December 13, 2022
Sure your brand could start posting without a social media strategy in place, but without structure, or any research into your audiences, how can you be sure that you’re sending out the most effective content and not wasting your time?
In this blog, I’ll be sharing some easy points for getting started on creating a glittering social media strategy for your B2C brand.
Okkkk let’s go
- Before you do anything, you should establish the goals that you want to achieve on social media.
Do you want to generate new leads? Or increase brand awareness? Do you want to drive traffic to your site? Or maybe you want to build a community of brand advocates.
Once you have your goal in mind, you can start to figure out what your social media strategy and content plan need to involve for you to get there. We also refer to these goals as the ‘why’.
Why do you want your brand to be on social?
- Next, it’s one of our favourite parts at IF – defining audiences.
This is a task best executed with a social listening tool – tools like these crawl online data to discover who your audiences are, when they’re online, why they visit social media platforms, what formats they interact with most, and which channels they’re on. Pretty handy if you ask me.
Once you have this information, you can use it to influence your channel strategy and your content strategy.
Remember: your audiences are the people your brand is talking to, so when you’re creating content you should always do so with the audience at front of mind.
- Now we’ve established who your brand is talking to, we can figure out what type of content you’re going to share and where you’re going to share it.
This is why your audience data is so important; you need to know what type of messaging and content formats work best for your audience and on which channels. You also need to consider what your audience wants to see from brands like yours, and how you can solve any challenges they have.
For example, the audience of a food brand could be 18-35 years old, and most active on TikTok and Instagram. A challenge this audience might have is that they’re looking for easy weeknight meals that aren’t just chilli or pasta. To solve this problem, the food brand could produce content that offers inspiration or the entire recipe of an easy weeknight meal using the branded product. The content format to use here would likely work best as vertical video so that it can be easily posted cross-channel (without forgetting to tailor your content copy per channel), and works in harmony with the audience’s existing behaviour of watching videos on Tiktok and Instagram.
This is also the stage where you decide on whether your brand would benefit from investing in paid advertising (the answer is yes btw) in addition to organic.
4. Next it’s time to define the brand personality and tone of voice to use on social.
Your brand personality on social is super important, and it should be something that is consistent throughout your marketing strategy where possible. It’s also one of the most fun parts about creating a social media strategy because you can start to visualise your brand as a living and breathing thing rather than just a name.
Your brand personality and tone of voice are part of what draws your audiences to you, by helping them figure out who you are, what you stand for, if they can relate to you and who they perceive the rest of your audience to be, and if your values align with theirs.
Finally, you can choose your visual identity and begin creating a content plan – but we won’t go into that in this blog as that’s a whole other can of worms.
I hope this blog has given you a steer into the basics of a glittering social media strategy, but if you’d like some more help from our team of experts… get in touch here.