If you're ready for the truth and some clarity, this article is for you! If you tend to be uncomfortable with hard truths, you may not be ready to read this. But if you continue, it will change your business's social media game!
Did you know that less than 5% of your organic content reaches your audience on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter? Many accounts see only 1-3% of their audience ever receiving their organic posts.
LinkedIn organic content reach starts at ~10% but can increase depending on how active you are and whether you are using a business account or personal account. There are some accounts, especially personal ones, who can realize 30% reach or higher if they "play the algorithm game". But who really wants to take the time to do that?
Customers expect organic content from brands. But organic content is a heavy lift. It takes a considerable amount of time and money to produce and manage. And this does not even require the content to be good quality content. Most social media content creators have no clue who to produce content that will actually convert.
So, if we have to play the content game as businesses to compete in this ecosystem, there is no excuse for not producing excellent organic content that delivers a clear, measurable return. Right?
Everyone wants their organic content to work, but few people actually know how to connect all content to your organizational growth goals. Some Social Media Managers or Content Strategist do not even know what business goals they should be building towards, let alone how to do this. If they did, businesses would not be so frustrated with the lack of growth on social media.
Connecting every piece of content to a measurable business goal is the game changer. It is the first step to algorithm-proofing your content.
It becomes the competitive advantage that leads to 3x returns on your social media investments!
And it all starts with a professional Social Media Strategist who can deliver a content strategy that will...
Support your 3 primary business goals (generate demand, convert demand, and build loyalty/advocacy)
Be algorithm proof! because none of us work for Zuck...
Create a turnkey content playbook that cuts your content planning in half
Yields 3x growth metrics or higher
Improve organizational efficiencies
Support stakeholder alignment, succession planning, and employee turnover
Break through all the noise on social media to get your message in the right place, at the right time, to the right people, every time.
Table of Contents
What is a Social Media Strategist?
A social media strategist brings order to the chaos that is social media content. They know how to deliver a content strategy that is effective, efficient, and sustainable so that your business sees a clear return on your investments of time and money.
Every social media strategist should be prepared to provide your business with a thorough Content Strategy that is targeted to your audience, takes into account your competitive opportunity, and provides the frameworks for your content to succeed.
Social Media Strategists build the roadmap for brands success on any social platform.
I would be doing you a disservice if I did not mention that you need to be very cautious about who you hire for your social media! We have worked with many agencies and many marketers who do not actually know how to do this.
So, when you are looking for an effective Social Media Strategist, pay attention to what they prioritize in conversations. If they shy away from metrics, refuse to commit to data, or otherwise give wishy-washy answers about they can guarantee they can accomplish, they probably do not know how to do this well (no matter how many years of experience they have).
A social media strategist should add clear value to your business and show you how to succeed on social media. Their work output should have longevity, despite social media being fast paced! Because a strategy is more significant and lasting than a finite moment.
Your brand's social media strategy should be sustainable and should deliver sustainable results.
What is a Social Media Strategy?
With a quick google search, here is what the most popular answers are:
According to Digital Marketing Institute, it is "a plan that outlines your social media goals, the tactics used to achieve them, and metrics tracked to measure performance".
According to Gary Fox it is "a plan of how to maximize engagement and interactions across social media to achieve a company's objective - these objectives may be to generate leads, improve brand awareness, or create a viral effect".
According to Hootsuite, "The first step to creating a winning social media strategy is to establish clear objectives and goals".
I've highlighted the concerning pieces in each of the statements above.
The most accurate statement comes from Zapier, "A social media marketing strategy is a game plan for using social media platforms to promote your offerings and stand out in an oversaturated digital market. It's not just a five-minute whiteboard drawing; it's a comprehensive document detailing how you'll use social media to achieve your business objectives." It is a little long, but more accurate than the rest.
Here's why...
A social media strategy is not a plan - it is a roadmap or set of frameworks that allow you to build the most effective and sustainable social media content plan. Your plan is the specific posts you create and when you will post. Your plan comes after your strategy and is guided by your strategy. An effective strategy cuts your planning time in half (or more) because it takes all the guess work and opinions out. It removes any "Monday morning quarterbacking" from your leadership or managers.
It does not outline your social media goals because there should be no difference between your social media goals and your business's goals. A business has 3 primary goals: generate demand, convert that demand, and build loyalty and advocacy from existing customers. Those are your only social media goals because all social content should support your organizational growth goals. So, your goals are set by the simple fact that you are in business.
Creating a viral effect is not a social media strategy or a plan. We do not work for Meta and we do not work for their algorithms. Viral videos entertain and most businesses are not in the business of entertainment. We are trying to sell products and services by convincing people of value. Viral content rarely does that. Instead, we want to be highly social and connect with our specific people to convince them of our value. We work for our brands and our content should be algorithm-proof.
I want you to toss out everything you have heard about social media strategies that makes them feel complex and overwhelming!
Here's what you need to know about a Social Media Strategy:
It is the turnkey roadmap for how your content will directly support your business goals and sustainably 3x your metrics.
It provides the frameworks for you to create content that reaches the right audience, at the right time, on the right platform, and with the right message.
It creates stakeholder alignment.
It all starts with your target audience and knowing them better than you know yourself.
For those who like to see the roadmap, here's the most effective breakout of a Social Media Strategy and what you should expect from anyone doing this work for you:
Target Personas and Competitive Opportunity
Key Value Elements for Your Target (Emotional and Analytical)
Content Playbook (with Guidelines and Frameworks Attached to Business Goals)
Measurement Model
Armed with this information, you can judge whether or not you have what you need to make sure you see a return on your time and money investments in social media. If you do not, it might be time to talk with a professional Social Media Strategist.
What a Social Media Strategy Does for a Business
This is quite simple, so I will just leave you with a quick list:
Aligns all content to organizational growth goals
Provides the roadmap to 3x returns, guaranteeing clear ROIs on content investments
Efficiently and effectively combines organic and paid for maximum results
Cuts your content planning time in half (or more)
Removes all of the guesswork from content planning, creation, and analysis
Creates operational efficiencies
Increases stakeholder alignment
Creates turnkey resources for employee turnover, team growth, or even succession planning
Did you know you could expect ALL of that from your Social Media Strategy?
It's time to get yours perfected!
How Social Media Strategists Deliver Growth
We've made a lot of claims in this post so you might be wondering how this actually works.
That is a fair question and if that is where your mind went, you are steps ahead of most people!
The "how" is where the magic happens.
I do not typically share details about our processes in free blog articles because this is how we make our money, and our processes are what makes our work so valuable to clients.
However, in this case, I am going to share the inner workings with you because I am confident that there is room for everyone to succeed!
I am not going to gatekeep this information so you can use it as you want. The value my team brings is in how we apply this work and the level of detail and experience we bring.
Here is the full breakdown of how we, as social media strategists, deliver growth for every client who follows this process:
Build a thorough Target Persona that includes a detailed narrative, key behaviors, what their days look like, how they think/feel/act, and what their biggest struggles are within your industry. Do not shortchange this! Your Target Persona does not need a name or avatar or anything hokey like that. Those are distractions from the main point. The goal here is to prove how well you know your entire target audience.
Analyze the competitive landscape for the white space that is right for your target.
Identify the most powerful value elements that speak to your target audience within your offer. There should be emotional value and analytical value.
Create content guidelines that specifically support the 3 business goals. As a reminder, those goals are 1) generate demand (also called awareness and consideration in the traditional marketing funnel), 2) convert that demand, and 3) build loyalty/customer lifetime value and advocacy.
Build channel guidelines that outline all of the platforms to pursue, the cadence to use, the type of content for each, and the KPIs you will use to measure success. The cadence and platform spread you create here is budget dependent. So, keep in mind the resources it will take to execute the strategy you outline.
Share frameworks and recommend tactics to enhance your organic content strategy (up until this point, everything has been organic content). Those types of tactics include, how and when to use paid ads, Influencer marketing, and Partnerships to maximize reach and impact.
While you have likely mentioned/included KPIs and metrics throughout, at this stage, you should create a full outline of all metrics and KPIs to track for all of the channels and phases of the customer's journey. This piece should make it clear how your social media contributes to the rest of your marketing and specifically, how it helps build to your business goals within the entire marketing ecosystem.
I hope this inspires you and if you are looking for more, just set up a call with us!
Hiring the Right Social Media Strategist
What happens when you try to fix your own plumbing?
You use your plumbing every day for showers, washing dishes and hands, laundry, and so much more. You know how to use the water; you can see some of the pipes. But do you really understand how the plumbing works and how to get the end-result you want?
Most people, if they are being honest, will answer no.
Plumbing is essential to your home and to our way of life. But just because we live in the house and run the house, does not mean we know how to make our plumbing run effectively and efficiently.
Social media is similar to plumbing in this way. It is necessary, it must run, and it can get very expensive if not handled correctly.
If you wait to hire a social media strategist (just like if you wait to hire a plumber), you can get by for a little while, but you will end up spending more time and more money in the long run and for frustrating (or no!) results.
We all want our resources to be used as efficiently as possible in business.
When it comes to social media, the most efficient and effective thing you can do is hire an expert at the beginning, to avoid any waste of resources.
Many of our clients come to us quite frustrated with social media and content because they have tried it themselves and are not seeing the results they want. Some have even lost hope that it can work for their business.
If you take nothing else away from this article, please remember this one fact:
Social media can and should create measurable returns for your business.
It is just about whether you're ready to take stop wasting your valuable resources and see those returns you want.
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Author: Julianna Francesca, Founder of The Business of Marketing
"Thank you for choosing to learn more about how marketing can grow your business. We need more savvy marketers and business owners out there and you're taking steps to be part of that elite group. If you want more info, check out the other free articles or snag a self-guided material. If you're hungry to see results, we invite you to learn about our expert brand managers, explore our Services, or take advantage of our complementary strategy sessions."
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