If you’re an established brand with an identity to uphold and clients to respect, you don’t have the luxury of trying everything and seeing what sticks when it comes to social media promotion. Your customers will simply jump ship if you start producing content that doesn’t align with their preferences or veers from the brand tone and values promised on your business website. This is where a cohesive social media strategy and supporting posting templates come into play.
Ideally, they are proven rules and formulas that allow your social media team to provide consistent content and advertising for your social media channels without changing the perception of your brand online. These can be as simple as “always use the company colours for text”, as niche as “remove background from thumbnail images”, as well as the tools used to create and optimise your social media post, as well as the image and graphic files for logos and other design elements.
So each brand will have a style and rules unique to it, but here’s how you can develop them.
Learn to Make SMART Goals
SMART goals are a popular method of planning, tracking and evaluating progress on a particular task or project. The acronym stands for:
- Specific
- Measurable
- Achievable
- Realistic
- Time-Specific
That means a goal like “improve viewership” isn’t ‘SMART’. Neither is “gain 500 followers this month”. Why? Because it doesn’t explain or quantify how you’re going to achieve it. Are you going to put up flyers? Ask your neighbours? Make 500 new accounts?
To be SMART, you have to be specific with your goals. “Gain 500 local followers this month by posting video interviews with local people” is a revised edition of the original target. Not only are you clear on exactly what you want, but also how you’re going to achieve it. With SMART goals, there’s no more hand wringing or procrastinating. You know what you need to do, and when you need it done by. It makes the undefined task of ‘social media management’ defined.
Compare your Competition
While your first instinct may be to look at what people are doing well and try to emulate that, you also want to see what everyone else is doing too. Because sometimes it’s easier to see what someone is doing wrong than to see everything someone is doing right. Not only that, but you can compare different levels of success and niches to understand the effects of different tactics.
To try this, just take a look at the comments on your competitors’ posts. Positive, negative, or completely off topic, each type will tell you how their videos are being received and what you should use and avoid.
Know your Audience
It’s hard to write a message when you don’t know who you’re talking to. It’s even harder to sell something to them. That’s why defining your audience and conducting research into your target demographic is a foundational component of any effective content marketing strategy.
Of course, reading up on your audience is theory, whereas engaging with them is practice. You can ensure boots on the ground and interact with your audience in real time by holding events, interacting with user engagement on social media (i.e. comments, shares, etc.), and by creating innately interactive content (i.e. doing polls on your channels, creating competitions/giveaways, sharing filters, sticker packs, etc.).
Once you’ve learnt how to reach your audience and have recorded some success, the next step is naturally to collect the data, understand your appeal, and double down on it. That’s how you continue to make impactful content that builds on your social media momentum.
Choose the Right Channels
There are endless social media platforms – Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, QQ – and each one appeals to a slightly different demographic. There are platforms only for businesses, for film photographers, even for fishermen.
If you know your target audience, you should know which platforms they use, and then you need to target them. In fact, sometimes it’s better to completely ignore the larger platforms and focus only on smaller platforms that have high levels of people in your niche – like showing off reels in a fishing forum.
And if you’re looking to integrate shopping into your social media, it goes without saying that knowing where your audience is likely to spend is paramount. Investing in paid promotions on Instagram (like ad reels) can eat up a good portion of your digital marketing budget, so you’ll naturally want to spend where you’re most likely to receive a good return.
Work with Brands & Influencers
Speaking of paid promotional reels, there’s no strategy that’s proven more effective for accelerating the reach of your branded social media content than partnering with an influencer or even another similar brand that aligns with or shares your brand values. Even if you’re a small brand just getting started, there are plenty of other creators, figures, and entities at your level. And each one of them has audiences of their own that you can reach by collaborating with them.
That goes both ways too, so don’t be afraid to reach out to other brands and local influencers to create content together. After all, you’re stronger together, and it’s the first step towards establishing yourself.
Follow your Own Drum Beat
What we mean by this is creating a posting schedule that suits your audience. So if your viewers are night owls, post before they start checking their phones at night. This doubles as a way to organise the work and to keep yourself and your team on track.
You’ll also want to consider holidays and events that your target audience enjoy, to capitalise on that excitement – for example, Father’s Day is the Black Friday of neckties. So plan ahead and lay out a path for yourself and your audience to get in step with.
Conclusion
If only social media management was as easy as “post a 10 second reel every day at 4pm”, but there are no easy answers. Every brand needs a fit-for-purpose solution. That said, hopefully these tips give you the tools to make that solution.
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