Crafting Your Organic Social Media Marketing Strategy

Social Media is an incredibly effective way to market your brand and gain potential viral growth. The caveat to this is the massive amount of time and dedication it takes to being successful on any social platform. Approaching social media without a plan or strategy can turn in to major time sinks with little to no results to show for it. Setting a base plan and continuously reacting and adjusting as needed is key to seeing meaningful results from your efforts.

Defining a social media marketing plan before even signing up for the platforms will save you time and provide a more impactful and effective marketing strategy. Social media marketing is not an exact science by any means and the landscape is constantly shifting. These general rules will allow you to build a solid basis for your social media campaign, independent of specific platforms and trends.

Perform a Social Audit

When you first start to look at creating a social media marketing strategy, it is important to audit your current social situation and track the results in a spreadsheet to refer back to and build off of as you progress.

Your social audit will look at 3 main areas:

• Social Profiles
• Content and Engagement
• Your Current audience

Social Profiles

The first thing to look at are your current social platforms. You will want to look at what social platforms your brand is currently on. If you are on multiple platforms, look at what you see the biggest traction from. You will generally want to focus the most effort on two or three platforms.

Once you gather all of your social platforms, record them, as well as the relevant metrics for each platform, such as average engagements, profile visits, page “likes” and any other data you may find useful from the platforms analytics features. If you are on a platform that does not provide analytics, do your best to gather close approximations to these numbers.

Content and Engagement

The next thing you will want to do is to analyze your content and engagement levels. On each of the social platforms you currently have, look at your posted content and break down each piece of content by type and platform.

Some of the content types you may have will be:

• Status Updates and Tweets
• Blog posts your wrote
• Blog posts and articles that you share
• Images and Infographics
• Videos
• Live Streams

After breaking down the type of content and the platform it was shared on, record the engagements each piece of content received in your spreadsheet. It may be helpful to separate content both by type posted on the individual platforms and a generic list of types of content.

It is also important to look at the time of posts as well. Different content will perform better at different times of the day and different days of the week. In addition, this will also help you identify when your audience is around on these platforms. Timing is one of the things that will need to be played around with quite a bit to nail, but a general overview will be sufficient for right now.

Your Current Audience

The final piece of data collection you will need will be your current audience. This may be the most difficult to track due to the vast amount of variables that can come into play. Your audience metrics may also be skewed due to bots and spam on social networks, which also increases the degree of difficulty in getting a good measure of this metric.

Start by looking at your social engagements and see who is engaging in a meaningful way. Look for genuine comments and interactions and try to weed out all of the ones that are empty engagements. While engagements can also come from individuals or brands that share similarities with yours, for the purpose of this exercise, you will want to look for engagements that contain conversion potential.

As you start identifying those individuals, start tracking general information about them. This should include key demographics such as age, location, and field of work. You should also categorize this information by platform and keep a more generalized record separately.

After you grab this key demographic information, select a few profiles to review for later. These should be profiles that ideally have either high engagement levels or fit in what you believe to be your target audience. These profiles will be used later on when narrowing down your focus on target audiences and building buyer personas.

The Audit

Now that you have collected a wealth of information, it is time to perform the actual social audit. Look at this information in two ways: the general overview of each category and the platform specific results.

Look for trends and leads. Look at your engagements and the profiles and demographics of your audience responding to your content. Is there anything similar between them? Using these common threads between your audience and your engagements and content, group together as many as possible. You will be looking for types of content that your audience responds to, common themes between members of your audience, and any other connections that you can make.

Compile this data and identify a list of wins and opportunities. Compare what has been working well for you on social at this point to what you are still struggling with. This list will build the base layer of your social media marketing campaign and will move into the next area of focus, goals and definition.

Goals and Definition

The next step in creating your social media marketing planning comes in the form of goals and definitions. Ideally, all of your social media efforts will be aimed at achieving one definitive goal that will propel your brand forward. This comes in many forms and can include increasing your audience, networking with like minded individuals, driving traffic to your website or marketing page, and much more.

It is important to define goals to keep your efforts on track and cohesive with each other. Too often, you will see brands with multiple campaigns spewing content out that does not flow well or even make sense together. Goals and focuses can and will change often, but it is important to keep cohesion in your messages towards your audience.

Furthermore, certain aspects of your brand should be defined as well in this section, including key metrics to measure, your target audience, and your competition.

Goals

After gathering your list of wins and opportunities, you will gain a clearer understanding of your current social situation. From this understanding, it is important to be able define goals to propel your brand forward. Goal setting will be vastly different for every brands situation. Your brand may wish to drive more traffic to your sales and marketing page to sell a product or a service, or grow a community of like minded individuals within your audience. The possibilities are endless, but whatever your goals may be, they should be S.M.A.R.T. goals.

S.M.A.R.T. Goals are a way of defining goals in an actionable way. S.M.A.R.T. Stands for:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Acheivable
• Relevant
• Time-Bound

Defining your goals this way will make sure you are shooting for something manageable and specific. It is easy to say that I wish to grow my Twitter following by 1000 followers. It is actionable to say that you want to grow your Twitter followers by 1000 followers in 2 months by slowly growing my audience by a 100 followers a week through engaging at least 20 potential audience members a day, and convincing them to follow by providing useful content and value.

This example provides an achievable goal that is specific by platform with actionable steps built right into the overarching goal. This goal setter may start by doing this and then have a weekly recap where they analyze their weekly gain of followers and implements any course corrections necessary if the desired results are not being achieved.

Define two or three goals and set a deadline for them, drawing information from your social audit. These goals could be either platform specific or agnostic, but should feed in line with your brand and business goals. Once you have determined your goals and defined them in a S.M.A.R.T. Way, it is time to define your metrics, audience, and competition.

Definition

With your goals set and your audit performed, it is important to define a few things before moving into building pulling everything together and creating your social media marketing plan. You will need to define your key metrics, your audience, and your competition.

Defining your Metrics

To put it simply, your metrics are what you are measuring. In the prior example, a few metrics they may define with the goal of increasing their Twitter followers would be number of engagements per day, length of engagements, visits to their profile, follower count, retweet count, and amount of tweets posted per day.

Your metrics will be key in determining if you are on track to meeting your goals. They will also give you more insight into user behavior and content reception. These will be the base of your social media marketing campaign. Track them diligently and refer back to them often.

Define as many relevant metrics as possible. The more data you collect will give you more insight later on in determining your next actionable steps. The key to tracking these metrics is consistency. If you commit to tracking every day, you will need to pull this data every single day, or else looking at your data to identify areas of opportunity or ways to get your goals back on track will be useless as the information will be skewed.

Use the built in analytic services that are available on most social platforms to compile the most accurate set of information and track this data externally, using a spreadsheet or a service like Airtable to keep all of the data in one central location. Make it a routine to track and analyze these metrics frequently and utilize the information they provide to help propel your brand.

Once you define your metrics, you will need to define who it is that you will be marketing to.

Define your Audience

Defining and targeting your audience is one of the most impactful things you can do to improve your results in all of your digital marketing efforts, including your social media marketing.

A defined audience will be hyper specific and takes all considerations of human psyche and behavior into account. In the ideal world, you will be able to look at your actual audience and be able to point to specific personas that they relate to. A defined audience will give you clarity in who you are talking to by establishing a general understanding of how these individuals think and feel, where these individuals are, both online and in person, how these individuals react to current affairs and social situations, and the best way to communicate most effectively with them.

To start defining your audience, first look at the product or service you are offering. Depending on what you are offering, you may naturally have a defined audience based on the product, which is where niching down comes in handy. If you have a product that will appear to a broader range of audiences, this will be a little bit more difficult to determine. Based solely on your product or offering, describe a very generic user or consumer. This will be the umbrella that encompasses your audience, but to be more effective, you will need to drill this down further than the broad use case.

To start drilling down and getting specific with your audience, refer back to the research done in the social audit. Dust off the list of profiles from over and start visiting them. Recall that these profiles were put off to the side due to high level of engagements or because they resemble the audience in which you want to reach. Without resorting to be an entire creep, visit these profiles and start seeing what information you can gather from them. Specific information like work and career paths, hobbies, age, times they usually post on social platforms, engagement levels of the platform itself as well as with other brands on the platform, and any other relevant information you can discover will be useful.

Repeat this process with every profile that you recorded for review. When conducting this market research it is important to understand that you are not specifically trying to target individuals, rather the aim is to define broad categories that you can sort your audience into.

With this information gathered, it is time to start building your buyer personas. Take the data and draw connections between people. Break them down into categories, which should be defined by individuals with multiple similarities between them. A single person may be broken down into multiple categories, but each category should clearly represent a single generic “person.” Generally, the more categories you have, the better picture of your audience you will have, but too many categories can weaken the effectiveness of this technique as they can become to broad to draw any meaningful personas from them.

After connecting and dividing individuals into categories, look at the key characteristics that define the categories. Use these characteristics to build your list of buyer personas. These can be graphical in nature, or just simple text, whichever works best for you. Reference this article for a detailed explanation on how to build these personas effectively.

After building buyer personas for your current audience, create them for your ideal audience as well. Your ideal audience will be the users you had in mind when first creating the product or service that you offer. Ideally your current audience will reflect your ideal audience, but there may be disconnect between the two.

If you are lucky enough to be hitting your ideal audience, then label the personas that best fit the ideal group to differentiate them from those who do not fit as well. If you are far off from your ideal audience, or there is a subset of individuals you are not quite reaching yet, add the ideal buyer personas to your collection.

At this point, you should have a healthy list of buyer personas to review that represent both who you are currently reaching and those you will ideally like to reach. Review the collective list and weed out any personas that are too similar or broad and set aside any personas that are to weak to stand on their own at this point.

You now have a well defined and researched audience to work off of. The amount of personas you have at this stage will vary. There are no limits to buyer personas, but there are dangers in having too many. Once you are happy with your personas, you will need to define your competition.

Defining the Competition

Competition comes in many forms. Competition could be brands dealing directly in a product or service you sell, other blogs or YouTube channels your audience may visit, or another brand that is already providing a product or service that you are hoping to disrupt with yours. For the purpose of this article, consider competition as any brand that is similar to yours that grabs your target audiences attention. Whatever your competition is, it is important to know them.

This is another area that is highly researched based, but is much less ambiguous than the other research done earlier. Using information from your social media audit, analyze where your audience spends their time online. When you visit these platforms or communities, identify brands in these communities that could be considered competition. Record them for review later on.

After going through your researched list, you will want to do some research using Google to uncover more brands that you may have not discovered from your audiences network. Competition can also come from personal use as well. Record these brands for later on as well.

Once you have grouped these brands together, narrow them down. Focus on brands of all size, from fledgling startups with a few hundred likes to leaders in your products industry. Categorize them into various areas of success, with success being something you define. Your areas of success could be segregated by followers or engagement, or popularity / notoriety in your community, but should be inline or based on your goals that were defined earlier.

For example, Singer/Songwriter Chase Hughlin has a strong following in the Midwest. His list of competition could include someone like Ed Sheehan being in the top tier, Hotel Books in the middle tier, and a local artist he discovered playing a coffee shop last week. The important part is to cover multiple tiers of what you define as success and use as many tiers as necessary as long as it can be considered a clear “next level” of success.

Build your list to include one or two brands from each of these levels. Deep dive into these brands. See how they engage their audience, what content they serve to their audience, the times they post to their profiles. Gather as much information as you can glean about their social presence on these platforms. Note the differences in engagements and content that they use on other platforms as well. You will again want to record this data with the rest of the information you have gathered at this point.

These competitors should also be watched. Give them a follow or like on their social profiles. This not only builds good will between brands, but also allows you to keep an eye on them using tools like Twitter List to filter out a list of just competitors.

Analyze your research. Look for trends in the data to start building off of. See what type of content performs best for these brands or what timing schedule they have for posting. This will help you gain more insight into your audiences consumption, as well as provide a baseline to work off of when building your plan.

Now that you have conducted all of this research and analysis, it’s time to build your social marketing strategy. Proper research during the audit and goals and definition phase will drastically cut down the time it takes to build your strategy, so make sure to make sure your data is as thorough and accurate as possible. If you have not been keeping this information organized during the discovery process, properly organize this information before moving on.

Building your Social Media Marketing Strategy

Due diligence and proper organization coming into this step should unravel most of your strategy before you do any actual planning. The process is simply connecting the dots between all of your research and reacting to changes quickly and as needed. There are three components to your strategy; your social profiles, your content, and your engagements.

Your Social Profiles

Your social profiles should be consistent in feel and tone across all of your platforms, but in the same vein, they will also need to be unique and tailored to the strengths of the platform.

The first step in this is determining your platforms. If you find yourself having more than three platforms, narrow down two as your main point of focus. To narrow these platforms down, look at metrics such as engagements and follows and profile visits. You may also wish to take familiarity of the platform into consideration as well.

It should be noted that all of the other big contenders of social networks should be addressed, but in different ways. You will still want your brand on these platforms, or at the very least, reserve your brands handle on these platforms. Ideally you will still post content on these pages and have a profile and presence, but you will not be spending as much time on them as other platforms.

Create branding consistency across all of these platforms. Start with a generic template to use across all platforms. Your profiles should have the same profile photos, headers, bios, and handles, or as close to the same as possible. Once you have this consistency, customize the two or three platforms you determined would work the best for your brand.

These main profiles should be optimized for the platform as much as possible. Optimize images, content, headers, bios and every other static feature you can. Copy used in bios and about sections are especially important. If you are unsure on how to approach this, reference your brands list to see how they optimize for the platform.

Once you optimize your main profiles, you then have to fill them up with content for your audience to view when visiting your profile.

Content

Content strategy is an incredibly encompassing topic but ties in very tightly with your social media strategy. Content comes in many different forms, all of which have numerous variables that come into effect as far as performance goes. Someone could write an incredibly detailed blog post, with graphs and examples, and a deep dive into the material, but not hit with their audience. Meanwhile, your competitor could have a video that is a hit, but is not nearly as in depth as your blog post.

Looking back onto the data you collected, you should be able to determine when your audience is active online. If you compare this information to your competitors, you may notice that they post around the same time as your average audience member may be active on social media. This is not a coincidence. Use this information to plan how much content your should post on your platforms and the time you should be posting it. Use your competition to start, but be aware that posting at the same time as your competition can put your content in competition with theirs. This could potentially cause less engagement due to your audience getting engaged by another brand.

After you determine when and how often to post content, you need to determine what to post. Using both your buyer personas and your data from your competitors, determine what resonates most with your audience. Start adding content types into the time slots you identified earlier. This will be another area where there are differences between social platforms. For your main profiles, ensure that content posted is optimized to the platforms. For the profiles you will not be putting as much effort into, post highlights to these platforms.

Before moving on to the final piece of your social strategy, there are a few additional things to consider for your content. For everything involving content, there is potential for inconsistency between your audience and your competition. Brands may post frequently during times your audience is offline or may post blog posts frequently, but video is a content that your audience engages with more. Always side with your audience in these instances. In the case of a small team or a single individual creating content, make sure the content is quality and also plays to your strengths. No one will watch a video if they can tell you are not comfortable or in your element if another brand posts a video with confidence and grace. Finally, do not be a robot with social. Using automation tools is helpful, but sticking to too much of a rigid schedule will disconnect the person behind the brand. Check out this article for tools to help you with automation and content creation for social media.

Engagements

The final piece of your social strategy is to determine how to tackle engagements. There are two sides to engagements, engagement you seek or invoke and ones that come naturally to you.

Reaching back to your buyer personas, you should have a general idea of where your audience is online. This goes beyond just the platform. If your potential audience is active in a particular subreddit or Facebook group, you should be there as well. Wherever your audience may be, you will need to integrate into their communities.

Engagements within a community will differ from engagements on your profiles. When you are engaging and participating in a community, the last thing you should do is attempt to sell. Answer questions, engage in a venting session, or share articles you think they may find interesting. When you first join a community, you are definitely on a sword’s edge. Dumping links to your site or email list form and commenting links to blogs you wrote in answer to every question will quickly get you shunned. Inconsistency in these communities, much like in posting your page, will not help much either. Pick communities you wish to engage in, and spend as much time as possible in them. Establish yourself as an expert in these communities and someone people can rely on or is at least recognized before just flat out sharing personal content into the groups.

Engaging with your profile is a bit different. Typically, these are a cause of content you directly posted, related to a product or service you sell, or because they seen you in another community and want your help as well. Much of the way you react to these engagements will be similar to how you engage in communities, but the ball is more in your court at this point. You can sell yourself a bit more when interacting with your audience this way. Standard social media etiquette still applies, but you can let your guard down a bit more with these direct interactions and be more personal.

Overall, plan to spend time every week specifically in engagement. Both on your audience’s turf and yours. Build community specific interactions, such as a weekly discussion they have on Twitter that is identified by a specific hashtag, into your engagement and content strategy. Most importantly embed yourself into these communities and be active and present on social media. The worst thing you can do for your brand is leave a comment or message unanswered for a week just to reply and find out that an individual turned to another brand for their question in your absence.

You now have a social media marketing strategy built based on solid and extensive research. It should work right?

Review and Pivot

While you have your social strategy in place, your strategy is far from over. After implementing your strategy, you will need to care and nurture it. Consistently set aside an hour of time at a fixed set of intervals to review your goals and make sure you are still on track.

Review your metrics, ensure you are still on track for your goals, and that you are still speaking to the appropriate audience. Social media strategy is not an exact science at all. With new apps and products coming out every day, you have to be on top of the latest and greatest. Being able to quickly pivot in social media is key to staying ahead. Jump on new social platforms before other brands do and stay on the latest content trends, even if it means straying from your plan.

If you are loosing audience or even plateauing on certain platforms, explore additional platforms to bring your brands activity up in. Or explore different content to produce that may resonate better with your current audience or expand your brand into a new territory.

Social media marketing is an ever-changing landscape, which will constantly be evolving due to the ever evolving social platforms. Your marketing plan needs to be just as fluid. Using quantitative metrics as well as what you are witnessing in communities and seeing in engagement levels, test and tweak aspects of your plan and find what works for your audience. Establish a plan to quickly and frequently test new ideas, timings, and buyer personas. Strike the balance of discovering new audience members and keeping and further engaging your current audience.

Try to perform social audits quarterly to ensure your marketing plan is still inline with your current social activity. Update, create, or retire buyer personas as needed as well. Overall, when it comes to your social strategy, stay flexible, never put all of your eggs (audience) in one basket (platform), and stay consistent where it matters.