How to Create the Ultimate Social Media Strategy that Drives Brand Awareness & ROI

Social media marketing is no longer an option for a brand or business to succeed online, it’s a necessity. With so many demographics active across social networks on a global scale, it’s where you want to be to engage, influence and convert.

To see why, just look at these stats from Datareportal’s Global Social Media Statistics:

• There are over 5 billion active social media users—that’s 62% of the world’s population
• The average time spent every day on social media is 2 hours and 20 minutes
• YouTube has the greatest number of active users, followed by WhatsApp and Facebook
• People use an average number of 6.7 platforms each month

These statistics just show the important role that social media has in people’s lives. But it’s not enough for you to just be active on social channels, you need to know how to talk to and serve your audience, share information that informs and excites them, boost brand awareness, and generate leads.

In this blog, we’ll break down the most important elements of social media marketing

• What is a social media strategy?
• What are the 8 steps in building a social media strategy?
• What are the 8 steps in building a social media strategy?
• Great examples of a social media strategy (B2B, B2C and non-profit)

What is a social media strategy?

Put simply, a social media strategy is a comprehensive plan that outlines your social media goals, the tactics used to achieve them and metrics tracked to measure performance.

It should help drive brand awareness and engagement across social media channels for your target audience/s, generate leads and help cultivate customer relationships. 

What are the benefits of having a social media strategy?

You may have run a successful social media campaign or got great engagement on your posted content. That one-off success is achievable. 

However, the difficult part of social media marketing is consistency. Do you understand why that campaign or post succeeded? Can you replicate it easily?

It may be daunting to think about creating a social media strategy, but it will provide your business with many tangible benefits.

A direction for all your social media activities
Improve brand awareness
Offer social customer service and support
Enhance targeting across audiences and platforms (e.g. your Facebook audience will be very different to your TikTok one)
Direct and increase website traffic
Personalize content
Generate better quality leads
Create social media influencer opportunities 
Offer social commerce and shoppable posts
Gather data you can analyze and measure
Promote your unique content that could go viral (remember that McDonald’s Raise Your Arches Campaign with the eyebrows?)
What are the steps in building a successful social media strategy?
Now that you understand the basics of a social media strategy, let’s get to the specific steps you need to take to create one. 

We’ll also highlight where to integrate your content strategy and engagement strategy into your overall social media activities to ensure all bases are covered.

Here are 7 steps to creating a successful social media strategy.

1) Set goals for your business
It’s worth spending time on this stage as understanding and defining your social media goals will determine the rest of your strategy.

Think about what your business wants to achieve from social media and understand that marketing and business goals are different. Is it greater brand awareness in the marketplace, to learn more about your audience, expand your following or generate more leads? 

You may want to achieve all these goals, but it’s crucial to note each one of them as they will involve different content and tactics on social media.

When you set your goals, define your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to understand which social media metrics are important. Research from Sprout Social shows the key metrics that marketers monitor on social media.