A social media content strategy is the systematic planning of creating and publishing social media posts to drive traffic and improve the branding of your business. 

As Jay Baer, author of six best selling marketing books, popularly said, “Content is fire. Social media is gasoline.” While social media is merely a platform, content is the real ignition engine that fuels the entire digital platform. 

However, if you have content but you don’t know how to amplify it, there’d be no results; if you have an audience, but you have no idea how to develop your content, again there’d be no results. 

Content strategy plays a crucial role in maintaining a sync between your brand and the audience. Millions of businesses have been able to increase their industry authority, develop a brand’s voice, and improve customer conversion rate with proper planning. 

To set up a content marketing strategy for your social media platform, you need to have the following conditions pre-fulfilled. So your brand will have a strong marketing base to develop the content strategy and generate faster leads.

Let’s check out these prerequisites:

Prerequisites to Advance Your Content Marketing Strategy

1. Set Your Business Goals

Your business goals define the “what” and “why” factors of your content marketing strategy. Let’s say you have a fishing business. Your business goal is to generate XX revenue by promoting your new range of fishing rods among the age group of 20-45 and encouraging them to take a trip to Rhode Island (RI).

You can bring a variety of content options out of it, for example, a video to show how your new fishing rod works, shorts of RI, its food, and people sharing their experience. 

You can also post an infographic to show the popularity of fishing in RI and why your fishing rod is the go-to option due to its durability and fiberglass construction. 

Setting your business goals will also let you aim for the right audience and research vastly into their specific requirements.  

2. Define Your Target Audience

Your target audience is highly likely everywhere across the Internet. The general norm is to divide them according to demographics (such as age, gender, education, and employment) and psychographics (such as interests, lifestyles, opinions, and personality types). These are the most crucial factors in defining your audience. Here, you have cleared the “who/whom” factor, now the question is “where”. 

While your audience is present on different social media platforms, the best approach is to go with the one that the majority of them use. Let’s say you are into the publishing business and you have to promote your books. Then, the best platforms would be LinkedIn and Instagram. Why? LinkedIn is a one of its kind social media platform that attracts users who are into reading and learning new skills. On the other hand, Instagram has an exclusive creator community that promotes digital publishers of all kinds. So, irrespective of what reading resources you are promoting, you’ll find the most of your target audience on these platforms.

To narrow down your audience list further, you need to understand their likes and dislikes. You can run surveys on digital platforms, check out the hashtags and accounts they follow and figure out the pain points through their online behavior.

3. Craft your social media content calendar 

Your branding time on social media is limited. A herd of other businesses is trying their all to attract your target audience’s attention. While you are winding up your one post, they have already created an essence of their brand in the audience’s mind. 

Staying active on social media is tough, but you don’t have to. The key to achieving consistency is to opt for a social media calendar. 

While spreadsheets and Google Sheets are often used as posting calendars, we recommend you look into a social media calendar software. 

A content calendar lets you plan ahead of the schedule and post timely content to match the users’ demands. You can also customize your content further to match the specific preferences of your customers.

4. Work with varieties of content

Your content is the representation of your brand to the audience. While a photo post is the most feasible option, it’s better to surprise your audience and keep them guessing your next social media update. 

Photos and videos are highly engaging options, however, lately, infographics are becoming popular among social media users. The reason being they are informational and equally entertaining. 

Another option is to run contests, where you can ask your audience to review or use your product(s) and post it on social media. In return, you can offer them discounts or give them a chance to get published on your official page. 

In most cases, live videos work very well, whether you want to share your background story, capture a live event, or just want to organize a live chat session with your audience. It makes them feel connected to real humans, rather than a brand’s name. As you know, customers often make buying decisions on emotional grounds, your content type encourages them to finalize their decision. 

Tips for Developing Your Social Media Content Strategy

1. The Content Bucket Method

The content bucket method lets you diversify your content and share it with your audience based on relevance and usefulness. Its main purpose is to initiate a social media plan. Here, you have to list down all possible options that interest your customers other than your business. The finalized options are called content buckets that you use in your social media posts. This way, you not only talk about your business but also focus on what your audience wants to see.  

You can use the following informational options for your content bucket.

• Authority content: You share your useful tips and knowledge to build credibility and authority in a specific field.
• Industry trends and latest news: You share the latest trends of your industry, its future scenarios, and what’s in motion for now.
• Behind the scenes: You share interesting details of the workplace with your audience and also introduce your team members. 
• User-generated content: You share other people’s posts who are reviewing your product(s) or describing its applications. You can also cheer them through comments or give a shout-out to their business to strengthen your customer relations. 
• Product reviews: You can share your own reviews of your products and how it’s competing with others. You can also share a list of the best products in the market and offer genuine advice to your audience to help them in decision-making. It’s an effective way of establishing the trust factor with social media users.

2. The 80/20 rule for sharing and promoting

The 80/20 rule is your best option to promote your business on social media. According to the rule, if you give 80 percent of your time to developing and sharing valuable information, you’ll only need to spend 20 percent of your time promoting it to your target audience. 

In that 20 percent, share information about your work culture, how your team puts in efforts to produce the deliverables. You should also give information about special offers, product launches, event invitations, and so on. 

If nothing special is happening, share a popular quote or recent story that people can relate to, the most. Don’t forget to give the credit to the relevant sources.

3. The content curation from credible sources

The content curation initiates traffic as effectively as the content generation. You can look for relevant information from bloggers, publications, industry associations, magazines, and so on. Share them and credit the source. 

The best option is to go for Feedly, a news aggregator app that compiles news from various online sources for you to customize and share with others. 

You can also opt for Google Alerts to receive notifications on selected keywords and topics.

4. The checklist to revisit your planned content

Before finalizing your content for social media, make sure it answers the following questions in affirmation:

• Is it worth-sharing (quality over quantity)?
• Is it consistent with your brand voice and imagery?
• Is it educational as well as entertaining at the same time?
• Is it relatable, honest, and real?
• Is it human enough to resonate with your audience’s mindset and cognitive feelings? 
• Is it relevant to the subject (does the words, color, images, videos, and other creative elements justify the nature of the subject)?

5. The three essentials

All your social media posts need to have these three essentials. However, in some scenarios, you may also opt for two out of three. Here’s a brief explanation of each of them:

• Text: It can be short or long-form depending on the social media channel. In case you are using it with an image or a video, it has to be super short with a catchy headline. 
• Image & Video: It needs to be in HD quality with appropriate colors that define your brand. You can opt for warm or bright colors as per the requirement, though warm colors are always preferred to suggest emotional content.
• Reachability: It includes hashtags, geotags, slogans, and other relevant keywords that describe your brand.

6. The content revision for different platforms

The purpose of a content marketing strategy is to promote your brand on the most appropriate social media channel. To enhance your impact, you can further promote your content on other channels as follows:

• Write a blog article for your website to drive traffic.
• Convert your article into a video clip/short for YouTube.
• Share the main points from your content on Twitter.
• Post a summary on your Facebook page or group.
• Upload an image or a story on Instagram that highlights the key factors of your content.
• Create an infographic out of your content and publish it on LinkedIn.
• Pin the relevant images on your Pinterest board.

While promoting your content on different channels, make sure you add a link to the original source.

7. The emojis and keywords

Emojis are the most fun way to convey your message. We all use it to set the tone of the conversation. For example, Breaking News 🤩 v/s Breaking News 😞. See the difference?

Emojis can help your post stand out, though don’t overdo it. You can also use gifs or memes to increase your post engagement. 

Now, to find relevant keywords for your business, you can try the tactics given below:

• Do a self-research to figure out the possible terms that people may use while searching for businesses similar to yours.
• Conduct a survey with your customers to know, what would they type to find you online.
• Run a Google Search with your selected phrases or keywords, you’ll find other suggested keywords from the search dropdown list.
• Scroll at the bottom of the search page to find the option “Related searches”, you’ll find here the most commonly used and trending keywords for your content marketing.

Tools for Creating a Social Media Content Strategy

Social Media Content strategy works best when you have an effective tool to rely upon. Out of so many choices, here are the five best options. 

Crosscap 

Crosscap is a popular SaaS-based tool. It uses intelligent augmentation to streamline your social media content in advance. You can:

• Organize your entire marketing plan with its marketing calendar
• Define, execute, and analyze your omnichannel promotions
• Manage your marketing budget globally, nationally, and locally
• Control the store profiling for your instore, branch, and franchisor marketing
• Regulate change requests and proof cycles with Adobe InDesign Plugin Integration

Buffer

Buffer is a web and mobile-based application. It schedules social media posts for all major platforms. You can:

• Analyze the marketing campaign results in real-time
• Collaborate with your team members and customize privileges for each one of them
• Export your social media data to any reports or documents
• Compare different metrics such as tweet clicks vs retweets
• Add the RSS feed to your profile

Hootsuite

Hootsuite is a social media management platform. It offers a user-friendly dashboard and allows integrations for popular social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. You can:

• Schedule multiple posts in advance
• Mange team access and roles with permissions
• Assign posts to different team members, automatically
• Extend the functionality with apps like ZenDesk and Slack
• Report on team performance

Sprout Social

Sprout Social is another famous social media management platform. It serves beyond social media, offering measures to organize every aspect of your organization. You can:

• Generate reports for Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter
• Organize digital asset and content library
• Manage chatbots with automation tools
• Receive email and push notifications for every update
• Set automatic answers for commonly asked questions

Agora Pulse

Agora Pulse is a social media marketing platform. It works quite similarly to Hootsuite and Sprout Social. You can:

• Generate reports for social media marketing campaigns
• Identify optimal posting times for each social media platform
• Customize and export user data
• Categorize individual posts to further streamline social media marketing campaigns
• Track and measure multiple social media accounts

Each of these social media tools is highly recommended for you and your team. To give you a head start, you can start your content marketing shift with Crosscap. 

Crosscap offers you omnichannel marketing potential, where you enjoy full control over marketing campaigns, workflows, team collaboration, social profiling, and much more.

Creating Your Very Own Social Media Content Strategy Template

A social media content strategy template is unique for each business. On a minimal level, it needs to contain the following key factors:

1. Target audience
2. Goals
3. Topics
4. Post frequency
5. Content format/ creative elements 
6. Team involved
7. Call to action (CTA)
8. Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

Measuring the Success of Your Content Strategy

To know if your strategy was a success, you should be able to answer positively to the following questions:

• Are you receiving better sales after the implementation of your content strategy?
• Are there more people signing up for your service, demo, or other deals?
• Are more users following and reacting to your social media posts?
• Are people talking about your brand outside the social media zone?

Next Steps

Social media content strategy is the most challenging part of your marketing efforts. You regularly need to work on your strategies and come up with new content ideas to keep your audience engaged. For the very same reason, social media tools are using machine learning and AI facilities to cut down your efforts and accelerate your content marketing strategy. To understand how it works in real-time and how you can achieve higher ROI with an improved conversion rate, book a demo with Crosscap right now.