Key Qualities of a Strong Social Media Content Strategy

What’s the limit to our content consumption?

More than 1.7 billion people use Facebook daily. Throw in Instagram, TikTok, and a couple of of others, and you see that social media’s audience is nearly all-encompassing.

It makes sense that marketers have to be on those platforms in order to take advantage of that massive audience. But what are the key qualities of a social media content strategy?

Content is for more than just marketers. Whether you’re a huge brand looking to keep yourself at the top, or a smaller company looking to move up, you need to make sure your content strategy is top-notch. With the right strategy, you can dominate on social media and avoid losing money on inefficient marketing.

Knowing your audience is central to social media content marketing.

The very first factor that can differentiate a great social media content strategy from a mediocre one is how well you know your audience. The audience is key to any marketing endeavor. You can’t possibly be selling your products to anyone if you don’t know who they are and what they could want or need from you.

If you don’t know your audience, you won’t even know what strategies or media to choose, let alone the content you put in front of them or the messages to give them or how to treat them once they become full-fledged customers.

Ask yourself these questions:

• Do I know basic demographic information about my audience?
• Do I know the intentions behind the purchase?
• Am I aware of specific purchasing patterns?
• Do I know the reasons behind customer churn?
• Do I know my audience’s adjacent interests?
• Do I have a customer journey map?
• Do I have detailed customer personas?

Overall, to make sure you know everything about your customers there are two key steps: Gather data and analyze it.

This may sound easy in theory, but it gets progressively more complicated as you start analyzing data. At the very least, you’ll need to learn all the basic information about your audience.

Social media platforms and Google Analytics can help cover that as you’ll be able to learn a lot about your audience, and advanced website analytics will show you the path that your customers make before the purchase. This will help us understand what content converts better.

Why Do You Need A Social Media Content Strategy?

1. A strategy helps save time by knowing what you’ll do before you start.
2. It will also help you understand why your social media marketing is working (or not working).
3. It supports your overall social media management efforts.

Do your research in advance

You Know Yourself

We’re living in a time of content overload and it’s hard to find something valuable and memorable. If you want to be sure your social media content marketing strategy is going to work, your brand needs to be something that the audience can remember and identify.

The basic elements of brand identity, like having a recognizable logo and brand colors, are important, but you also have to work on perfecting a brand voice. This is the most important thing for content marketing, on social media or elsewhere.

If you have a unique tone and style that you use consistently, it’s going to be much easier for you to be recognized.

Have Clear, Measurable Goals

While creating outstanding content will help bring visitors to your brand, it’s the content strategy that turns those visitors into customers. If you start creating content without having a set of goals in mind, you’re setting yourself up for failure.

Without measurable goals, your content campaign is just a creative effort that has nothing to do with business. You’ll guide your content creation efforts with what feels right, not what’s good for growth.

So, if you know exactly what kinds of results you want to see when the campaign is over, your social media content strategy is probably going to be a success. If not, you’ll have to figure out your goals.

Most goals should be centered either around increasing sales or increasing brand awareness. Whatever path you want to go down, make sure that you don’t formulate your goals simply as “increasing sales”, but rather have clear sales targets stated at the beginning of a campaign (e.g. Open 10% more leads than previous campaign).

Look at your competitors

No matter how good you are at creating social media content, you can’t start a content marketing campaign without researching what your competitors are doing.

In some ways, this is an alternative form of market research. Here, you’ll be looking at your competitors (at least the ones who share the same target audience as you). Evaluate their brand, their brand voice, the types of marketing strategies they use, and the messaging they bring out in their advertising.

What techniques are they using? Why did they use this specific phrasing, rather than some other phrasing? This image rather than that one? There’s a chance your competitors don’t know what they’re doing, either, but even then, you can start picking out what doesn’t work, or what seems wrong — and why.

It may be impossible to judge some aspects of their content marketing strategy, but at the very least you’ll be able to understand the general direction they’re taking and see the top-rated posts.

Do a social media audit

If you’re already using social media, take stock of your efforts so far. Ask yourself the following questions:

• What’s working, and what’s not?
• Who is engaging with you?
• Which networks does your target audience use?
• How does your social media presence compare to the competition?

Once you collect that information, you’ll be ready to start thinking about ways to improve.

We’ve created an easy-to-follow social media audit template to walk you through each step of this process.

Your audit should give you a clear picture of what purpose each of your social accounts serves. If the purpose of an account isn’t clear, think about whether it’s worth keeping.

Understand the Platforms

Running content marketing campaigns on the biggest platforms like Facebook or Instagram is a no-brainer. However, to have a really successful content marketing strategy, you need to knowingly choose other social media platforms that you want to invest time and resources into.

First off, ask yourself, is your target demographic using that social media platform? Instagram is mainly populated with people under 35, and Snapchat is another great fit for teen audiences.

If you’re able to make a survey of your clients and find out what social media platforms are most popular with them, that’s the best-case scenario.

Social Media listening

You can also employ the tactic of social listening to see what other topics and engagements your audience members are participating in.

The idea here is to “plug in” to the social conversations and engagements your target audience has with other brands and other people, giving you the opportunity to uncover new trending topics, new angles for your messaging, or new approaches you may not have otherwise considered.

Do searches of the competition’s company name, account handles, and other relevant keywords on social media. Find out what they’re sharing and what other people are saying about them.

You know how to combine content with sales

Social Media sales funnel

Posting content on your social media page without having an integration with the sales department makes you just a blogger, not a business. While creating content is mostly a creative job, you should not forget to incorporate that creativity into your sales process.

If you have a clear understanding of how your content marketing efforts on social media improve your sales funnel, it’s another sign that your content marketing strategy is solid.

What if you have no idea how to do that? The easiest step is to do great content pieces that introduce your new products or services. That’s a no-brainer if you own a fashion brand. You just create great photography that shows your products in the best light. If you own a company that doesn’t have a physical product, it may be harder, but not impossible.

Another good idea is to include CTAs into your content. Linking to your website is a good tactic as well. Facebook lets you do that on any post, while Instagram only gives you one link in the bio, so you should use it wisely.

A tactic that may not lead to direct sales but helps to guide people down the sales funnel is creating content specifically for leads who are close to a sale. Unlike content that is created to get more traffic, this content explains how to use your products better. This may be what a lead needs to become a customer.

Content Distribution Channel?

No matter how great your content is, it’s safe to say that it won’t be noticed if you don’t put effort into promoting it. Sure, there’s always a chance that your piece may go viral, but making something go viral isn’t an easy task. Having your social media account grow slowly but surely is a more reliable idea.

Do you know exactly how you’re going to expose your target audience to your amazing content? Great, this means you have a vision for your social media content strategy.

If you don’t, start with the basics. The most basic way you can expose people to your content is to pay for ads. Run a paid ad campaign that’s focused on bringing you traffic as opposed to leads. Make sure that you put your best pieces on paid promotion, this way you maximize the benefits you’re getting for the price.

Promoting content in collaboration with other content creators is also a good idea. Having your content reposted by an already established social media account can give you a sizable boost in followers.

Are There Channels You Should Add or Remove?

Sometimes less is more. However, you should be careful before removing a social media channel. The same goes for investing in new ones.

Thinking about deleting a social account? Ask these questions first:

• Am I posting consistently on this channel? If not, it may be time to start.
• Is weak performance possibly tied to poor execution? Be honest with yourself. It’s easy to blame poor performance on a channel “just not working for your business.” Sometimes that’s an accurate assessment. However, you may just need to change your approach.
• Are my competitors successful on this channel? If so, they’re probably doing something you’re not. If no one else is succeeding, it could be your audience simply isn’t there.
• Do I have time to spend on this platform? If you can’t make it a priority, it may be time to cut it loose.
• Once you’ve answered these questions, you should have a clear idea of what you need to do.

Measure the Success of Your Social Media Content Strategy

Social media is such a staple of our evolving digital culture that it’s almost hard to imagine a time without updates, likes, and shares. Where else are you going to find a huge database of your target demographic who are already in the mind frame to read, click on, and share your message?

Take a look at the number of active monthly users (July 2020) for the most popular social platforms. Despite these numbers, many companies still doubt the power of social media because it seems unquantifiable. How do you know if your social media strategy is working?

The answer is simpler than many marketers realize. It all boils down to engagement, which is any type of interaction from your customer that goes beyond passive acknowledgment and actively recording and measuring that engagement through various social media platform tools and services available, some free of cost like Google Analytics, Facebook Analytics, Twitter, LinkedIn Instagram

You Need More Than Just A Social Media Content Strategy

Content creation is far from the only thing you’ll need to succeed on social media. Understanding what is a social media content strategy, creating one that capitalizes on your strong sides, and improving it when you see it under perform are integral to being truly successful.

We can help! Integet is a young agency that helps build brands, being young we understand what businesses need to succeed in social media. We have helped numerous businesses and corporate establish their social media strategy, content strategy, and promoting it to gain an audience, customers, and partners. Talk to us to discuss what are your needs.