Social media strategies are essential for anyone who wants to achieve a goal with their marketing; without one, you are simply posting without purpose. Without a strategy, your social media content will easily become inconsistent, and you’ll fall behind the marketing of your competitors.

When it comes to writing out a strategy, I genuinely believe that the written word is better than the typed word. There have been studies linked to writing by hand that suggest that we remember things better once we write them down. It works for me and many people to write things down, so grab a notebook and pen and let’s get into how to write your social media marketing strategy.

Goals

Firstly, let’s talk about goal setting. I see so many people who write unrealistic goals with their social media marketing, and it quickly leads to feelings of overwhelm and which can lead to burnout and feelings of worthlessness. That’s not what I want for you.

Remember back in school when teachers would harp on and on about “SMART Targets”? I used to think it was just some new buzzword that they had all decided was going to take the world by storm. It wasn’t until I started setting goals for my business that I realised that they were right.

 So, let’s write some SMART targets as our goals. For those of you who don’t recall what SMART stands for, it’s: specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound.

Although for the purpose of this content, I’m going to reorder them.

Your goals need to be relevant to your business strategy. If your business goal is to increase your brand awareness over the next 12 months, you likely don’t need your social media strategy goal to be about monetising your content. But if you instead focused on increasing your reach, it would support your business goals.

Next, let’s look at “measurable”. We need to be able to measure your goals. So, yes, that does mean looking at your analytics. Sorry about that, but if we don’t measure the goal, we will never know if you accomplish it. So, rather than our goal being “to increase reach”, we can write that we “want to reach 1 million people with our content”. Far more measurable.

Is that goal achievable? Not likely when you are first starting out on social media. So, we need to adjust the number of people we are trying to reach so that it’s still high and a goal to be worked towards, but it’s not so high that it’s unachievable. Why not write we “want to reach 2,000 with our content”; still a high number for a novice, but it’s achievable.

Then, let’s look at the specific part of the instruction… because reaching 2,000 people isn’t enough. We need to know who they are and where they are. So, perhaps we want to refine the goal to something like “reach 2,000 sole traders, entrepreneurs and business decision makers on LinkedIn with our content”.

Now we know who we are targeting and where.

Let’s round it all off with the last element of the SMART acronym: time-bound. To know how to measure our goal, we need to know when we are going to get the measuring stick out. Otherwise, we are looking at our analytics for the sake of it, and, trust me, nobody does that. We look at them to ensure we are hitting our targets.

For me, a social media strategy typically runs for 3 months. This is because social media marketing moves at such a pace that we need to be able to adapt our strategy if something in the market changes. You can always repeat a strategy if it’s working for you and there have been no changes. That makes our example goal: “Over the next three months, we want to reach 2,000 sole traders, entrepreneurs and business decision makers on LinkedIn with our content”

Instantly, we can see that a plan is forming. Just from writing out our goal, we can see so much information about what we are going to do to achieve it.

Planning

Stick to no more than two goals as a maximum in your strategy (otherwise, your messaging can get confused). We then need to think about how we are going to achieve them.

Break down the steps you need to take to achieve your goal. For the example goal I have given above, some of my steps would likely be:

• Send 10 connection requests on LinkedIn per day to people in my target audience
• Post content on my profile regularly that will appeal to my target audience
• Research keywords and content that will give my content greater reach to include in my posts
• Engage with all comments on my posts to increase the reach of my content
• Message new connections to grow relationships and show the algorithms that I am an active user of the platform
• Update my profile to include the keywords I have researched that will be relevant to my audience and ensure that I am being searched for the right reasons
• Review and keep a record of my current reach on LinkedIn

Do you see how quickly and easily we have written a plan for how we are going to achieve our goal?

Once you’ve written out the plan to reach your goals, your strategy has almost completely written itself, as we know what we want to achieve and how we are going to achieve it.

What else to include?

Finally, I would like to look at the factors that will hold me back from achieving my goals. If you notice from the steps I’ve written above, I haven’t written anything unachievable in terms of time commitments. That’s important because when you are running a business, time is your most important commodity.

By naming and writing down the things that will hold you back from achieving your goals, you can start to address them and ensure that they don’t derail your plans.

Once you have these elements written down, you have a strategy that’s built for success.

I genuinely believe that social media marketing with a strategy is simple to do and should be done by every business owner. Stick to these simple steps and you will have a strategy that will work for you: write down your SMART goals, write a plan of how you will achieve them, don’t overstretch yourself and be aware of the pitfalls that can stop you from achieving your goals.

For more help with writing your social media strategy, book a Strategy Call with me today, and I will help you to write yours at a time that suits you.

Social media marketing remains the easiest and cheapest way to promote your business and introduce yourself to potential clients. It’s become the indicator of “success” for many business owners. But why? When did we give our measurement of success over to an algorithm we don’t understand? 

Let’s take a look.

When you start your own business, you’re constantly told to “post about it on social media”, but nobody tells you why. It’s the one bit of advice that isn’t very helpful when you’re already feeling overwhelmed.

The truth is, it’s not about becoming an influencer. It’s about growing your audience. It’s about getting your message in front of your target audience. It’s the top level for your sales funnel that gets your message in front of a large number of people who can begin to travel down the know -> like -> trust path.

On average, it takes 7 points of contact before someone remembers your name. It can take up to 21 points of contact before they understand what you do, and up to 49 (!) points of contact before they trust you enough to buy from you.

49 touch points with someone before they are ready to buy sounds ludicrous! It sounds like an impossible task to a new business owner. How on earth are you to achieve that simply, quickly, and effectively so that you can get that much-needed cash flowing into your business?!

The answer is simple: regular and consistent posting on social media. 

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Most of us will, at some point in our lives, have created at least one post on social media. Whether it’s sharing a meme with our friends, or checking in at the pub, or ranting about something that has annoyed us. The problem that most people have is not “how” to post, it’s the why behind the post. We know we need to post with purpose, but our brains throw up all the reasons why we can’t.

When you start your business, each post suddenly becomes a business marketing decision, and we apply a lot of pressure to ourselves, because now every post has the potential to earn us customers, but it also has the potential to turn customers away. That’s the last thing we want, right?

It’s a daunting task!

That’s where I can come in. It’s my job to help make all of that seem so simple… because social media marketing should be simple, easy and effective. Think about how many people already like you; your friends, your family, your (now ex) colleagues… They like you because they got to know you. 

That’s what social media marketing is all about: helping more people get to know you online so that they can like you, trust you and buy from you. It builds your connections so that people recommend you because they trust you and allows you to “get your name out there” (which is a really nonsensical phrase in my opinion).

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Just like many small business owners will discover how essential networking is when they first start out, getting your social media marketing right is the best thing you can do to grow your business reputation. 

Social media marketing is essential for businesses; it can be the key to unlocking your next client. Let’s face it, we all want more customers, more business, and to grow our reputation. The most effective way we can do that is to use social media marketing.

If you’re a business owner looking to grow online, what’s holding you back from using social media?