Social Media Marketing: Developing a Strategy to Build Your Brand and Engage Your Audience

It’s estimated that 57.1 million people in the UK are active on social media platforms. That’s more than 84% of the population!

With so many people engaging on social media, it presents a huge opportunity for businesses of all sizes to reach their target audience with social media marketing.

But you can’t just throw a few organic posts out there and hope for the best, treat social media as something that you look at when you have a spare minute, or set up a Meta ads campaign with a CPA objective and leave the algorithm to ‘do its thing’.

It often takes a strategic approach to deliver the kind of success you want to see.

In this post, we’re going to quickly run through some of the steps you should consider when you’re looking at a social media strategy to build your brand, engage with your audience and deliver results for your business.

Set your social media goals

One of the biggest recommendations I could give before you get started with social media activity, is to really think about what you want to get out of it.

Without taking the time to establish some defined goals, your social media efforts are likely to lack direction and clarity. And if you don’t know what success looks like — it’s hard to measure if your activity is successful or not!

Having specific objectives in place helps you to stay focused, allocate your budget and resources effectively, and measure your success over time.

So, what kind of goals should you aim for?

This all depends on the needs of your business, but some common social media marketing objectives are:

• Increasing brand awareness
• Driving website traffic
• Generating leads or sales
• Building customer loyalty

It’s entirely possible to combine objectives — for example, you might have one ad campaign that’s designed to raise awareness, a more sales focused ad campaign targeting people that have visited your website but haven’t converted, and an organic presence that’s designed to engage existing customers.

But making sure you have a clear rationale and objective for social media activity should underpin everything you do.

Understand your target audience

Knowing and understanding your target audience is the foundation of any effective marketing — and social media is no exception.

It’s important to look at the demographics and psychographics of your target customer — things like their age, gender location, interests, lifestyle choices and beliefs. This can absolutely help with your choice of social media channels, your ad targeting if you decide to go down the paid social route, and (to a degree) your messaging.

But what’s arguably more important for delivering effective messaging is really understanding the underlying pain points and motivations that lead them to consider purchasing your product or service, and the likely worries or concerns they might have about going ahead.

When you genuinely understand this, it will help you produce content that really speaks to their needs, helps build a positive brand connection, and reassures them that your business could be the solution they are looking for.

Review your competitors

Another step I’d recommend taking before going ‘all in’ on building social media ads or an organic posting schedule, is to carefully review the activity of a select number of competitors.

The Meta ads library is a great resource to get an insight into the paid ads that other brands in your industry are currently running, to help you get a bit of inspiration. If you see a trend in a certain type of ad across multiple competitors — it might be safe to assume that it’s something worth trialling with your own unique approach on your account.

And by reviewing the types of organic posts that get the most interaction and engagement, it can also help spark inspiration for similar content that might do well on your own page.

Of course, competitor analysis isn’t just about taking inspiration from the trends of what’s currently doing well — it’s also your opportunity to do a bit of gap analysis. By looking at important topics that your competitors aren’t covering, it gives you the opportunity to deliver something unique to your audience.

Choose the right social media platforms for your business

I’m going to keep this section quite punchy, as I covered it in quite a lot of depth in a previous post: Which social channels are best for my business?

But in a nutshell, it’s generally not advisable to be active across every social media channel available. Especially if you’re a small business, it’s likely that you’ll spread yourself too thin and would struggle to produce high-quality content for each different channel.

It’s far better to focus on a small number of channels where your target audience are most active and where you’re able to focus on producing genuinely engaging and valuable content.

Define your brand tone and visual style

It’s really important that your business is consistent in the way it communicates across different channels and customer touchpoints.

Consider your brand personality and values and think about how you want your audience to perceive your business. Are you professional and formal, or casual and friendly? Try to be consistent across each of your social channels, your emails, and your website.

Also, choose a colour scheme and visual identity that effectively communicates your brand identity and try to stick to it across all your different channels.

By being consistent in your tone and visuals it can help customers recognise your brand and build a sense of trust, recognition and loyalty.

If you’re interested in reading more, I put together an in-depth look at the importance of brand identity a few weeks ago: How to Build a Successful Brand Identity for Your Small Business

Plan your content calendar

Once you’ve defined your objectives, taken the time to really understand the needs and motivations of your target audience, had a sneaky look at your competitor activity, decided which channels are right for you and agreed on your tone and style…it’s time to start planning your content.

Having an ongoing content calendar is essential if you’re going to make sure you post regularly on organic social. It makes it easy to know what’s coming up when, and helps you stay accountable! And from a paid social perspective — having a clear plan for new variations of ads can help you avoid ‘ad fatigue’.

Depending on your objectives, consider ‘mixing up’ your content a little bit — varying not only the post type (images, videos, text) but also the style (educational, entertaining, inspirational, promotional). This is a good tip to help keep your audience engaged and interested.

Build in regular review periods for your content, where you can take an objective look at the type of content that is working for you the best and adjust your approach accordingly.

Craft effective social media posts

Once you have your content plan in place, it’s time to get started producing some effective ads or posts.

If you’re struggling for inspiration Canva is great for providing pre-built social media templates that look really professional. Just remember to change the colour palette and font so it matches your brand identity!

It’s important to include compelling visuals in your posts. Eye-catching images, videos, or infographics can really help capture your audience’s attention.

If the objective of your post is for people to take action (visit your site, sign up to a newsletter, make a purchase), consider trying to follow an established copywriting framework to communicate your message.

Depending on the platform, you might also want to consider using appropriate hashtags to help increase your post’s reach and visibility. If you’re struggling to decide which hashtags to use, Shane Barker has put together a useful guide on hashtag research tools.

Engage with your audience

Engaging with your audience is a crucial aspect of social media marketing, and it’s also one of the things that makes a lot of business owners nervous!

If you’re posting high-quality content regularly across your social channels or in social ads, you’re likely to get questions or comments on your posts. In a lot of circumstances the comments are going to be positive — genuine questions about how your product or service works, or maybe even a glowing comment from a happy customer.

But sometimes you’re going to get a negative comment or review. It happens to all businesses, but it can sometimes lead to a sense of dread because it’s on social media and ‘everyone can see it’. If you do get a negative response, the best thing to do is be empathetic, personalise the response (automated or ‘stock’ answers won’t make the situation better!) and keep your tone positive.

But regardless of whether the comments are positive or negative — it’s important to respond quickly. Hubspot suggests that most customers expect a response on social media within 24 hours!

Need support with your social media strategy?

Social media marketing can be incredibly effective for businesses of all sizes, if you take a considered, strategic approach.

If you follow the steps in this guide, you’ll be ahead of a lot of your competitors that haven’t put as much thought into their objectives, audience, brand identity, choice of channels and creative decisions.

But if you’re a busy business owner or work in an over-stretched marketing team, you might be thinking that this all sounds great — but social media strategy needs to sit on a back burner for now as you deal with other priorities.

I’ve got good news — you don’t need to put it off.

Just give me a call (or drop me an email if you prefer!) and I’d be happy to discuss your social media strategy requirements and how I can help.