How to Build Social Media Content Strategy to Gain More Customers
What is an Effective Social Media Content Strategy?
Behind the success of a content strategy is a well-oiled machine that works in favour of your business. How to build a content strategy is what we will discuss further, but first, let’s have a look at what you can expect from an effective content marketing strategy.
- More Traffic: Your strategy for the website blog or social media bears fruit when you see an upward trend in the traffic footprint. Higher traffic means your strategy works as expected, attracting more people to check your solutions.
- Better SERP Ranking: Less than 1% of people go beyond the first page of Google results. So, if your page is not on the first page, there is no point in its existence. On the other hand, if your page is among the first ten Google SERP results, that means your strategy is working.
- Higher Engagement: In the marketing world, engagement is measured in terms of bounce rate, comments, session duration, and social share. In this, a lower bounce rate means the visitors are not abandoning your website or page and move to a competitor’s page.
On the other hand, a higher number of comments, session duration, and social share means your visitors are liking the content and want others to access the same.
- Conversion Rate: Another crucial aspect of a successful content strategy framework is the conversion rate. Higher conversion rates imply that the way you have structured your content and built the campaign, it’s working successfully. The target audience is not only visiting your website, but they are taking the desired action you want.
Now that you know what to aim for with the content marketing strategy, let’s learn how to build one for your business, with a focus on Social Media Marketing.
Build a Social Media Marketing Content Strategy
In 2021, Statista recorded a whopping 4.26 billion people using social media. They also expect this number to increase to 6 billion by 2027. This penetration of social media across all industries, age groups, and regions is something every business must harness to its advantage.
The increasing usage of social media is attributed to the higher number of mobile device users. The major social media platforms include Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn.
60% of the global population is on social media, and these three platforms are their priority.
Your priority must also be to build content marketing strategies that give the highest importance to these three platforms. A social media content strategy defines how you must use content to increase brand awareness and conversion and complete all goals on social media platforms.
Goal Setting Exercises
You need to finalise one or two goals for building the content strategy. The purpose of setting goals is to ensure that your focus remains steadfast as you work on content formation, distribution, and monitoring.
The set goal will help you stay focused on the metrics and parameters you wish to achieve. Moreover, you won’t focus on other metrics, which might be climbing or plummeting as your goal is fixed.
For instance, for a social media strategy that aims to bring more traffic to the website, you won’t care about the number of shares of your post on social media. Rather, you will want to focus on increasing the Click-Through-Rate (CTR).
Some of the most common goals for social media content strategy include the following;
Increasing brand awareness, and here you will use metrics like the number of likes, shares, retweets, comments, mentions, etc.
You can also set lead generation as a goal whereby your focus must be on getting more email sign-ups, clicks through social media platforms, etc.
Hence, track only the parameters concerned with your goals and not everything.
Know Your Audience and Competition
The second milestone in building a content strategy for social media understands your audience. Knowing them, you can tailor content development according to their preferences. Your content will resonate with the audience, and they will be more inclined to engage with your brand.
Know your target audience’s preferences, gender, age, location, education, profession, etc. You can gain this information from one-to-one interviews, social listening, polls, surveys, questionnaires, etc. You can also use social media analytics to gain valuable information about the users.
With this information, you will better understand which platforms to use for content sharing. It will allow you to build content that brings the most authentic and verified results.
The second type of analysis you need to complete is that of your competition. This will help you understand who is your competition, what they are doing, and what you must do for a better response. Competitive analysis is a great way to find the gaps and leverage opportunities that your competitors are missing.
Social Media Accounts Optimisation
How your social media profile looks is also important to achieve success with the social media strategy. Your profile must look professional and resonate with your brand’s message. While visiting your profile, the visitors must understand quickly what you do and how well you do your work.
To ensure this;
- Use a high-quality and brand-specific profile picture. Ensure that all your social media handles have the same or matching profile pictures.
- Your bio on social media platforms must be concise but explain your work clearly.
- Add all the relevant links that can take potential customers to the right place on social media accounts.
Take this opportunity to hand-pick the most relevant social media platforms. Don’t just post content on every social media platform you find and hope for more conversions; it won’t happen. The very premise of a good strategy is to use your resources in the right way and place.
Social Media Content Planner
You might have heard of cheat sheets shared by social media marketing mentors. Well, you can use their templates, but they won’t work in every case. Hence, the best approach is to exclusively build a planner for your brand and purpose.
Begin by deciding the content types you want to post on social media platforms. You need to decide the key messages you wish to convey through your social media channels. Among the types of posts, the most popular ones include educational, informational, inspirational, and occasional content.
You can educate, inform, and inspire your users with your posts. Remember that in the majority of the content you frame for social media, brand resonance is required. It need not sound promotional at all, but the users must be able to understand that the content you share relates to your brand.
As a part of social media content strategy, you can also share posts in the form of contests, competitions, polls, and case studies. Then you can run live streams and collaborate with other influencer of your industry.
The trick is not to use one type of post. Publish different types of posts in varied formats. Different types of posts brings more engagement and raises the excitement level of the viewers as well.
Create a Content Calendar
Creating the right posts for your social media content strategy is essential, but it is equally essential to have a content calendar. Publishing great quality content regularly has a strategic advantage. It delivers higher visibility and entertains the viewers with different types of posts consistently.
Go deep into the content calendar by deciding what to post, on which day to post, and at what time to post. Use this content calendar to plan things ahead. Choose a time when your audiences are online and post when they are scrolling through their feed, looking and liking the posts.
The same content calendar will also act as a monitoring tool. You can revert to the calendar to check the posts that are performing well. Note the time and day on which you published them. More importantly, set a baseline schedule according to the platform you are publishing on. The number of posts you must publish on Facebook is different from Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn. And the same applies to every platform.
So, take some time to find the best time slot for the platform you want to
Keep Posting and Keep Tracking
As you keep posting content on your chosen platform, you must also keep monitoring it. For this, you need to assess the post’s performance according to its reach and impressions, primarily. In addition to this, take note of the engagement level, including likes, comments, shares, and post saves.
Additional parameters for this are follower growth, CTR, and changes in brand sentiment. As you keep track and record all these elements, you will get a holistic performance review of your content strategy.
According to its performance, you can make changes in the schedule and other elements. You can know what works and what doesn’t work and pivot your content strategy for social media accordingly.
Conclusion
Social media has immense potential every business can use to its advantage. However, to crack the code, you need to build a befitting social media content strategy that will help you progress further. Using social media’s power, you can easily bring your brand closer to the target audience.
10X Digital group is a Social Media Marketing Company Melbourne, you can build and execute the best social media strategy for your business. Our content strategists and social media experts will help you get in front of your target audience, achieving the desired results in the process. Get in touch
