How To Build A Social Media Strategy: Step By Step Tutorial
Social media is a vital marketing tool that can attract new clients to any business in today's world.
Social media marketing can be daunting to navigate and seem like an impossible task. But never fear! In todays' episode, I will show you how to develop the perfect content marketing strategy for your personal brand to help your business grow and expand on the best social media platforms for your business with minimal effort.
We're going to talk about how to develop a social media strategy step by step, from creating a social media calendar, social media post design to the best social media management tools and social media scheduler.
While having a social media marketing agency or a dedicated social media marketing manager might be the ultimate goal.
Suppose you're starting and can't afford that luxury service. In that case, this episode will show you how to maximize your digital marketing efforts to know how to get clients for social media marketing.
Think of it as a mini social media marketing course.
Be sure to stick around until the end because I'll share a few of my favorite low-cost, no-cost social media marketing tools that help me create social media content faster.
Hey, if this is our first time meeting, I'm Online Business Strategist Molly Ann Luna, Founder of the Legacy Leaders Academy. An elite business mastermind community of values-driven entrepreneurs who want to leverage their expertise online via digital course business to work less, earn more, and be more present for the moments that matter most.
Each week I share my best marketing strategies to help you build a profitable portable business. If that interests you, then be sure to SUBSCRIBE.
Social media can be a lot to take in, especially when you're just starting. To help, here's a quick compilation of some of my social media tips to set you up for creating a client-attracting social media strategy.
These are the ten must-haves for a strategy to build an authentic, engaged social media community for your brand.
STEP 1: Define Clear Goals
Defining clear goals is the foundation of your social media management strategy. Defining goals gives you direction, purpose, and motivation and will help you consistently implement your social media strategy.
The 4-Pillars of success that we live by as Legacy Leaders.
It's easy to want to set goals to achieve vanity metrics like followers, subscribers, views, or downloads, but I want you to think beyond that.
If you're honest with yourself, you got into business to make money, not win an impossible popularity contest.
Don't get caught up in the lie that you need to have a huge following to make money online. You don't.
I don't.
Instead, decide what you'd like to achieve with your social media strategy.
Is it to:
1) Build Brand Awareness: Being active on social media helps you stand out and keeps your name on peoples' minds throughout the day. After enough exposure, to get more interested people checking out your brand's content.
2) Connect With Customers: It's a mistake to think that your business needs to "close the sale." Instead, social media opens the lines of communication between you and your customer base. Connecting with your customers helps to reduce your churn rate and leads to repeat customers in the future.
3) Boost Your SEO: By promoting your content on social media, you can get more likes, views, shares, and engagement with your content. Then, you'll drive more traffic to your site, which boosts page views. These are all positive signs to search engines like Google, and these factors help improve your SEO.
4) Grow Your Mailing List: Once people get to your website from your social media content, you'll have more opportunities to turn traffic into leads. Over time, you can use this traffic to grow your email list and generate even more revenue from your email campaigns.
5) Drive More Revenue: Each of the advantages listed above leads customers down your sales funnel and generates more profit for your business.
First, decide which goals you'll aim to achieve on social media.
STEP 2: Choose the Right Platform For Your Business
Not all social media platforms are created equal. And not all social media platforms are suitable for attracting clients to your business.
People go to different platforms for different reasons.
There are currently over 65+ social media platforms to choose from.
Some of the most popular include:
Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin, Reddit, and Pinterest.
Facebook - serves a large audience, and while paid ads can be expensive, they are optional. An engaging account still reaches and helps your ideal clients.
Instagram - is great if your audience is younger and typically shopping from mobile.
YouTube - is the second-largest search engine in the world is great if you plan to create evergreen content.
Twitter - is a way to stay up-to-date on the latest trends. Depending on your commitment to social media marketing, Twitter can be a powerful tool for building brand awareness and connecting directly with other customers (not to mention other influencers). Keep in mind that Twitter needs its marketing strategy, and you'll need to plan for multiple tweets per day.
Do your research and get to know how each social media network operates, and choose the right ones for your brand.
Speaking from experience, it's impossible to master all social media marketing platforms at once.
While here in a bit, I'll share my social media marketing strategy and how I repurpose one piece of content to publish on various social media platforms. When you're first starting, I highly recommend choosing one platform to master before branching out.
You don't want to create a social media confusion cul-de-sac for your clients, telling them to like, follow, and subscribe to every platform you're publishing on.
But instead, give them a clear call to action to lead them one step closer to saying yes to your paid offer.
STEP 3: Get To Know Your Audience
Knowing who you're showing up on social media to serve is one of the essential parts of your social strategy.
Ask your audience what their pain points are, find out what publications they read, and where they hang out outside our social media.
This info will help you craft content that truly resonates with them and enables you to build an engaged community.
STEP 4: Create a Content Library
After researching your ideal clients, decide what main objections and pain points they need help resolving that smartly lead to your paid offerings.
Then reverse engineer your social media strategy to begin to create a content library.
Choose 3-5 core topics you'll curate social media content on.
Too few will limit your reach; too many will dilute your brand power.
For example, if you're a life coach, maybe you'll choose to create social media content about confidence, communication, and career choices.
Or, if you're a personal trainer, maybe you'll choose to create social media content about bodyweight workouts, nutrient-rich recipes, and fitness gear.
Define your content categories, then move on to the next step
STEP 5: Identify Keywords and Hashtags
A little more research here, but collecting a bank of the top industry keywords or hashtags your audience uses will make a more straightforward messaging composition.
Plus, choosing the right target keyword and hashtags can help your business be found in search more efficiently, which means more eyeballs on your brand and the potential to convert those people into paying clients.
Finding the right keywords, phrases, or hashtags is essential to reaching your target audience. As the expert on your chosen topic, there might be specific jargon you're using, but that might not be your core target audience's exact words. That's why it's essential to do your keyword research before creating your social media content.
There's an extensive range of tools to help you choose the right keywords to target for your business.
A few of my go-to social media tools to find searchable keywords include:
FREE OPTIONS:
Keywords Everywhere
Google Trends
PAID OPTIONS MOLLY ANN IS CURRENTLY USING:
Tubebuddy (add affiliate link)
VidIQ (add affiliate link)
STEP 6: Create a Content Schedule
After you have your list of the library of content you'd like to create, you need to create a schedule.
Based on your objectives and the amount of content you have, decide how often you'd like to post on social media and what days.
I suggest using a mix of live and scheduled posts to balance your content and remain current with topics in the industry or that relate to your audience.
Remember to choose a schedule that aligns with the social media platform you're choosing to promote your business on AND one that you can consistently maintain.
For example, the typical rule of thumb for the top three social media platforms are as follows:
Twitter: 3-5 tweets/day
Instagram & Facebook: 1-3 posts/day
YouTube: 1-2 videos/week
STEP 7: Set Up Social Platforms
If you haven't established your chosen social media platforms yet, do so now.
Or if you have social media accounts but haven't consistently been posting branded content that aligns with your chosen social media goal in step 1. It's time to give your social media platform a makeover.
Using my number 1 go-to free social media tool, Canva.com
Select your brand colors and imagery.
Update your name, bio, and links ensuring that they have the same look and messaging across all platforms.
Once you do that, it's time to start creating.
STEP 8: Create Your Social Media Content
You can choose to take many paths to create your social media content.
I'm about to share my social media content creation strategy with you, but keep in mind you can eliminate the steps that won't serve or rearrange the efforts to help you better.
For example, if you enjoy writing, starting your social media content creation by writing a blog post might be the best first move for you.
On the flip side, if you're more of a verbal processor, jotting down a few quick talking points and then smashing the record button on your podcast platform or video camera might make the most sense. Because once you have the audio file, you can easily plug it into a transcription service, like rev.com, and convert your spoken word into written form.
Molly Ann's Social Media Strategy:
Decide on the content topic.
Conduct research to find searchable keywords with low competition
Write blog
Push blog through Grammarly.com
Grab snippets of the blog and push through Jasper.ia to write weekly emails, social media posts, metadata for my YouTube video upload
Record video & send to video editor who will publish the video and strip the audio file to be posted on the podcast
Snap thumbnail image
Using Canva.com create thumbnail images and revise image size for IG and Pinterest
Schedule Content - directly to social media platforms in real-time is best, but you can also use a scheduler like Canva.com, Hootsuite, Later.com, or others.
STEP 9: Conduct a Social Media Audit
Make it a habit to periodically conduct a social media audit on your channels.
A self-audit can help you catch inconsistencies across channels, what campaigns worked (or not), review benchmarks, and set new goals, enabling you to improve your social media strategy consistently.
Keep an eye on the competition, but be careful not to get caught in compare mode.
You can learn so much from watching others. Pay attention to the type of content that gains traction and what kind of social media is dead on arrival so that you can save yourself from creating the same devastating results.
Remember that a social media marketing strategy can be a powerful and free resource to help you get your business noticed, but it's not the only way to make waves.
Tune in to the next episode for more marketing strategies to help you start, scale, or skyrocket your business.