In today’s digital age, social media has become a powerful marketing tool that can help businesses connect with their audience, drive traffic to their website, and increase their brand awareness. As a digital agency, having a well-crafted social media strategy is essential to help your clients achieve their marketing goals (and to help you reach your agency’s marketing goals too!)
Ready to take the social media scene by storm?
Use this guide to learn about the key components of a winning social media strategy for a digital agency.
Define Your Goals
Firstly, one of the most influential things you can do to construct a winning strategy is to decide where you’d like it to be in future. Setting well-defined goals helps you develop a clearer picture of what your strategy should look like and makes it easier to set plans into active motion.
Here are some examples of popular goals:
- Increasing engagement – Engagement refers to any interactions your social media profile has with its audience. Likes, comments, views, shares, etc. all boost visibility and growth.
- Driving website traffic – You can use social media as a launching pad for driving people to your client’s (or your own) website. This also helps measure conversions.
- Generating leads – Lead generation is the process of attracting and nurturing prospects towards your business. As a vibrant consumer hub, social media is the perfect place to do this.
- Enhancing brand awareness – Every brand should set social media goals relating to brand awareness. The more consumers perceive your brand identity, the easier it is to generate conversions, drive traffic, and get closer to the other goals on this list.
- Making conversions – Conversions happen when you successfully turn a regular consumer into an active consumer. You can promote conversions through social media links and advertising.
Know Your Audience
Understanding your client’s target audience is critical to crafting a successful social media strategy. The more you know about the people you are trying to attract, the easier it will be to win them over. You can gain powerful insights about your target market by utilising the following tips:
- Use social listening tools – Listening tools are a form of software that enables you to track, analyse, and monitor conversations that occur on social media.
- Utilise social media metrics – Many social media platforms come readily equipped with metrics-tracking tools that help you follow consumer behaviour in a simple and understandable way.
- Conduct surveys – Social media is the perfect place to engage in conversations with your audience – and you can use those conversations to learn more about what they want from you as a brand. Conduct fun surveys, Q&As, polls, and more to find out what your consumers want.
Choose the Right Platforms
Unfortunately, social media platforms do not come with a one-size-fits-all option. Every platform comes with its own unique strengths and weaknesses – and it’s up to you to either use them to your advantage or let them derail your strategy.
Instagram is a visually focused social media app that prioritises high-res video and image content. It works well for brands with a lot of graphics or visual content to share.
While visual content still performs well on Twitter, it’s short-form written content that dominates on this platform. This makes it ideal for brand announcements, customer support, and nurturing ongoing dialogue with your target audience.
Facebook is an app that prioritises both visual and written content. However, the highest-performing posts typically include attention-grabbing links or videos.
Create Engaging Content
Furthermore, the kind of content you upload onto your social media platforms needs to be intentional, high quality, and engaging. If it’s not, it won’t resonate with your client’s target audience.
Here are some tips for creating engaging content:
- Use visually appealing graphics – The vast majority of consumers are visually driven, and most social media platforms promote visual content. Make sure your graphics are consistent in terms of aesthetic appeal, resolution, and overall brand style.
- Incorporate storytelling – Finding ways to weave in storytelling to your content will make it more emotional and relatable to consumers.
- Leverage user-generated content (UGC) – UGC is based on implementing a trend or campaign that invites consumers to upload their own content that promotes your brand. Many brands do this to spread brand awareness and generate low-effort, high-quality content.
Plan and Schedule Posts
There are many benefits to using a social media content calendar. It helps you organise your content campaigns more effectively and ensures that your client’s brand remains consistent. Consider:
- Frequency – How frequently are your posts being uploaded? The recommended pace is once every two to seven days, but this depends on a variety of factors.
- Timing – The time of day you upload content can have a significant impact on consumer engagement. Make sure you’re uploading in the right time slot for your social media goals.
- Format – Video, image, blog, or tweet? You should have a variety of different formats in your content calendar to ensure that consumers don’t get bored.
Monitor and Measure Performance
Setting goals and implementing strategies means very little if you aren’t tracking their progress. Your agency should always use analytics tools to gauge how effective your strategies are in reaching targets and provide insights into improving future campaigns.
The best way to extract meaningful data from analytics tools is to know your business needs and choose the tools that best meet your requirements.
It is also useful to select analytics tools with high customer support rankings – many of these tools can be difficult to navigate and you’ll never know when you need a bit of support.
Go For Gold
In essence, developing a winning social media strategy entails setting clear goals, understanding your audience’s needs, knowing how to navigate different social media platforms, and tracking your progress on them via high-functioning analytics tools.
Crafting and implementing a well-crafted strategy for a digital agency can help you help your clients achieve their marketing goals and push their brand into the next level of success