How to Create a Winning Social Media Strategy (+Template)

Every day, billions of users are scrolling through thousands of posts on dozens of social media platforms. With this kind of excess, it’s easy to feel defeated. How can a small business stand out with all this noise? It’s simple: By developing a targeted social media strategy.

With a social media strategy, you’ll focus on reaching your audience with high-quality content they want to see on the platforms where they’re already spending time. You won’t be competing with all the noise for any attention; you’ll be putting a plan in place to reach your potential customers. In this article, we’ll go over all the steps you need to follow to create a social media strategy that works for your business.

Contents

What is a social media strategy?

Before we get into the steps, let’s go over what a social media strategy is and how creating one can help build your brand and grow your business.

A social media strategy outlines how your organization will create and distribute content, which social media platforms it will use, and what defines success for your brand. Ideally, your social media strategy is documented all in one place that’s easy to share with the marketing team, new hires, or anyone at your company contributing to your brand’s social media presence. (Using our social media strategy template can help you set that up.)

A social media strategy will help you spot trends so your content ends up in front of more people.

How detailed this strategy gets will depend on the size of your business and the investment in social media management.

For instance, if you’re a one-person marketing team growing a new channel, you might not have specific hour blocks to post on Instagram Stories daily—at least not yet. But suppose you’re a social media manager for a brand with a large TikTok following. In that case, you might have a social media strategy that dictates which emoji your brand uses and which it doesn’t in its daily video posts. Either way, you’ll need the basics, including your audience, goals, and more, which we’ll cover below.

Now, this might all sound prescriptive and boring. You might wonder where the room for organic day-in-the-life content, jumping on trends, or connecting with your audience is. The truth is that there’s room for that, too. But it’s important to have a clearly defined strategy in place first to know what you’re working towards and where your investment is going.

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Why does a social media strategy matter?

Your social media strategy matters because it keeps you organized and focused on growing the right audience for your business.

As of July 2024, there are 5.45 billion internet users worldwide and 5.17 billion social media users. If your target customers are online, then chances are they’re on social media, too.

Source

The people who head over to your social media profiles will likely do so for a few different reasons. Some will follow for product and offering updates, some will engage with content and share testimonials, and more will check out your social presence while they’re in the consideration stage.

In fact, 51.2% of people research brands online before purchasing. You need a plan in place to make sure that you’re taking advantage of this online traffic to build your audience, engage with your followers, and convert your community into your customers. So, let’s get to it.

How to create a social media strategy

Now that we’re clear on what a social media strategy is and why it’s important, let’s get into the steps to create one of your own. Here are the essentials for developing a social media strategy that works for you and your business.

1. Write your mission statement

You’re likely familiar with a mission statement for a business. It’s a concise, clear statement of the brand’s purpose, values, and goals. But documenting this guiding principle for your marketing is worthwhile, too.

If you don’t already have a content marketing mission statement, start your social media strategy doc by crafting one that’s specific to these channels. Here are a few questions to help you get started brainstorming:

• Is your social media content funny or formal?
• Is your personality quirky, irreverent, or all business?
• How does your social media content relate to other marketing channels?
• What type of content do you share on your social accounts?

And when you’ve got all your answers down, use this formula to start drafting:

[Your brand]’s social media presence is where [your target social audience] can find [type of content] and [other type of content] for [benefit]. 

Developing a concise statement that defines your social media content and why it matters will also help you with the rest of your strategy.

2. Set your goals

Your time, efforts, and budget are all valuable and limited resources. For your social media strategy to be effective, you need to put those resources to the best use for specific goals. In The 2023 State of Social Media Marketing, Buffer reported the top three social media marketing objectives:

• Building brand reputation (selected by 66% of survey respondents).
• Understanding customers (65%).
• Improving competitive positioning (63%).

These are great places to start if you’re unsure what you’d like to get from your brand’s social media presence. Once you have your objective, it’s time to set some goals. SMART goals are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound.

For example, if your following on TikTok hovers around 1,000 and you’re posting regularly, a good goal for building brand awareness could be to get 250 more followers on the platform by the end of the quarter.

Remember, this strategy is meant to focus your social media efforts and ensure you get the results you need without wasting your time. So, keep this part simple if it makes sense for your time or your company. Think more followers, posts, and engagement—and these can be incremental gains.

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3. Define your audience

You need to define your audience to grow your followers and engage with your community. Your target audience on social media is a part of your company’s target audience, so a good place to start with this step is pulling out your buyer personas and mapping these to your social.

Which platforms do each persona spend time on? What type of content does each persona engage with? This will be a good starting point for defining your audience and brainstorming content.

But your brand’s target audience isn’t a direct translation of your social media’s target audience. Your persona, endearingly referred to as Brad the Builder, never goes on TikTok, for instance. Why make a bunch of videos with him in mind? That’s why it’s helpful to go one step further.

Once you’ve aligned your channels with buyer personas, look at your followers on each platform and figure out patterns. Do the people following your account have similar ages or job titles? What about their educational backgrounds or geographic locations?  This will help you hone in on your target audience—and hopefully even develop your own social media personas for content creation.

4. Audit your accounts

Before you get any further in your planning, you need to take the time to do a social media audit. This should be comprehensive, but it doesn’t need to be an exhausting endeavor.

Here’s where to focus your social media audit:

• Confirm you have access to all of your accounts: First things first, make sure you have up-to-date credentials for your social media accounts.
• Review your profiles: Are the cover and banner photos on brand and high res? Is pinned content relevant? Are you optimized for search? Make sure this is all set.
• Dive into your audience: Note everything you learned from reviewing your audience.
• Get familiar with your performance: Check your analytics for patterns, identify content that works well, and remember anything that regularly tanks.

This gives you a baseline understanding of your social media performance so that you can focus on growing.

5. Check out your competitors

Once you have a handle on how your own social media is working, you need to figure out the landscape. Check out your major competitors and do a similar audit. Sure, you don’t have access to all the analytics, but you can still see follower counts, posting schedule, and engagement metrics, including likes, shares, and comments. What’s working well? What do you like? What isn’t getting engagement?

You can bet that competitors like Poppi and Olipop keep tabs on each other’s social profiles.

Then, use all this information to inform your content planning, leading us to the next step in your social media strategy.

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6. Plan your content pillars

Content pillars are themes or topics that your account will consistently create social media content about. That includes new posts, re-shares to amplify other posts, and reactions to trending stories related to these topics.

The topics will be specific to your brand, but there are several common types of content pillars.

• Educational: This content will teach your audience about your niche. Think breakdowns of your expert knowledge in videos, posts, and threads. Remember, this should be about your area of expertise, not directly about your product or offering.
• Entertaining: Think memes, gifs, and trend videos for entertaining content. With this type of content, you want your audience to pause scrolling, notice your brand, and even laugh and follow.
• Promotional: Your product tutorials, case studies, testimonials, and new release updates are all examples of promotional content.
• Engaging: This type of content includes direct engagement with your audience. Think about conversations with followers, response videos to comments, and user-generated content.

If you try to post all of the types of content we just covered in the table above, you’d be busy—and your social media profiles would look scattered.

That’s why it’s worth the time to designate content pillars. This focus will help you more easily brainstorm and create content, identify trending stories to engage with, and find complementary accounts to engage with online. And by staying consistent, you’ll let your audience know what to expect by following your brand. This will help with brand recognition, the first step to brand loyalty.

A great example of educational content from Maha Copy.

When coming up with these content pillars, remember to choose topics relevant to your brand and your audience.

For example, let’s say you’re running a small marketing agency. For educational content, you might want to focus on copywriting for your expert tips and create content around this. And for the engaging category, you might run a weekly AMA “office hours” where your followers submit marketing challenges and you give your on-the-spot advice. This helps you know where to focus your efforts, and it helps your audience know what to expect.

7. Document your tone and voice guide

Content pillars help develop consistency that makes your brand and social media content more recognizable. A clear tone and voice guide will help with this, too, by ensuring you maintain your distinct brand voice.

Is your brand serious, studious, or silly?

Your guide can include how you capitalize and punctuate posts, what types of slang or casual language you use, and even key terms to use regularly.

Keep in mind that your tone will shift slightly across your platforms. For instance, your brand account on LinkedIn should sound more professional than your brand account on TikTok or Snapchat. If you want to include these platform-specific differentiations in your tone and voice guide, all the better.

8. Settle on your core channels

Your social media strategy needs to identify the platforms on which your brand will be active. But you don’t need to post with the same frequency everywhere. Focus on your core channels instead.

You might need to do some work to figure out which should be your core channels. Consider where you have the most followers, where your competitors are most active, and where your target customers spend most of their time. Then, once you’ve identified your primary channels, you can turn your attention to setting a schedule and brainstorming content. In other words, create your content calendar.

9. Create a content calendar

If you’re scheduling your social posts in a tool like Buffer or Hootsuite, you can use these to create a social media calendar. But your content calendar doesn’t need to be on a social platform or a scheduling tool—a Google Sheet works perfectly well. The main thing is organizing your content, cadence, and schedule.

Here’s what you need to include for each piece of content:

• Dates and times: Specify when each post will go live, including the time of day you plan for each post to go live. Remember, time of day matters when it comes to engagement. Here’s a guide to the best times to post on social media.
• Content type: Indicate whether it’s an image, a video, a carousel, a status update, a poll, or something else. This will let you track how often you post different types of content and help you with performance analysis later.
• Platforms: Record which social media platform the content will be posted on.
• Post details: Her,e you’ll want to track the copy and the primary visuals for each post.
• Campaign: If your post is a part of a more extensive marketing campaign, make sure to note that in your calendar.
• Target audience: Include the specifics of the audience you’re appealing to with social media content. For example, you might be posting for current customers or members of your community with a certain job title.

Remember, your calendar should be a tool for you to make planning, tracking, and reviewing your social media content easier.

10. Cover your social selling

More than two-thirds of people on social media have clicked a link and learned more about a product that they weren’t previously interested in. And many of those people go on to buy the product—whether it’s through the link immediately, months later, or even when they find the product in a store. That’s why 87% of sellers report that social media is a powerful sales channel for their business.

Influencer marketing is a popular form of social selling

So, when you’re coming up with your social media strategy, make sure you’re accounting for your approach to social selling. Will you regularly share links to your product or offer? Will you group these links to your products in highlights? How will your call to action appear in your bio?

Most of your sales will likely come from paid social ads vs. organic posts, but it’s good to proactively decide how you’ll feature links, products, and sales in your organic content.

11. Schedule progress reviews

Set up regular progress reviews to see how your performance metrics stack up against your goals. These could be monthly or quarterly, and they should also be annual. But it’s important to make sure they’re on your calendar so you’re accountable for checking in.

By checking in on your social media performance regularly, you’ll be able to adjust your strategy to improve your performance. If something isn’t working, you can pivot. If something is really working, double down. These progress reviews help you maintain an emergent social media strategy that helps you grow your brand.

Social media strategy template

Now that you have all the details use this editable social media template to get started.

Use your social media strategy to grow your brand

Having a solid social media strategy is important for small business owners and marketers who want to connect with their audience. By clearly defining your goals, understanding your customers, and developing a plan to create and distribute quality content, you can build a strong online presence that engages your audiences, attracts new followers, and ultimately builds your business.

If you’re ready to level up the results of your social media efforts, contact us. We’ll show you how we can help with each part of your social media strategy.