This Social Media Strategy Template can help you save time

A documented strategy can fill the gap between knowing what to do and how to plan it.

Social media marketing is a complex area. We all know that planning is key.

It is just as important to have a social media strategy documented.

Unfortunately, many marketers plunge into social marketing without a strategy and never get to the bottom of the water.

Avoid such serious mistakes by creating a well-documented strategy template for social media.

We can help you create a social media strategy template.

You want something more? Get our social media strategy template for free to instantly create and communicate your social marketing plan.

What is a Social Media Strategy Template (SMO)?

A social strategy template is a document that outlines your social media goals, and discusses the plan to reach and measure them within the budget and time frames.

It is, in a nutshell: the driving force behind all you do on social media to market your brand/clients.

A template can help you plan, create and distribute your social media content. It will align with your overall digital marketing strategy and act as an integrated marketing campaign.

However, it is important to be as precise as possible, especially at the beginning.

You don’t want your north star to stop you from following the path you chose.

What should you include in your Social Media Strategy Template?

A template is essential to get you started and guide you and your team along the way.

This is why you should start with your social media goals and work your way up to achieving them.

Answering the five Ws is the best way to determine what to include in a social-media strategy template.

Why? Why should you invest in social media? What are your social media goals

Who? Who are you targeting? Your audience/customers can be decoded and their behavior understood.

Where – Where will you share your content? Find the most popular social media platforms for your audience.

What? What content will you share on social media?

When – When will you publish your content? Are you able to determine the best time for posting on social media?

These 5 points are essential information that should be included in your social media content strategy template.

You can continue to map more information.

• What training and tools do you need to reach your goals?
• Which person will be responsible to perform a specific task?
• What is your client’s budget for social media?
• What is the expected return of investment (ROI).

We now know the information you should include. Let’s find out how to get every bit of information we need and make it into a structured social strategy template.

Step-by-Step Guide for Using the Social Media Strategy template

These steps will help you to create your own social media strategy template.

It will require a lot of time, which is a problem considering the profession you are in.

We have created a template for social media strategy so that you don’t have to spend your time creating everything from scratch. The template makes it easier and more time-savings to follow each step.

Step 1: Define your social media goals and key performance indicators

Your goal is to create a strategy that can be used to accomplish your goals.

What are your social media goals for the next quarter?

You could achieve more exposure, increase followers, generate leads, drive traffic or even make sales.

You can have multiple goals, even for different social media channels. Every social media platform is unique. Therefore, the strategies that you create for each social media platform will also be different.

Remember, every goal must be SMART. Wait, what’s smart? This is the S.M.A.R.T goal setting technique.

Specific – Choose a goal

Measurable – Your goals should be quantifiable

Attainable – Your goals should be realistic

Relevant – Your goal should align with your overall strategy

Time-bound : You must set a deadline to achieve your goal

One example of a goal that is SMART would be:

To increase brand awareness and build brand awareness until the end of the quarter, we need to increase the Twitter retweets rate by 10%.

Is it true?

Let’s not forget about the quantifiable part of smart goals. How do you know if you’re achieving your goals?

You need to choose the metrics that best align with your goals. If your goal is to increase referral traffic via Twitter, you will need to track CTR.

Once you’ve finished your goals and key metrics, drop it in our template.

Step 2: Understand Your Target Audience

Next is to figure out the “WHO”

Who are your target audiences? It’s the people that you want to reach, engage and sell to. It is therefore essential to understand your target audience’s likes and dislikes.

Sleepy Owl Coffee, for example, knows that its target audience are coffee lovers who love trying new coffees.

Preparing a persona is the best way to learn about your target audience. These are some things you need to keep in mind when creating one.

• Age
• Gender
• Localization
• Profile of a worker
• Interests
  
• Preferred networks
• Behavioral traits
• Pain Points

Most of the information can be found in the analytics section on different social media platforms. Rest of the information will be gathered through interviews and surveys.

If your business is new, chances are you have already taken down some of these details. It’s time to start focusing your efforts on targeting your audience.

You can create a buyer persona to help you understand the behavior and needs of your audience so that you can entertain them with your content on social networks.

This section is easy to use in our template for noting multiple buyer personas.

Step 3: Research Your Competitors

Unless you sell potatoes on Mars, there will be competitors using social media to target the same buyer personas.

A competitive analysis will help you see what is working and what isn’t.

Why do competitor analysis?

• Crucial in figuring out your target audience
• It allows you to understand the market landscape
  
• Set performance benchmarks
• Find out what brands expect from you on social media
  
• Identify brand messaging and tone of voice
• Look for opportunities where your competition is failing
• Find micro-influencers in your market.

How can you spy on your rivals?

Social listening is the best way for you to monitor your competitors.

Track and analyze all keywords and hashtags that your competitors use in order to reach the audience.

You want to know how people respond to the content of your competitors and how they support you on social media. What their performance is. To establish industry benchmarks, note down key performance metrics.

Step 4: Choose the Best Social Media Networks

You want your brand profile to get great engagement on all social media channels. It’s a dream come true, right?

It’s not a good idea to go after every social media channel in pursuit of the same goal, especially at the beginning.

You need to know which social networks work best for you or your clients.

Concentrating your efforts and budget on a handful of networks is better than trying to make every move and spreading yourself too thin.

How do you find the best networks?

The best thing to do is to

• Learn which social media platforms your audience uses
• Find the strongest social media channels of your competitor
• Find the channels that align best with your brand voice and tone, as well as your social media goals.

Once you have reviewed all of the above, it will be possible to identify the most effective social channels for your company.

Social media audits cover all of these areas and are the best way to discover your most successful channels.

What’s next?

After determining the most effective social media channels for your brand’s brand, create a strategy that works with each channel to achieve your overall marketing goals.

To strengthen your channel strategies, dive deep into our extensive guides:

• Facebook marketing guide
• Instagram marketing guide
• Youtube Marketing Guide

Step 5: Create engaging content ideas

A content strategy should produce engaging content that leads to results.

You will be able to identify the content that is most effective for you and your competition by conducting a content audit. This type of content should be more prominent in your social media strategy.

First, choose your brand theme.

There are tons of post types available on every social media platform that allow you to present information in many different ways. You must create content that is consistent with your brand’s tone and style.

KFC is able to entice customers while simultaneously allowing them to share their thanksgiving stories with others.

You can also see the bright, colorful and outdoorsy theme LaCroix Sparkling Water follows regardless of content.

After you have established your writing voice, visual tone, and content ideas, you can start to think about what content you will use.

These are the top content ideas.

• Ask me about live streams
• Giveaway or contest on social media
• How-to tutorials
• Memes
• Curated content
• Trending hashtags
• Content created by users
• Behind-the-scenes
• Surveys on social media
• Video tips, tricks and hacks
• Instagram Reels
  
• Informative carousels

You can use multiple content types to grab your audience’s attention, thanks to the many features available on every social media channel.

Without a social media calendar, however, any of these content ideas will have a significant impact.

This brings us to the next stage!

Step 6: Create a social media calendar

Social media calendars are essential tools for managing and planning your social media posts across multiple channels.

A social media calendar allows you to plan when and where you will post each post on different channels.

A complete overview of all your information is helpful for content creation and consistency across every profile.

A calendar allows you to plan and manage your content, not only by leveraging holidays or the best times to post on social networks, but also helps you determine and prioritize the best content mix.

What’s that?

As a brand, it is important to post posts that are relevant to various social media goals. It is important to choose a content mix that strategically breaks down the frequency of posts for each goal.

and are the most popular rules for deciding a content mix.

The 80-20 rule applies.

However, the rule of thirds in social media is the opposite.

These rules may not be right for you. It is important to determine your content mix. You can test other ratios before settling on the best.

Once you have a clear understanding of what, when and how much to share, it is time to start deleting everything from your social media calendar.

We have something for you! An auto-populating social media calendar.

SocialPilot’s calendar feature allows you to see a monthly overview of all scheduled posts across multiple channels.

Step 7: Keep Track of Your Progress

While this step is not necessary for creating your first social-media strategy template, it will be crucial when running your strategy live.

Your social media strategy template should not be considered a one-time assignment. It is important to keep revisiting it to assess the progress and setbacks made since its inception.

You must include a section in your template to track the progress of each social media KPI that is relevant to your goals.

SocialPilot’s dashboard for analytics will help you track all engagement metrics. You can easily export PDF reports to get analytics for every social media channel.

What’s Next?

Social media strategy templates will guide you along the path of social media marketing.

You can create a great social media strategy template by following the steps in this blog.

The task is not over once the template has been completed.

It is important to keep returning to it in order to adapt your strategy to changing circumstances and social media marketing landscapes.

Avoid the headache of creating a template and let our social media strategy template do all the hard work.

Once you have a strategy in place, SocialPilot’s unparalleled analytics, scheduling, and team collaboration features will make it easier.

Get your free trial now!

SocialPilot’s first post, Use this Social Media Strategy Template To Save Time appeared on SocialPilot.

Did you miss our previous article…
https://onlinemarketingagencies.net/?p=3721