance for all social platforms. By having a consistent posting schedule your audience over time will have the opportunity to engage with your business and learn more about how you can help them.
Without posting regularly with a content calendar it can lead to a business being forgotten about online and impact social media presence. It could lead to a competitor being noticed and interacted with instead on their social posts.
By having a social media content calendar in place focused on your social media marketing goals, it allows time to think ahead to important dates in your calendar relevant to your business.
It could be planning into the schedule a business anniversary or a relevant date in the calendar celebrated on social media to get involved in.
Regular Audit
It is important to regularly run a social media audit of your performance on social media channels by analysing your social media metrics. These can be used to identify what content is resonating with your audience and helping to achieve your marketing goals. So that they can be leveraged and built upon for future posts in your social media content calendar.
Equally identifying any social posts which haven’t achieved the right results, whether it be reach, likes, comments or shares, can be noted to not use in future and adapt for the content strategy going forward.
Sometimes content which a marketing team think will be a hit, aren’t always as relevant or engaging for your social media audience. So it is worth consistently reviewing to be sure.
Having a social media audit regularly of how your content plan is performing will save time and improve results by further improving the content strategy for the future social media posting schedule.
We hope our blog post was useful to learn more about the importance of social media marketing and how it can help reach your marketing goals for your business.
To have the best social media marketing success requires time and effort to ensure researching, planning, creating, engaging and delivering the right content and interacting too with your community on each social media platform focused on.
At 1PCS Creative our social media specialists can take care of all of it for you with our social media management service. We can happily review your social media or create from scratch for the relevant platforms. Taking care of all your social content, strategy and responding to any messages and comments.
Freeing up time for you and your team to focus on other important tasks. If you would like to discuss how we can help, please free free to get in touch with one of our team.