How to Create An Effective Social Media Content Strategy? : A Step-by-step Guide

Social media content strategy can define the blueprint of your success. But, are you still in the trial and error phase of deciding the right strategy? Social media content creation can be a daunting choice if you lack strategic ideas. The entire effort can fall in vain if applied unprofessionally. However, content marketing strategy doesn’t need to be painful.

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Social media content strategy is neither rocket science nor child’s play.  It just needs the right direction! A well-defined roadmap can lead your business to multiple social channels. 

Benefits of Social Media Marketing

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First thing first! All business owners should have content marketing strategy goals. It allows choosing the right direction. Moreover, it quintessentially depends on the business domain. In general, there is a rough sketch to get the grip of the primary marketing channel. Before getting into that details, find out why it is essential in the first place!

Let us take a glance at the mind-blogging stats that can influence your social media strategy:

Hence, using an effective strategy can help you drive conversion from them!

In this blog, you will get a complete guide on crafting an effective social media content strategy. So, without further ado, let’s glance through the steps and create your personalized content strategy. 

Let’s dive in!  

1. Understand your Audience 

As I mentioned before, the strategy needs to be customized to the audience base. In other words, you need to be certain about whom you are talking to. It helps you immensely in the following ways:

  • Curate content that engages the targeted audience 
  • Comprehend which social media platforms to use and how
  • Know when your customers and prospects are active 

In order to meet the checklists, you should have a clear demographic. In that case, you can revisit through the buyer persona and get the required answer. Well, the story doesn’t end. Here, you have a few more steps to follow:

Content marketing strategy

Source: contentwriters.com

Understand audience demographic: Don’t worry about the process. Understanding the demographic is now very easy with Google Analytics. Learn the basics like age, gender, interests from the lists. Your audience interest would help you to create engaging content and in-marketing segments. 

One-to-one chat with the targeted audience: Yes! Details are very important. And there is no shortcut. If you want to negotiate with these tiny details, you need to compromise with the outcome as well. You can simply try out two-three phone calls to have a good grip on them. Remember, the drill is to know their preferred social media platforms. 

Research each Platform: understanding your audience’s choices would not be enough. Walk a few more miles to know the details of the social channels themselves. For instance, 67% of B2B businesses use Twitter to promote their social campaigns. Hence, it would be the right choice to use the same if you are among the one.  

If you keep an eye on all pointers, you will have a better grip on social media marketing efforts. 

2. Organize Social media content Audit 

Make a list of social networks you are using currently. To get noticed, you should push your limits and expand your connections. Before that, clarify a few things in your mind:

  • Which among your used channels offer better outcomes?
  • Which channel from the lists can be removed? 

It is, of course, an essential decision to strengthen your content marketing strategy! In fact, it is smarter to eliminate extra efforts and save energy for the future. However, before erasing your existence on a particular platform, give yourself more time to analyze the facts. What factors do you need to pay adequate attention to? Why doesn’t the platform show the necessary outcome? Are your competitors doing well from the same platform? Should you need to prioritize that channel too? All these questions should be taken into consideration before making the final choice. 

How do multiple social platforms help to improve your business scale?

Source: welcomesoftware.com

Likewise, you should also know hopping for all the latest trends can spoil the entire effort. Hence, it is better to focus on singles and make the best out of them. On the other hand, putting all impulses would spread the effort too thinly. So, the best way is to depend on the demographic and concentrate on the highest traffic. As a general rule of thumb, it is better to maintain two to three social channels simultaneously to improve brand visibility and more. 

Let’s dig into the crucial demographics to improve your social media content strategy:

  • 79% of the total Facebook users are female between 18-29 years. 
  • 72% of female users are active on Instagram regularly. In addition, these users are aged between 13 to 17 years of age. 
  • 38% of Twitter users are aged between 18 and 29 years. And the users’ gender ratio is evenly distributed. 
  • Lastly, 37% of users of LinkedIn are aged from 30 to 49. 

3. Analyze your competitors

As a universal rule of the game, do not over and underestimate your competitors. It is essential to understand the esteem of your competitors to consolidate your stand. Moreover, six out of ten entrepreneurs focus on social media marketing. However, only one or two earn adequate exposure. So, there is a difference concerning strategy and effort. 

Therefore, t is crucial to study what your competitors are doing! Kick off the additional elements and figure out your top competitors’ actions. Wait a minute! All business that is in your domain is not your competitor. You can consider only the toppers as your competitive contenders.

Platform Strategy Roles

Source: platformprofessional.substack.com

You can simply search your business domain on any social media platform and analyze their social media marketing efforts. That’s all! Review their channels thoroughly to track their performances. Then, make a list of the top competitors. When you are done, you can take notes on the following factors:

  • The write-ups they are posting 
  • How to engage a larger audience?
  • Whether they are following the industry experts and their trends. 

This way, you can learn how to plan social media posts more effectively! When you clear all the answers, you can replicate their highest-performing strategies. However, following them would not be a great idea! You should curate the strategy uniquely. Likewise, be consistent with the effort of improving your business. Then, you can frame the rough draft from your competitors instead of blindly following them. 

4. Strengthen your brand voice and tone 

Content is the King! It has the power to impress your customers. Moreover, it sets a business identity among the audience. Hence, it is essential to focus on the brand voice and modify the brand tone. Look, all content on social media can engage your audience. 

The catchy tone and creative way can do your business. Hence, based on your content marketing strategy goals, you should choose the right tone. The selected group of the audience should be comfortable with the tonality and writing style. For example, if you are targeting older generations for health-related services, you should choose a sophisticated style and caring tone. 

In addition, it is not applicable for social media content strategy; it is a critical factor to engage your audience at large. So, you should now shift your attention to learning how to communicate on social channels. From promoting your service to engaging with the audience, the tone of communication plays a pivotal role. Take some time and research the audience base and the competitors. Moreover, the brand voice should resonate with the business ideals. 

Here, you can consider the following thing while optimizing the social media content marketing strategy:

  • First of all, draft an enticing brand engagement guideline. 
  • Choose a creative tone to engage with a targeted audience 
  • Frame the content based on your social media content strategy and goal

Once you meet the checklists, you can start writing content for a specific social media marketing strategy. 

5. Follow the best content marketing practices 

Once you select the right voice and tone for the content, you should maintain the same for your rest interaction. This will help you stick to your nuances and help your audience recognize your brand. In fact, your marketing nitty-gritty would be even more well-defined. However, there is still much room for improvement. As you already know, there is no formula in particular. However, you can create your unique roadmap to reach the goal. 

How to create a social media content strategy?

Source: blog.hootsuite.com

Here are a few advanced steps you can try to improvise your content marketing efforts: 

The right way of using emoji: Don’t use an emoji for the sake of using it. The content should be attractive and meaningful at the same time. If you make it unreasonable to the audience, they might generalize your brand. 

Choose the right length: Just because you are good at writing doesn’t mean you will write long content. Similarly, if the content is too short, it might lack the technical stands. Moreover, the effectiveness of keywords and hashtags partially depends on the content length. Hence, choose the right length to make your message impactful. 

Figure out hashtags and keywords: These are the core elements of social media content strategy. Hence, using the right hashtags and keywords can change the whole game. You will get many free tools to learn the proper use of relevant hashtags and keywords. Also, you can check the list from your competitors’ posts and use the ones with the highest performance. 

Details of formatting: Choosing the writing style is not enough to get the audience’s attention. Formatting also has a lot to offer. For example, it makes a post more acceptable and understandable. The world of social media is a bit different from other marketing channels. Hence, you should be accustomed to the style and formatting. 

Maintain visual consistency: Consistency is another crucial factor in content. Visual consistency also helps your customers to recognize you easily. From logo usage to color scheme from image size to style, you can easily grab the grip of social media content marketing if you can create a unique pattern for each. On the other hand, it is imperative to maintain the right dimension of videos, whitespaces, stories, and more to be elaborative and professional. 

Apart from these points, you should also be consistent with the frequency of posts. 

6. Make a list of content curation sources

Does it sound Greek to you? Then, let me first explain this. It involves gathering potential information and shortlisting the ideas and topics for each post. It is a great way to keep things organized. Well, for social media posts, the number will be huge! Hence, it would be pretty much difficult to manage the large volumes. You can choose the two tactics:

Content curation: Let’s have a look at this definite way! Curating content involves sharing relevant content that can attract the audience. It helps to develop better relationships. Also, it fills the empty bucket and supplements fresh content. Establish your brand as a value offering platform.

However, this effort can only be fruitful if you source the contents from reputed sources. In addition, it also helps to save time. To ease the process of content creation, you can take assistance from advanced tools like Feedly or Buzzsumo. The former offers pre-selected keywords and sources. On the other hand, the latter offers an insight into trending social media content

Repurposing: It is a method to show which content one should repurpose and on which platform. It is a great way to reuse content based on clients’ expectations. You can gather the key takeaways efficiently from a post. 

Adding CTA is an imperative part of social media content strategy. It shows the different ways to explore CTAs and whether you should add comments or not!

7. Set a goal for each Network

Setting different goals for each platform is very important to improve the social media content strategy. So, let us focus now on the different goals that social media ad campaigns can achieve. In general, one can tie the social posts to a specific reason. It could be for various reasons like:

Social media usage statistics

To educate your audience: Suppose you have an online learning institute. You can create short content regarding any of your courses. For example: ‘Tips to learn cost effective logo design,’ ‘How to improve your coding skills, etc. You can create a content calendar and post the tips at a particular frequency. It will help your brand to gain trust and your targeted audience would start relying on you!

To inform your audience about your product or services: Suppose you have recently launched a new product and service. In that case, to get your customers’ attention write about the USP of the product. Also, in the first segment, you can write for the audience requirement and then suggest the solutions. 

For example, you can start by posting, ‘are you struggling to hide your dark spots?’ then suggest your products to remove them! Once the audience starts relating their problems, you can build a strong relationship with them! 

To promote your brand or services: If you want to promote your brand, you need to choose the right marketing tone. For example, if your products are for young audiences, you need to choose a sporting tone for them. 

To distribute impactful content: To provide quality information about your brand, you should curate impactful content. However, it should be relevant to your brand and drive the attention of potential customers. 

In order to reach any of these definite goals, you should plan an outline to reach your goals. For example, it can be brand awareness, relationship building, customer services, and sometimes all of them. Based on your goal you can set the tone and type of the content. 

8. Divide Team’s Responsibility 

When you work with an efficient team spirit, it develops better productivity. It is universally true! Executing social media content strategies are easier said than done. Organizing the potential efforts all by you would be much harder! On the other hand, if you divide the responsibilities among the experts, the result would be more impactful! Hence, to facilitate the entire process, you should evenly spread the responsibility among your team.  

 So, before developing your team, you should consider a few more things:

  • Who will write the posts for each platform?
  • Create infographics or graphics?
  • Who will finally edit or publish the posts?

Well, by now, you must be aware of the fact that every platform requires a particular style and formatting. From content length to hashtags, every platform has a different requirement. So, all your team members should be aware of the details. In addition, it is better to coordinate with an experienced editor who can efficiently rectify the loopholes. 

Final Thought

Social media content strategy can drastically change your business status. It helps to strengthen your audience base and boosts conversion. As a part of your online business, it is one of the prerequisites that can bring potential exposure. 

Using an impactful and tailor-made content marketing strategy, you can change the entire outlook of your business. However, it is easier said than done! It takes dedicated effort, insightful research, and effective execution to benefit from it. So go ahead to craft a unique social media content strategy to get noticed now!

With an experience of 11 years, in the industry, and having the uncanny ability to convert difficult concepts into engaging content, Vikram has the ability to perfectly insert gusto into content. When he is not researching about new marketing concepts and writing to attract, he enjoys the occasional fictional books and loves playing with his 2 dogs When he is not researching about new marketing concepts and writing to attract, he enjoys the occasional fictional books and loves playing with his 2 dogs.

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