As a Marketing Agency, much of your strategy can depend on each individual client’s needs and budgets, but there are a few key components to an awesome Social Media Marketing Strategy that should never be missed! Whether you’re just starting out and building a social strategy from scratch or are rolling with the punches of an ever-changing digital world, this framework can help you set a foundation that will blow your clients’ businesses out of the water.
Chances are, your clients already have some kind of online presence – no matter how small that might be. The very first step in creating an awesome social media strategy will be to determine what already exists, and if there’s anything out there already that you can leverage in your marketing efforts. Use their current online presence to help determine who their most engaged audiences are, and where their ideal customers tend to congregate; do they see a lot of instagram traffic, or are they more prominent on Google? Are they seeing significant organic traffic, or has everything to date been paid? Really take the time to understand their current online presence, if any, because it can pay dividends in time and money for you in the long term.
This is something that we all get better at with experience, and can feel somewhat like trial and error at first, but clearly defining the goals for your social media marketing strategy will help keep you on track, and help set clear expectations for your clients. Once you’ve established what their online presence currently looks like, you can estimate what it’ll take to scale up. Much of this will depend on components such as their current Net Promoter Score, their current following and social engagement, and how much money – if any – they are willing to funnel into growing their social channels.
Unarguably THE most important component of your strategy will be to have a reliable pool of engaging content to pull from each day, or each week. Original content is often your best bet, but this can be costly and time consuming to collect. As part of developing your strategy, you’ll need to consider where you’ll be sourcing all of your great content, and if it will be you or your client that will be responsible for providing that. Additionally, consider the type of content that will work best for your goals; will video be the most successful content, or will you be relying on images and text?
Once you’ve determined the goals of your strategy and have figured out how content will be sources (and by who), it’s time to create a budget! If you plan to charge a monthly fee, be sure to factor in advertising costs and any outsourcing fees, if applicable (for example, video production or photography). Breaking down a budget can be unnerving starting out, as you may not be sure what to charge your clients; but fear not! We’ve created a tool to help with exactly this that you can find here, which is based entirely on averages that we see in the industry!
After determining the content you’ll be posting, and having analyzed the best platforms for your client, it will be time to gain access to existing accounts or to create them from scratch; depending on where your client is at. There’s more to this than just blasting all content to all platforms, as platforms tend to have very specific types of content. Similarly, there may be certain times of the day that are best for posting on a given platform that may differ from another. Understanding and leveraging this will help you share content that is more likely to resonate with the right audience and the right time, and it may even go viral if you’re lucky!
Once you’ve defined your goals and have awesome content flying out to all the right platforms, you don’t just want to rest on your laurels! Reporting and analyzing everything that you put out there will be key for refining your strategy and improving it over time. Be sure that you have a system in place for storing this data, because in the weeks, months and years to come it will be incredibly useful to look back on what worked, and what didn’t. Additionally, you’ll want to keep your client looped into all the hard work that you’ve been doing – and reporting is the perfect way to do that!
The world of social media is constantly evolving, which means over here at Cloud Campaign we are forever learning as much as we can! Are there elements to your social media strategy that we've missed out here? Share them with us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter or LinkedIn - we’d love to see!
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