How to build a social media strategy step by step?

I want to walk you through how to develop a Social Media strategy for your business or your brand step by step.

This comes in absolutely handy for every single type of business.

Every business is on Social Media or rather should be on Social Media but in order for you to reap the benefits of Social Media you’ve got to have a plan.

You’ve got to have a strategy, otherwise, you’re going to be running around in circles and chasing your tail for a very long time,

Developing a Social Media strategy isn’t actually that easy, so that is why I’m going to be walking you through the steps that you need to be successful on Social Media whether you plan to grow your brand, sell a product or sell coaching packages.

Whatever your goal is you’re going to find this incredibly valuable.

Here’s a glance at this episode…

• [01:48] What is a Social Media Marketing Strategy?
• [03:40] 7 steps for How to Create a Social Media Marketing plan
• [04:01] Set Key Goals
• [07:52] Understand Your Ideal Client Avatar
• [11:26] Understand Your Competition
• [15:44] Optimize Your Profile
• [18:26] Create Social Media Content Calendar
• [22:19] Use Storytelling
• [23:08] BONUS TIP

What is Social Media Marketing?

Social Media Marketing essentially is using the Social Media Channels that we have available such as Facebook and Instagram, Linkedin, YouTube even ClubHouse, etc to grow your business and sell your offer and all your products.

As well as selling your products you can increase brand awareness, build amazing communities and just really grow your business.

So Social Media is incredibly powerful.

What is a Social Media Marketing Strategy?

Well, your strategy should really be within a document that outlines all of your goals and everything that you hope to achieve and how you’re going to do it.

I’m talking about your tactics, the steps that your business is going to take.

A lot of businesses do outsource their Social Media Marketing to marketing agencies and these agencies will build out a Social Media Marketing strategy for your business but i think that it really pays to have ownership of your own business and to understand what that strategy is so that you can begin to implement it and see results.

If you choose to outsource it then that’s completely fine so within your strategy, you want to make sure that you have all of your existing and anything that you plan to create along with specific goals for each platform that your business is on.

This is where a lot of people get it wrong.

Every single platform should have its own goal and its own strategy.

In order for you to be successful on Linkedin, Linkedin should have its own strategy.

Every single platform is very different from each other so if you’re going to be on multiple platforms then you’ve got to create a strategy that is a multi-channel strategy so that you are able to see success on all of those platforms.

A really good Social Media Strategy should also outline who is doing what in your business and also how you will be measuring the results.

I’m going to be talking about that a little bit further but these are some of the things that you want to make sure that you have in your plan for your Social Media Strategy in order for it to be incredibly effective.

So that you’re not hooked to creating posts and wondering why only two people are clicking etc.

7 Steps for how to create a social media marketing plan?

#1: Set Key Goals

The first step in achieving anything that you want, especially on Social Media you’ve got to have a goal and you’ve got to have a goal for each platform that your business is on.

So if you are on Instagram, what is your goal for Instagram?

If you’re on Facebook, what is your goal for Facebook?

If you’re on LinkedIn, what is your goal for LinkedIn?

As well as any other platform that your business is on.

You’ve got to set goals for these and you’ve got to make them absolutely specific.

When it comes to goal setting for Social Media I love to use the smart acronym so each of your goals should be specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and Time-bound.

This is the most effective way to set a goal.

Here is one of the goals that you might have: let’s use Facebook for example.

You might say:

“We will use Facebook groups to grow a community of 10 000 strong of our ideal clients in less than 6 months”

Can you see how that goal is really clear?

I talked about the platform and in fact, I even went ahead and talked about the micro platform.

Not just ‘Facebook’ but ‘Facebook Groups’.

I also mentioned how many people we want inside of the group and in what specific time frame I am looking to achieve that.

That is a really clear goal.

You can set that goal for any specific platform that you want.

For example, you could say:

“We’re going to use Instagram dm’s to cut down the customer service in our Business to less than two hours”

This means that you’re going to be asking your customers to DM you if they need anything, if they’re stuck etc and you’re going to have perhaps yourself or a team member such as a VA who is going to be responding to their dm’s in a very timely fashion.

These are specific goals that you can have in your business.

One of the things that a lot of people focus on when it comes to Social Media is vanity metrics.

People want to track how many followers they have on Instagram (link this to this blog: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1VIOgNNt8O4c9_jgsT3Ell5TbMFEgXja1kBaGCygK1rY/edit?usp=sharing ), how many people are in, how many friends they have on Facebook, how many subscribers they have on YouTube etc

…and all of these things are good but vanity metrics won’t help you to sell your products, they do help in some sort of way if they are real but the problem with these metrics is that a lot of them aren’t real.

Followers can be bought on Instagram for example, so a lot of them aren’t real.

There are so many other things that you ought to track instead when it comes to your Social Media Marketing.

My favourite thing to track is Conversions.

So when we create a Sales System for example I make sure that we have a unique link for each platform.

So I make sure that we have a unique link for Facebook, a unique link for Instagram, a unique link for YouTube etc

What does this help us do?

It helps us to be able to look in our analytics and I can see how many people purchased a specific product from Instagram or from LinkedIn or from Facebook etc and when you have that type of information it helps you to govern your marketing for the next month or the next quarter because if you know that this specific platform is doing the most of the heavy lifting for you in your business what are you going to do you’re going to focus on that specific platform.

So metrics are important, but vanity metrics won’t help you.

The specific metrics you ought to look for are things like click-through rates and conversions from those specific platforms.

That’s how you really make Social Media Marketing work for you.

You may want to track different things depending on the different platforms, so for example if you’re using Instagram to drive brand awareness you might want to be tracking how many people are viewing your Instagram Stories.

If you’re using LinkedIn to try to drive traffic to your website you might want to be tracking the click-through rate on LinkedIn etc.

This is what I mean by if you are going to be on multiple platforms you’ve got to understand that each platform needs to have its own goal and it’s got to be trackable.

That leads me to number two.

#2: Understand Your Ideal Client Avatar

Why is this important?

It’s so important to understand:

• Who your ideal client is
• What they are looking for
• What are their problems
• What are the key things that keep them up at night
• What are their struggles
• What are their daily frustrations

These are the very key things that you’ve got to understand about your audience even before you create your product, create your offer even before you write a single Social Media post.

You’ve got to really understand these things about your audience.

When you do this you’re able to create content so much much more easily because you understand them.

You understand things such as:

• What they like
• Things that they are likely to share
• Things that they are likely to click on
• Links that they are likely to be interested in
• The product that they are most likely to buy

So the fastest way to actually get that conversion is by truly understanding your audience.

What are some of the key things you need to understand about them?

• Their problems
• Their frustrations
• All of the things that keep them up at night
• Their age
• Their gender
• Their location
• Their average income
• And so on…

These are some of the things that you want to understand about your ideal clients.

It’s really important to understand that your ideal clients are real people, they have real problems, real wants, real needs so you’ve got to really get to know them because this is the clear difference in having your content be spammy and being unwanted to actually really connecting with people at the heart level…

… in which case they buy into you and once they bought into you they will continue to buy from you over and over and over and over again .

That requires an investment on your part in terms of actually doing the work.

There are other ways to find out this information as well; it doesn’t have to be all from your head so a lot of Social Media analytics will actually give you this information.

For example on Instagram and even on YouTube and even on Facebook actually, you can see analytics such as the people who watch your videos, the time zones that they are in, what countries they are from, this is very important because it informs your marketing right once you know where they are from you can understand and you can make a decision as to where your market is coming from and therefore where to advertise.

For example, I can see looking at my analytics from YouTube that 57% of my audience in the last 28 days have actually been all women the other 42% have been men.

Sometimes, my analytics change and the gender ratio changes like the screenshot below.

I can also see that the age in the last 28 days have been between 18 to 34 and I can also see that my top countries in the last 28 days have been the United Kingdom, Serbis and the United States.

Now the analytics changes often so sometimes I log into my YouTube account and it changes. Sometimes it’s 100 women, sometimes the age is a little bit different and it changes sometimes.

It pays to understand who these people are but it doesn’t change so drastically that it’s unrecognizable.

Like all of a sudden, I have 100% men, no that never happens.

Mostly, it’s 100% women.

My market is women of a certain age and so that is roughly what I get and so my messaging is tailored towards those people and so my analytics shows that I am attracting the right type of people for my business.

BONUS: HERE’S A RESOURCE TO HELP YOU WITH YOUR CLIENT AVATAR:

#3: Understand Your Competition

The third thing you want to do when it comes to your Social Media Marketing Strategy is you’ve got to understand who your competition is.

I don’t even like to use the word competition, I prefer to think about it as who else is serving your audience.

You’ve got to understand who they are going to.

Who are the other influencers, other gurus, other coaches, other people in your industry who have a level of authority or expertise similar to yours.

Now it’s not a ‘competition’ thing, I don’t believe that there is such a thing as competition in that way because the world is a big place, it’s truly big enough for us all but there are people who are doing the same thing as you and you’ve got to identify who they are for several reasons.

You’ve got to understand why people are going to them, what is it that they have and you’ve got to understand what is it that sets you apart, how are you going to be different and why should people come to you.

These are the key things.

When you understand who your competition is and what they are doing it gives you an understanding of what your market expects of you.

It gives you that benchmark so you know okay well this is what they are used to, so therefore whatever you put out there it’s gonna be better, it’s gonna be greater, it’s gonna be different, it’s gonna top what already exists.

Another thing that it does is that it helps you to spot the opportunities like where are the gaps in the market.

Perhaps you can see that a lot of the people in your industry are really dominant on a specific platform, perhaps they’re really dominant on Instagram, you would of course go to Instagram.

But then you might think well actually perhaps there’s an opportunity for you to dominate on Facebook or for you to dominate on YouTube for example.

Or you might find that a lot of your competitors are dominating using a podcast as their vehicle or using blog posts as their vehicle and you might choose to do the same but you are going to change your vehicle to video for example.

It gives you the opportunity to see where the gaps are and where the opportunities lie so that you can dominate them.

So use everything that you discover to inform your own Social Media Marketing.

#4: Audit Your Social Media

This is one thing that my clients do all the time, in fact, the moment they start the program it’s the first thing that they do and that is to audit their Social Media.

You’ve got to audit your Social Media and do a Social Media Audit.

If you’re already using Social Media you’ve got to look at where you are right now.

There are some key questions that you’ve got to ask yourself such as:

• What is working right now and what is not working?
• What type of people are engaging with your content?
• What is your best performing Social Media platform?
• How does your Social Media presence compare with your competitors?

These are some of the questions that I want you to be asking yourself because it really helps to do an audit so that you know you’re not blindsided, you know this isn’t some pipe dream that you’re building, no it is going to be an effective Social Media strategy.

You’ve got to really ask yourself these tough questions and take what you can from them in order to build up.

Your audit should give you a clear picture of what is working, what isn’t working and a clear picture of each of your platforms.

If you are running several different platforms you’ve got to repeat this audit across all of these platforms.

Once you have the key information it will help you to improve the way that you or your business uses Social Media moving forward.

Once you’ve done your audit you’ve got to ask yourself some further questions.

• Is it working?
• Is it worth me remaining on this platform?

If you find that Instagram isn’t working for you you can make a decision of do I continue to use Instagram and use it in a different way or do I just move to Facebook that is working better and almost consolidate my efforts and put my eggs in that one basket that is working.

These are some of the tough questions that you’ve got to decide.

A lot of people want to be on all platforms but it doesn’t make sense for you to be on Instagram, on Facebook, on LinkedIn, on YouTube, on ClubHouse and TikTok and every other platform under the sun.

It doesn’t make any sense for you to be on all of those platforms if it’s not working for you. You are much better off being on one or two platforms.

That is being used effectively and you can measure the results from those specific platforms.

#5: Optimize Your Profile

Now we are getting into the practicalities of it and that is to optimize your profile.

This is so, so, so important.

Did you know that the majority of businesses that have a Social Media presence, their profile isn’t actually optimized?

What does optimization mean?

The simplest way that I like to describe it is to ‘roll out the red carpet’ to make sure that when your ideal clients find you that they are completely impressed and they are head over heels in love with your stuff because you have put everything in place and you have made sure that whatever it is that they found you for what they are looking for, that they find very, very easily and most importantly that your messaging is clear.

So you’ve got to make sure that you truly optimize your profiles.

Whatever platform that you’re on you’ve got to make sure that it’s truly optimized for sales .

This is the key here.

3 Tips For How to Optimise Your Profile

Write a Mission Statement for each platform

Here is a tip that I learned, that I really love and that is:

For each of your platforms that you are on, that you have your business on, you write out a one-line sentence, a mission statement for what you hope to achieve from that platform.

For example on Instagram you might say:

“We will use Instagram to increase brand awareness and grow our YouTube channel”

If that is your mission statement then on Instagram, on your Instagram stories if you have the swipe up feature for example when people swipe up they would then land on YouTube.

Can you see how you can use one platform to grow the next platform?

Go ahead and create a mission statement for each of your platforms so that you know what your goals are exactly, how you are going to be using them.

Complete every field in the ‘Settings’

One of the tips when it comes to really optimize your profile is to make sure that you complete every field that the platform requires you to complete.

A lot of people skip this.

Don’t skip any part of it, complete every single part of it.

Include keywords that your ideal clients will use.

Try to use hashtags in your profile if you can and make sure that when you are using images on your profile make sure that you are using high-quality images.

This lends to your brand as well so don’t be overwhelmed by these steps remember it is better to use fewer Social Media channels and be fully optimized and you have a goal and a mission statement for each platform than it is to be on all these platforms and none of them is actually effective for your business.

RELATED: FACEBOOK BUSINESS PAGE TUTORIAL [2021 INTERFACE] STEP-BY-STEP

#6: Create a Social Media Content Calendar

This is something that has absolutely changed my business.

This is so important for your business because it really helps you to stay on track.

You’ve got to put your content in one space because although sharing content is essential it becomes very overwhelming to figure out what type of content to post, when to post it ,when did you post the last content etc.

But if you have a plan for all of these things it becomes very, very easy to track what your content is doing, how and when did you post and when is the next post due and you can even be ahead of the game.

Inside of your Social Media content calendar, you want to make sure that you list out all of the platforms that you are on and all the different types of content that you will be producing for each different type of platform.

You also want to put on it the days that you will be posting, the times that you’ll be posting and whose responsibility it is to create the content to produce and edit and all of these things and of course to publish the content.

These are the things that you want to have on this one document.

That is going to be shared between you and your team so make sure that your Content calendar really fits with the mission statement that you wrote for each platform.

So that every piece of content that you publish really works together to build your business, to generate the sales and increase your revenue.

Here is an example of one of the ways that you might want to structure your content:

You might decide that 50% of your content will be geared towards lead generation.

As we know growing leads for your business and generating leads is the lifeblood.

So 50% will be around generating leads then you might decide that 25% might be around brand awareness and you might use a video specifically for your brand awareness and your company culture.

Then you might decide that another 20-25% might be about curated content etc.

You’ve just gotta have a vision for your business across your platforms and really figure out how to do that and by taking these steps you’re going to be able to experience the beauty that comes with really running a business that runs by itself…

… because you have a fabulously effective Social Media Marketing Strategy, if you’re starting from scratch and you’re not quite sure what to do then use this rule.

It’s called the 80% 20% rule.

You’ve probably heard about it.

It’s the Pareto principle.

Now the 80% 20% rule can work in all areas of your life and your business but in this instance, the 80% 20% rule is this:

80% of your content will educate, entertain and engage your audience, whilst 20% of your content will be led or geared towards marketing and sales in terms of generating income.

That 80% 20% rule should guide your content in terms of what type of content you produce and how your publishing, what platforms you publish and what you’re actually saying and what the call to action is.

You could also try another strategy which I use, as well which works equally well and that is called the rule of thirds.

That means that one-third of the content promotes your business, generates profits, generates leads, the second third of your content shares ideas from other thought leaders and experts in your industry, whilst the final third of your content is all about personal interaction and storytelling.

All of these things are for brand awareness so that works equally well as well when it comes to deciding what type of content to put out for your audience.

Pro-tip for you guys is to make sure that you have some sort of scheduling tool that really helps you so that you are ahead.

One of the worst things about creating content is the feeling that you’re running that hamster wheel and you’re constantly going and going and going and you’re never stopping so make sure that you have a scheduling tool so that you are always ahead.

BONUS: Grab My HIGH-CONVERTING SOCIAL MEDIA POSTS HERE

#7: Use Storytelling

Use storytelling in all that you do.

One of the biggest things that have really helped my business is the stories.

I share stories all the time on Social Media via video, via posts, sometimes they’re really short two sentences sometimes they are long-form stories but stories have really allowed my audience to see into my heart and into my business and into my life and it has allowed them to buy into me.

The rule of storytelling is that once people have bought into you they will buy from you over and over and over again so this means that a lot of my content is really geared at connecting with people in a unique way and storytelling happens to be the best way to do that.

BONUS: JOIN MY FREE STORYTELLING MASTERCLASS HERE

That leads me to a bonus tip that I want to share with you.

BONUS TIP:

All of your social media marketing efforts need to be linked to your Sales System.

That’s right!

It needs to be linked to your Sales System because that is truly what is going to grow your business.

A lot of people spend a lot of time building brand awareness, building followers and all of these things but they are broke.

I have met people with hundreds of thousands of followers on Instagram, hundreds of thousands of YouTube subscribers but they have no money.

In the backend, their business doesn’t actually exist.

It’s one thing to be an influencer if that’s what you want to be but if you are reading this to build a Social Media marketing strategy for your business you’ve got to understand that everything needs to be geared towards getting people into your Sales System.

Even when you are doing content for just brand awareness etc it needs to be with the intention that when people are aware of your brand they will go into your sales system and they will opt-in for something that they will purchase, a product etc.

So make sure that you are driving people there and that your call to action is really directed towards your sales system.

If you’re wondering how to implement a sales system into your business so that you can triple 10x your revenue you can schedule a call with my team so that we can help you and really help you to build your sales system.