Looking to fine-tune your social media marketing strategy for 2021?
Good! Now’s the perfect time to make it happen and leave 2020 behind for good.
Sure, doing so might seem daunting given how social media is so much more competitive and complex than it used to be.
The reality, though? A succinct strategy will help your brand tackle its goals with a sense of purpose.
That’s why we put together a comprehensive guide to creating a social media marketing plan from scratch.
Whether you’re totally new to social or just want to double-check your priorities in 2021, this guide has you covered.
- Set goals that make sense for your business
- Take time to research your target audience
- Establish your most important metrics and KPIs
- Create (and curate) engaging social content
- Make your social presence as timely as possible
- Assess what’s working, what isn’t and how to keep improving
1. Set goals that make sense for your business
Let’s kick things off with a quick question:
“What do you want from social media, anyway?
Social media strategy planning starts with your goals.
Perhaps you want to build a community or a more dedicated following. Maybe you want your social accounts to drive more revenue this year.
Either way, your goals will define your content strategy and how much time and energy you’ll need to dedicate to your campaigns.
Sample social media goals for 2021 and beyond
What really matters is that you set realistic social media goals.
Emphasis on “realistic,” by the way. We recommend tackling smaller objectives that allow you to scale your social efforts in a way that’s both reasonable and affordable.
Below are some sample goals that businesses of all shapes and sizes can pursue.
Increase brand awareness. This means getting your name out there. To create authentic and lasting brand awareness, avoid solely publishing promotional messages. Instead, focus on content that emphasizes your personality and values first.
Generate leads and sales. Whether online or in-store, followers aren’t going to make social purchases by accident. For example, are you about alerting customers about new products and promos?
Grow your brand’s audience. Bringing new followers into the fold means finding ways to introduce your brand to folks who haven’t heard of you before.
Growing your audience also means discovering conversations around your business and industry that matter the most. Digging through your social channels is nearly impossible without monitoring or listening to specific keywords, phrases or hashtags. Having a pulse on these conversations helps you reach your core audience much faster.
Boost community engagement. Explore ways to grab the attention of your current followers. This means experimenting with messaging and content. For example, does your brand promote user-generated content and hashtags?
Even something as simple as asking a question can increase your engagement rate. Your customers can be your best cheerleaders, but only if you’re giving them something to do.
Drive traffic to your site. Simple enough. If you’re laser-focused on generating leads or traffic to your website, social media can make it happen. Whether through promotional posts or social ads, keeping an eye on conversions and URL clicks can help you better determine your ROI from social media.
Any combination of these goals is fair game and can help you better understand which networks to tackle, too. When in doubt, keep your social media marketing strategy simple rather than muddling it with too many objectives that might distract you. Pick one or two and stick with ’em.
2. Take time to research your target audience
Making assumptions is bad news for marketers.
And thanks to the sheer wealth of demographic data and social media analytics tools out there, you really don’t have to anymore.
Much of what you need to know about your audience to influence your social media marketing strategy is already available, granted you know where to look.
Remember: different platforms attract different audiences
Take today’s social media demographics, for example. These numbers speak directly to which networks your brand should approach and what types of content to publish. Here are some key takeaways as of 2021:
Facebook and YouTube are both prime places for ads due in part to their high-earning user bases.
The majority of Instagram and TikTok‘s users are millennials or Gen Z, signaling the strength of bold, eye-popping content that oozes with personality.
Women vastly outnumber men on Pinterest, which is noted to boast the highest average order value for social shoppers.
LinkedIn’s user base is well-educated, making it a hub for in-depth, industry-specific content that might be more complicated than what you see on Facebook or Twitter.
Don’t spread yourself too thin. Instead, focus on networks where your core audience is already active.
Do your homework on your existing social media audience
Although the demographics data above gives you insight into each channel, what about your own customers? Further analysis needs to be done before you can determine what your real-world social customers actually look like.
That’s why many brands use a social media dashboard that can provide an overview of who’s following you and how they interact with you on each channel.
For example, Sprout’s analytics dashboard puts your audience demographics front and center. It also highlights which social networks are seeing the most activity, helping you ensure your spending your time on the right networks.
With Sprout’s Group Report, you can view Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and Pinterest data side-by-side in a customizable format that’s exportable by date range and profile.
Consider also that there’s plenty of other sources of valuable audience data to supplement your social media insights. This includes your Google and email analytics or even your best-selling products.
All of the above will ultimately influence everything from your marketing messaging to how you’ll approach customer service or social selling.
3. Establish your most important metrics and KPIs
No matter what you’re selling, your social media strategy should be data-driven.
That means focusing on the social media metrics that matter. Rather than focus on vanity metrics, brands are tasked with digging into data that aligns directly with their goals.
What metrics are we talking about, though? Check out the breakdown below:
Reach. Post reach is the number of unique users who saw your post. How far is your content actually reaching users’ feeds?
Clicks. This is the number of clicks on your content or account. Tracking clicks per campaign is essential to understand what drives curiosity or encourage people to buy.
Engagement. The total number of social interactions divided by the number of impressions. This sheds light on how well your audience perceives you and their willingness to interact.
Hashtag performance. What were your most-used hashtags? Which hashtags were most associated with your brand? Having these answers can help shape the focus of your content going forward.
Organic and paid likes: Beyond a standard Like count, these interactions are attributed to paid or organic content. Given how organic engagement is much harder to gain traction, which is why many brands turn to ads. Knowing these differences can help you budget both your ad spend and the time you invest in different formats.
Sentiment. This is the measurement of how users reacted to your content, brand or hashtag. Did customers find your recent campaign offensive? What type of sentiment are people associating with your campaign hashtag? It’s always better to dig deeper and find out how people are talking about your brand.
An effective social media marketing strategy is rooted in numbers. That said, those numbers need to be put into a context that circles back around to your original goals.
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