How to Create A Social Media Strategy

Define what success looks like

Before doing anything, you need to define what success looks like. What do you want for your business to achieve from social media? What does success look like in three months, one year, or five years from now?

What concrete business metrics or needles do you want and need to move in those time frames? Note - that you will want to frame your objectives around measurable KPIs that will actually move the business forward, not looser engagement metrics that are “nice to haves” but have no proven connection to long term sales, market share or growth.

An example might be a minimum expected number of appointments, identified web prospects, visitors in store, products trials etc. Matching of the above with an expected conversion rate to becoming a valued customer that over the long term drives a market share target.

Find the People

Think about where your best prospects actually are. There is no point jumping straight into technology solutions or choices around social platforms or channels unless they can connect your with prospects that have real potential to become your customers. 

Look for Prospect Pools. Define your ideal prospect (some people call this a persona) and then filter across multiple platforms whether that be Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest or TikTok. 

Pick the platform with the largest volume of easily accessible pools of lowest hanging fruit prospects.  

It's important at this stage not to leap into a drive for world domination. The best social strategies are data lead. The market is fluid. Competitors are active. Consumer wants and needs change. You want to test the most likely platform/s first and learn before scaling within a platform or moving to the next. Don’t bet the farm. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket and blow your budget. This is not like traditional advertising or communication where a campaign or initiative is planned against a fixed budget. You will want to establish sustainable ROI from a variety of tested scenarios and then find the combinations that work. Then like a seam of gold, mine that gold until you reach diminishing returns. 

Find the Story

Find a story that resonates. Once you have established your clear business objective and found the people and platforms to test, it's essential to remember that these are real people with hopes, dreams and aspirations just like you and I. Many marketers, organisations and agencies make the mistake of treating “target markets” as theoretical constructs. It’s not enough to simply grow up a brand and product or service in a channel against a prospect pool and expect any kind of success. Many people would use fancy terminology like value proposition or single minded proposition etc. which is fine, but actually you just need to think about crafting a story, connection or a solution that delivers a real solution for a real person. 

Be rigorous in sharing that story with a few real people before you go live with your strategy...because it’s very easy as business owners to assume (to our detriment) that what we have is unique and powerful.

It's also important to remember that “the Story” can change or resonate at different times with different subsets of your prospect pool. Also a proper data lead approach means testing slightly different flavours of your core story to understand what really and truly resonates in a motivating way. 

Design your path to purchase

It's not enough to just have an objective, defined prospect pool and story. You need to make it easy for real people to buy. The technicians and agency people might call this “the back end”, but all it really means is ensuring your shop window, whether it be virtual or physical, is but a few paces or click away so that people can enter quickly and efficiently throughout their busy days. Put another way - many a finely crafted social strategy has fallen over at the final hurdle because it's simply too bloody hard to do business with you. 

For example, think about lowering the bar...think about the perceived risk that a visitor faces or thinks about before clicking on some dubious link on the internet. Think about the fear that people have of being dragged into high pressure selling situations or open ended subscriptions or simply the fear of having to share too much data. 

How can you lower that perceived risk? How can you give them an interesting or useful piece of information or insights that they can use at no financial risk up front. Think about how you can be generous, earn trust, give to get, open the door just a crack in order to enter into a meaningful conversation. It could be a taste of your product at retail, it could be a video of what you might expect as a patient or customer, it might be a calculator to understand real benefits over time or a white paper with some meaningful research learnings. Anything that you can do to open a relationship in a genuinely valuable way (from the prospects perspective) will give you a good chance to round out an effective social strategy with a clear and easy path to purchase. 

Execute

Closely related to crafting an easy path to purchase is the absolutely mandatory requirement in the modern social environment to get it right or not cross any boundaries. It's important to remember that the very thing that makes social such a powerful amplification tool for marketing is the same thing that will amplify your clumsy mis-steps and usage of the medium in ways that disrespect people's privacy, data or sense of safety or comfort when interacting with your brand. 

When it comes to platform formats, data and privacy obligations, content, imagery, targeting techniques, data collection etc. it's important to remember that social is an incredibly complicated ecosystem these days and the rules are changing daily. Just like you would ask a lawyer or accountant to help implement technical aspects of a contract or business plan, you need to dial in people that understand the social platforms to help execute the plan on a day to day basis. 

Measure

Finally you must remember that any effective strategy is one that is measured against your original objectives. Set up simple dashboards and/or regular reviews that take a look at the actual measures that directly underpin your original business objectives. Be prepared to be agile and flexible. Don’t kill initiatives too early. Get enough data points at each stage to ensure that any insights are valid. If needed, make a change to ensure that your strategy remains effective. If it isn’t then retest and go again and focus on that sustainable ROI. 

Sometimes it's really helpful simply to have a sounding board to run your social strategy past. Sometimes it's good to have someone outside your day to day team to sense check your strategy from a consumers perspective. If you would like a 30 minute chat at no initial cost, feel free to book a strategy session here.

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