Social media is one of the most powerful tools that businesses can use to create brand awareness, connect with customers and grow their brand. According to a survey by Sprout Social, 68% of consumers surveyed in the United States state that social media helps them interact and engage with brands.
However, simply creating a profile and posting content without a clear goal in mind is not enough. If you want to see real results from social media, you need to create a content strategy. Creating a social media content strategy can be difficult. But it’s important to have a plan if you want to make the most of this powerful marketing tool. In this blog post, we will discuss steps that will help you create a social media content strategy that works for your business.
Why is a social media content strategy important?
A social media content strategy is important because it helps businesses connect with their customers and create a consistent brand identity. Without a strategy, businesses run the risk of posting irrelevant or off-brand content, which can damage their reputation. By developing a social media content strategy, you create a plan for what you will post on social media. It includes goals, target audience, types of content, and a schedule.
Steps to creating a social media strategy
1. Set goals in line with your organisation’s overall objectives
The first step in creating a social media content strategy is to identify your business goals. What do you want to achieve with social media? Are you looking to increase brand awareness, drive traffic to your website, or generate leads? Once you know your goals, you can begin planning your content accordingly.
2. Identify your target audience
Before you can start creating content, you need to know your audience. Who are you trying to reach with your social media posts? In order to achieve this, performing market research through primary or secondary methods can help you uncover an untapped segment or identify gaps in the market. Once you know who your target audience is, you can start creating content that appeals to them.
3. Choose your platforms
You don’t need to be on every platform, just the ones that will reach your target market. The audience you would like to reach heavily influences the platforms you choose, and therefore first determining your target audience helps you prioritise platforms. For example, if you intend on reaching out to Gen Zers, the generation of digital natives, focusing on platforms that allow you to post engaging, bite-sized video content will increase your chances of engaging them. In McKinsey & Company’s study of online behaviour of Gen Zers Asia-Pacific region, a staggering 70% state they discover new brands at least once a month through video-based platforms such as Tik Tok and YouTube.
4. Create engaging content with relevant content pillars
One key way to ensure consistency in your content is through content pillars. These are topics or themes that add a sense of structure and help you determine what is important to you based on your brand’s strategy and its mission, vision, values and positioning. For example, if you’re a fashion brand that advocates slow fashion and sustainability, one main pillar can be environmental sustainability. Social content can also be based on the different stages of the marketing funnel and the different purposes it will serve. Generally, a content’s purpose falls into four broad categories: promote, educate, inspire and entertain.
5. Planning your social media content calendar
Once you have the fundamentals in place, it’s time to come up with engaging content. Planning well in advance and gathering your assets and writing up copy would ensure you stay organised and do not come up with posts off the cuff. Giving yourself adequate time would ensure you are putting up content that is insightful and or high quality.
Alternatively partnering with a social media marketing agency will allow your in-house marketing team to devote their time to other projects. BDSA, an experienced social media marketing agency based in Singapore, can help you do just that. We use the project management tool, Monday.com, to ensure that the process of ideation and planning is efficient and that all communication is organised in a central dashboard, which can be accessed by everyone on the team.
We start the process of social media content planning a month in advance, beginning first with a ‘discovery session,’ where we aim to understand the themes, topics, events or promotions that clients would like to focus on. We then set about creating posts around these and add on additional post ideas to fill up the social media calendar for the month. Clients will then let us know their comments in the same online workspace. The copy and final artwork will also be put up here to be approved or revised. Using a tool like this makes the process systematic and builds transparency into it.
Partner with BDSA to start creating engaging social media content
Creating social media content can be resource-heavy. At BDSA, we aspire to support your business’ marketing efforts with our social media marketing services. We develop high-quality content with the intention of increasing your reach, engagement and conversions, with the ultimate aim of winning over customers and garnering brand advocacy. EDG’s SME marketing grants offer organisations the financial assistance to help them transform, innovate and scale up. BDSA also assists companies in applying for this grant. Learn more now.
