How To Build Your Social Media Marketing Strategy

1. Class Introduction: So before you begin doing anything on social media as a personal brand or business, you need to have a complete understanding of what you actually want to achieve from social media and the step you're going to take to achieve that outcome. But if you've got no plan in place, That's obviously going to be very difficult. And that's why most personal brands, personal pages, and companies, have a social media marketing strategy in place that they follow throughout their journey. But what on earth? Because a social media marketing strategy, YG need one. How do you create one where you are in the right place? Because today's Skillshare class is all about creating your own social media marketing. Hi guys. My name is Ethan bridge. I am host of the social media marketing school podcast and the guide pine, the Instagram page at the marketing, eat them. And as I said in today's Skillshare class, I'm going to be teaching you the steps that you need to take in order to create your own social media marketing strategy. If you want to succeed on social media, you need to know the steps you're going to take throughout your journey to eventually get to that point of success. So that's why you need a social media marketing strategy. So without any further ado, let's dive straight into the first module with the very first step. 2. Why Are You Using Social Media?: So step number one of your social media marketing strategy. Now, at this point, we know it's going to start making our strategy because we need to understand what we actually want to achieve from social media. Why as a brand, why is accompany? Are we using these different social channels? Is it because you want to build brand awareness? Is it because you want to drive traffic to your website? Is it because you want to get new clients? These are all reasons you need to pinpoint because they are ultimately going to be what influences the way you create your content, the way you portray yourself, the way you speak to your audience, you name it. All of these different factors all depend on what you actually want to achieve from social media. So that is the first thing you need to do. You need to pinpoint why you are using it. And then from that, you can begin creating your goals. You need to have meaningful goals, achievable goals that make sense. You could create goals for the next month, six months, one year, and beyond. Breaking up the goal process gives you those goal posts to aim for it. Now they may move throughout your journey and that's something we'll talk about later on. But setting those goals in the beginning, really helpful because this begins to give you that understanding of what you actually want to achieve from social media. Because if you don't know what you want to achieve, then how on earth do you expect to achieve? You need to understand why you're using it. If you want to build brand awareness, you then know what sort of content you need to create. If you want to get clients, you obviously want to solve the problems of your audience and therefore, you create content to do just that. But understanding what you actually want to achieve is the first step. And it's incredibly important because if you don't understand what you want to do, your whole social media journey is going to be an absolute shambles because as the content creator yourself is going to be all over the place. So step number one, pinpoint the reasons as to why you are actually using social media in the first place. What are the goals you want to achieve? 3. Competitor Research: So now moving on to step number two of our social media marketing strategy, and this is competitor research. It's very unlikely that you are a brand new company that has never been seen before. You are doing something completely different. And therefore, it's likely that you have competitors who are already performing well on social media. Now, I'm a big believer that you shouldn't just go out on a whim. I guess everything, if there's something you can go by, if there's a structure that's already been put in place which has been proven to work. Why don't you model from that? Why did you take that structure? And therefore, doing competitor research is key. You can find out which of your competitors are doing it. Well, Madu, what you do off of them, don't copy. It's the worst thing you can do. Put model their success in your own way, change it, but use that framework because you know that works. And if they're a competitor, you know, that's what your target audience is looking for as well. Because being a competitor, they own part of your market share. And if you want to take customers from them, you need to take that framework of what they're doing well, but then improve upon it. So you need to do that competitor research to see what's working. Why guess when there's all this information out there that we can learn from already. So for example, just off the top of my head, Jim, company on social media, Jim Shock. What do they do? Well, influencer marketing, user-generated content they have how to use their content isn't all about just selling their products. They have workout guides, they have motivation, you name it, all of these different things that bringing leads to ultimately drive traffic to their website and sell their products? Yes. They have promotions. Yes, they have product-specific posts, but they mix in everything else. And this is how we've built the trust and built a billion-dollar business. It works. So if you were a new gym company, you wouldn't come in and guess everything, you would have a look at Gymshark and muddle your strategy off of what they do because they have shown you what works and they are leading the way. And therefore, why guess and do something brand new when you can take what work and adapt it and use it for yourself. So to round up the point before you start creating your content and going about different outreach strategies in getting new clients, do your competitor research. If you haven't done competitor research and whatever you do, I feel for you because you are literally going in blind. It's not impossible. It's like finding a light switch in the dark. It's not impossible, but it's difficult. So do that competitor research to give yourself the best opportunity from the get-go because the information's out there. You've just got to look, take notes, and then do it yourself. So step number two, you need to be doing your competitive research. 4. Understanding Your Most Important Metrics: Moving on to step number three. And in step number 3, we need to be understanding of most important metrics. So if we've now implemented Step number 1, which is understanding why you were using social media in the first place. It should allow you to then implement step number three, which is understanding, which are your most important metrics. So from the content you are producing, are they contributing to the metrics that are aligned with your objectives we set in step one. If they're not, you're obviously going to want to adjust your content strategy accordingly. So just for some examples, I'm now going to go through some different metrics that may or may not apply to you. But the ones I'm not going to mention Our likes because we've seen it time and time again. Facebook and Instagram are testing the hiding of likes. So I think going forward, the amount of light you get isn't gonna have any real correlation to contributing towards the actual business objectives you've set yourself, you make it all the lights in the world. But if they are from not very targeted audience members, then they obviously aren't going to convert into customers. And also, it's a shame, but people often buy likes to up their social proof. That's not the way to do it. You want all of your likes and your comments and engagement coming from accounts and people who are big fans of you and what you talk about in your brand, because they are the individuals that you are going to be able to convert further down the line. So for example, let's talk for a few metrics other than likes and comments that may apply to your business objectives. So number one, the amount of reach you get through your content. The reach is the amount of individuals that your post is seen by. And this is unique users, unlike impressions, which is where a unique user may say it multiple times, that adds two more impressions. Reach is unique users, so every different person that sees your piece of content. Now, if your objective is brand awareness, obviously reach is going to be your most important metric because brand awareness, you want as many people to find out about your brand as possible. Reach is telling you just that. Is your content reaching a wide audience? If it is, that's going to help you if your brand awareness, simple as that. Next, we have clicks. If you were using a website link in your bio, is your content pushing people further down your funnel and getting them to click your website link. This is obviously a really good one. If your objective is to increase your website traffic through social media, you can see how they all interlink, but the number of clicks is a key to seeing how people move through your sales funnel as a whole, social media is obviously a form of marketing. You produce content. As a form of marketing. Marketing is obviously a thing that you want to do to increase your revenue. And therefore, creating content on social media is essentially the top of your sales funnel is bring in potential leads in and getting eyes on your business. But that content isn't very good if someone's looking at it and then just scrolling on, you want to have them go further down that funnel. And therefore, you should be trying to drive that website traffic. Dr, those products sales on Instagram for example, or Facebook. You have the shop. And so if you tag your products in your posts, that could be a direct purchase. But back to the point on the website links, if you were wanting to drive website traffic, suggests that in your piece of content and Instagram themselves, if you view your insights, tells you how many website taps you are getting. So further down the funnel clicks are a great metric to look at if you want to increase your website traffic. Now moving on to the third metrics that I want to talk about. And this is one just as more of awareness to see how well your content is performing as a whole. And that is the amount of engagement you are getting. Engagement doesn't only tell you how well your piece of content is performing. It almost shows how much people are invested in you, in your brand, how much they love you as a company or a person, and as a great indicator of finding out how loyal your audience is. So engagement is a really, really important one to look at if you want to look at your brand from that aspect. So essentially what your engagement rate is, is your social interactions. So you're like, Sure comments. All of those divided by the amount of impressions you get on each post. And obviously you want your engagement rate to be as high as you possibly can. The higher that percentage shows that more people are invested in you, your brand, your business. So aiming for that high engagement rate is pretty essential with all the content you produce. So if you want to clarify how well your audience perceives your brand, then looking at your engagement rate is a great metric to look at, but that does round up that point. You need to begin understanding your most important metric so that you can then tie them back to your objectives that you set in step one to see how well your social media content is actually performing. You want it to be contributing to what you want to achieve. And if you don't understand the metrics that show this, then you're never going to be able to understand how well you're doing. 5. Target Audience Research: So moving on to step number 4 of this strategy, and this is doing your target audience research when it comes to social media nowadays, you've got to understand the desk, not really a one size fits all anymore. You've got Instagram, you've got LinkedIn, you've got Tiktok, you've got Twitter, you've got Facebook, all of these different social media platforms. So you've got to ask yourself the question, where does my target audience law? What social media platforms are they using most? If your product or service is aimed at the ages of 13 to 18, you can safely assume that they're probably not going to be using LinkedIn because it's more of a professional platform for people who have jobs or they're within the business industry. They're much more likely to be on platforms such as TikTok, Snapchat, and Instagram. So if you have a product or service that is aimed at those individuals, Daniel, other platforms you should be using. If you offer a B2B or B2C service, then you want to be looking at things like LinkedIn and yes, still Instagram, the only platforms that really apply to most people nowadays are Facebook and Instagram. They are the only two where you've really got companies and consumers alike using the platform. So always be on Facebook and Instagram. But you've then got to think about, okay, how can I utilize Tiktok? How can I find my way on Twitter? Shall I use YouTube? You need to be asking yourself, where is my target audience lies? Because there isn't a one size fits all. But then you've also got to begin to understand the content across all of these platforms is different. You can't just expect to have a post perform well on Instagram and then post it on LinkedIn. And it perform exactly the same because the audience on LinkedIn is extremely different, the audience on Instagram. So you have to repurpose your content. You have to think about it and go, okay, how can I tweak this? So if I put it on that platform, it's still going to perform. Tiktok, for example, is a short 15 to a minute long video. You can't really expect a piece of content you post on tiktok that's aimed at Gen Z to perform well over on LinkedIn. I hope you understand the point. There isn't a one-size-fits-all. You have to think about the different platforms where your target customer lies, and then how you are going to produce the pieces of content for each platform so that it really, really hones in on that audience. But before you even do all that, you as a personal brand or business, I hope, understand who that target customer is. You should have a customer profile of your perfect customer, which should make it obviously much easier for the, for you then to establish where they are going to be situated. So I should have said that before, but I just want to pinpoint it now that that target customer, you need to understand who they are. Once you understand who they are, you can then establish where they're going to be. Now, personally, I like to. Spread my social media strategy across all the different platforms by spend the majority of my time on the one that is working best for me at that moment in time. At the moment for me. That's Instagram, I spend the majority of my time on that platform because at the moment, That's why I'm saying the best results by also have my toe dipped in podcasting. I have my toe dipped in YouTube, I have in Tiktok, I have it in Facebook. All of these different platforms. I am there, but I am the most present on Instagram because that is where I'm seeing the best results. So let's say you are across five different social media platforms at the moment, you should be spending 80 percent of your time on the one that's working best at the moment. And then spread the rest of the 20 percent, so 5% for each across the four other platforms. Because you then might begin to pick up an audience on one of those other platforms, Tiktok, for example, overnight you might post a viral video and that be your new biggest following for platform. So then you can slowly begin to spend more time on that platform and then you're building up to larger followings. And then you may have two platforms that performing well at the same time. But if you're going all in on one platform and putting all your eggs in one basket. You were relying heavily on that platform to stick around vine when Vine was a platform and then overnight it vanished. And everyone who hadn't diversified on that platform, we're suddenly thinking, Oh, what do I do now? That platform is not gone and I've lost. Some of them lost. But one million, two million, three million followers. Which is crazy when you think about it. And because they hadn't diversified, that was it. Unfortunately, they lost it oh, and weren't really compensated for it. So as a business or a personal brand is really important that you do diversify. And having your toe dipped in all of the platforms allows you to do so. But as I said, spend the most time on the one that is working for you at the moment because do more of the same of what's working, obviously. Rule number one. But make sure you are also having some input into these other platforms so that if one platform was to just vanish one day, you do have that backup because I'd hate for you to go all in on Instagram. And then one day, that platform just disappear. The way I look at it is we essentially rent a space on social media. We don't own our accounts and the developers can get rid of the app any day. It's unlikely, but it's not impossible. We saw refine, as I said. So as we rent a space, don't actually own or following, they could vanish overnight. But if we have things such as a website, we drive traffic to our website or an email list, though the things we own, they can't be taken away from us. So building these things alongside your social following is also a very, very important point by rambled enough about your target audience and how to find them and the platforms you should be using. So that is the next part to consider. If your social media marketing strategy know your target audience and know exactly where you need to be looking for them. 6. Creating Effective Social Media Content: Okay, so now we understand what we want to achieve from social media. We know what our competitors are doing, so we know what works. We know the target audience. We want our content to hear where they are going to be and we know how to work out whether our content is achieving the objectives we set ourselves. So now we can start creating content. Your content is arguably the most important part of your social media marketing strategy because that is what people are going to follow you forward. This is how people are going to find you. This is how people are going to engage with you. So the quality of your content is everything. You need it to be as high as possible. Because you want people to remember you, you want people to come back to you for advice. Your content essentially is just key I could ramble on about all the different points of why it's so important. And this point alone could be a whole course in itself. I could teach you step-by-step how to make the perfect piece of content for social media. But we don't have time to talk about that in today's class. So I just want to walk you through some points you should consider when actually creating your content. If you want to know more about creating great content on social media, make sure you check out some of my podcast episodes. I'm going to tell you about the podcast in the outro of today's class. But they're awesome, awesome resources on there that teach you how to do it effectively. But for the purpose of this class, let me just walk you through some things that you must consider when you are creating your content. So number one, you need to think about your brand colors and the theme that you'll page. It's going to show if you've already got an established brand or you've already got a personal brand. And for example, you have a website. I hope on that website, you've picked some brand colors. You have some sort of branding already. If you haven't, this is something you need to think about. Now is, for example, with my brand is very dark gray or black, yellow, and white. They almost three brand colors with you, depending on whatever colors you want to use, just type into Google branding color ideas. You'll be taken on to websites such as Pinterest or there might be a random college generated that you come across. They are some great ways to work out which colors compliment each other well, but this is something you need to be considering when you create your content. Because when people view your page on Instagram or any social media platform, having those brand colors will make it look good. Or when somebody scrolling through the feed, if they understand what your brown colors are already, there'll be able to instantly associate that content with you because it is displaying your colors. Now, you want this to be consistent across everything. If you're website is certain brown colors, you want to match that with your social media content. So there is that consistency when people go further down your funnel, especially if you were taking them from social media onto your website. If you've got certain brown colors on social media and then they go into your website and then looking at completely different colors, it's going to confuse them and it's not good for your branding and your customer journey. So you need to be considering this. So tip number one for when you're creating your content, think about your brand colors. Number 2 in ESA, make sure your content is memorable, interesting, and actually enjoyable to consume. If your content is none of these in the long term, you won't succeed. If your content isn't enjoyable, nobody's going to want to consume it, especially if you're creating Harris OS, for example. If you were just having a ton of texts on every single slide, people aren't going to want to read them, afraid. A lot of people. And there was a study by Microsoft and they found that the average attention span of an individual was eight seconds. Eight seconds, that is it. So if you are not grabbing their attention within the first three to five seconds with your content is unlikely that you're going to continue to retain it. And even though the average attention span is eight seconds, if you can grab the attention and really get them hooked. That's how you retain the attention and get people to consume your whole post. So by making your content enjoyable to consume, this is all down to your copywriting and how well you can display your message. Again, that could be another course in itself. That is how you make your content enjoyable. It's also going to help you make your content memorable. At the end of the day, if someone's finding new in the Explore page or they're coming across your content. You want them to remember you. That is what branding is, that's what branding is all about. Is somebody asked that person the question, for example, oh, how do I do this? They might think and go. I remember that person made a piece of content in the past. Let me send them in that direction. That's a free referral from someone else because you made your piece of content memorable. Perfect. That is what you want with your content. Make it enjoyable. Make it memorable. It's something you learn over time. It's not something that you're just gonna get the hang of straight away. Unfortunately, creating content isn't easy. The first piece of content you create is going to be awful. Mine was, somebody else's was. Yours will be too. But you can't create your 100th post without creating the first. So just dive straight in and you will improve over time. Now it did just touch on it. But the next point I wanted to mention is, as a content creator, is your duty to make your content as easy for an individual to consume as possible. So this all comes down to your copywriting. You don't want to be having a ton of texts like I mentioned, as soon as someone's scrolling through social media, you've got to remember that in the feed you're competing with family photos, pictures of dogs, funny videos, this and therefore when they scroll to your post and if it's just a ton of text, task, no interest in someone's going to look at that and go, well, that can't be asked to read that. And then they scroll on. You want it to be eye-catching, inviting, and we have your copy. You want to keep it as short and straight to the point as possible. I have a role with my carousels that if each slide takes longer than five seconds to read, there is too much information on that slide. So I try and cut it down and only mentioned the most valuable points possible. That way I can keep my copy sure. That way I'm still getting my message across, but it's still enjoyable to consume. So make sure that you are evaluating the content you produce, making sure that it is easy to consume. A question I'd ask yourself is, would I consume this content myself? And be honest, you are going to be slightly biased because obviously you've just put the effort in to produce that piece of content. But if you can be honest with yourself and say, okay, we don't actually consume this concept myself. A great place to start because if you wouldn't consume it, Why do you expect someone else to? And one of the final points I want to mention on the content you create is you need to make sure it really does connect on an emotional level with your audience. I've mentioned earlier on the, your content needs to meet the needs and wants of your audience. So you need to understand the type of content that they are wanting to consume. Because if you can make your content relate to that person on an emotional level, they're going to have a connection. They're going to want to engage, they're going to want to interact with you, and they're going to want to consume the rest of it. So if you know someone in your audience has a problem, or multiple people have that problem, then if you speak about that and you hit off that post by saying, do you struggle with XYZ question mark? They instantly going to see that and go. I do. And because you are creating a post about it, obviously gets them thinking, okay, if I keep on consuming this, the solution is going to be at the end of it. So let me carry on and find out the solution. So you're hooking them at the beginning by connecting on an emotional level because you're relating it to a problem that they are currently happening. You can see how connecting on an emotional level can encourage them to consume the rest of your content. For example, people love a post about a journey and they will connect with on that post about your journey because they may be currently in the position that you speak about as being the start of your journey and your story. And you've put in certain skills and processes throughout your journey to achieve the point you are today. Now, you are literally giving someone a framework there to get from the point which they are currently at to the point which you are at. So they know that to bridge the gap between those two points, they just have to follow the processes that you mentioned in this post. And they're obviously going to be inspired by that, motivated by that, educated by that, because it relates to them and their current position. So though you are telling your story, you are emotionally connecting with your audience because most of your audience are probably in that position that you used to be in. But now they are seeing how to bridge the gap to get to the point where you are. And therefore, they're going to find it really, really enjoyable to consume because it's helping them as a creator. So you can just see from the points, they're just how important connecting on an emotional level is. Again, I could talk about that for hours and have done on my podcast, but I'm trying to keep it as quick and short for you. Here. It's possible because I don't want to overwhelm you because overall, this isn't a class about creating great content, is about creating your social media strategy. But that does play a huge role, the strategy itself. So now you know what makes up great content. You now need to think about how you're actually going to produce this content. Are you going to produce it in a single image? All you're going to produce it in a carousel, a video story. And this is something that, again, as a content creator, you really need to consider because it is our duty to portrayal message in the most suitable way possible for our audience. For example, if you want to be really personal, walk, a little bit more raw behind the scenes. The perfect place for that is an Instagram story because at the end of the day you just hold up the phone, click Record and talk. There's no polished editing. And you can just literally take someone behind the scenes about your day. But that behind the scenes does build that trust, builds that relationship with the audience because it makes you look like a more genuine individual. Because where someone on your feed might see something that's really professional, one really well produced. When you take them behind the scenes, they can see that at the end of the day you want just a normal person. So stories are a great way to get a crucial personality. If you've got a really detailed point where you want to show off your expertise, you may start thinking, Okay, this will probably work best in a video or a carousel. But let's say for example, you have quote, you don't want to just sit in the camera and go. Consistency is key. And that peel video done, you should put that on a single image posts. That is probably the best way to get across your message in that instance. So it's just a very quick point I wanted to mention. Just think about the format. You all creating your content in. Make sure it's suits what you're talking about. And it gets across the way you want your message to get across. But that rounds up this stage of the social media marketing strategy. It's picking your brand colors to thinking about your branding and actually creating your content. 7. The Importance Of Ensuring Timeliness: So moving on to the next step, and this may not be one you thought about. All of the other ones may have been pretty self-explanatory. And you may have just been watching them because you wanted to find out some framework and structure behind them. But this is one that you do need to think about and this is timeliness. Timeliness pays a big part in your social media marketing strategy. You can't just post a piece of content every day. That's it. Forget about it. If your personal brand wanting to make money your business and you want to build trust with your customers. If they ask you a question, you've gotta be on it like that. You can't have someone asks you a question and respond to three weeks later because you weren't checking up on Instagram. Timeliness is everything to building that trust and continuing relationship with your audience. If you post a piece of content, be ready to respond to comments. Don't post a piece of content just before you go to bed. Because if you post a piece of content and then you get loads of really important comments from potential customers or people that have previously bought from you and want to maintain that relationship. You're not gonna be able to respond to them for a nine hours, put yourself in the customer's shoes. If you've got a problem, you call up that business and you expect to response instantly. And you should be treating your social media exactly the same. If someone asks you a question, you respond instantly, someone sends you a DM, you are on top of it. You've got to be thinking about these things and taking social media seriously is a business at the end of the day, it helps you grow your business and some people create their whole business of the social media. So timeliness is key. I post all of my content every single day at the same time, it's just a content strategy. I have people know when I'm going to post my piece of content, and therefore they are ready to consume it at that time, especially if they are really invested in what I talk about. So many will have post notifications turned on. But as soon as I post a piece of content, people know because I post around 2.5 in the afternoon every single day. The I'm going to post them so they're, they're ready to consume. And when you've built up that routine over time, it increases your engagement. If you're posting at seven AM one day, 01:00 PM, the next, then 1030 PM. Nobody really knows when to check in on your account to consume your content. So you're going to see a drop in engagement. Instead, you want to make sure that you are having similar posting times every day so that your audience can get used to that and be ready to consume your content as a result. Now the final point I want to mention on timeliness is the, let's say someone praises your brand in their story or send you a compliment. In the DMZ. This is something you can capitalize on. Give that person a shout-out, show your gratitude. If a customer comes to you and says, honestly, thank you so much, your content has helped me do XYZ. Your product has helped me achieved this. I love your physical product. It's amazing this and you have a UK clearly really helped that individual. You now don't want to mess it up by not replying to their message that said, thank you or leaving it to three weeks. As a customer would feel kind of disappointed. You've almost poured your heart out to this brand that's helped you do something and they've paid no notice and new whatsoever. But you as a brand, if you do respond to that message, you further built that relationship. It's likely that they're going to come back and continue to buy it from you for however long you produce products or create content for. Also, you can then put that review on your story is social proof and that may attract new people and it does build that trust. So making sure you are constantly ready to be grateful to your customers, respond to problems, post at the same time every day so that you're responding to comments. The way I like to think about it is think of your favorite creator or your favorite brand or your favorite business person on social media. Imagine if you sent them a DM no matter how many followers they had and they responded to you like that, how impressed which you'd be bucks, you know how busy they are. And I get that some people with personal brands will receive a lot of messages depending on how they grown as follows, increase. So this may become unsustainable, but at first you have no excuse you are watching this because you want to build a social media marketing strategy. So that implies you don't have one already or you're very new to social media. So you do have time to respond to these comments in the DMZ and making sure you are constantly there for your audience. So don't say Oh not. So just remember that timeliness with your social media is very, very important. 8. Assessing Your Analytics: So we're almost there now this is the penultimate point of the strategy and we'll posting content, we're engaging, we're getting people in the DMZ. You now need to start assessing your strategy, your current strategy, what you're doing. Looking at the metrics that we talked about earlier on, and reviewing whether what you're doing currently is actually working. If you want, actually assessing your analytics, which are very, very key on social media. On any platform, it's really easy to find your Analytics. Instagram, for example, head over to your profile. Click in the top right-hand corner. Click on insights and, and up comes an incredible amount of information that you can learn from. And you can actually go on into each individual post and look at your content in that way. But you need to be assessing your analytics. You can't just continue with something that isn't working and expect for it to click one day you need to actually assess what you're doing. Double down on what's working and change, what isn't. It baffles me that someone will come to me and go. I've been doing this for for mumps now. I've been consistent. I've been doing everything I need to be doing but still not working. And I go, okay. Have you reviewed your current strategy? And they go, Well, no, I've just continued what I'm doing. I was going and I think, well, That's the reason because you are continuing to do something that doesn't work. Something that doesn't work isn't going to magically work overnight. You adjust, you learn from your mistakes so that you don't make those mistakes going forward. And then when you learn from mistakes, you obviously get better. And then when you get better and find things that do work, you doubled down on those. You cut out the things that didn't work and you improve and improve and improve over time until it is pretty much almost perfect. Testing is really important, in my opinion. Split testing, for example, you may love producing carousels and they do work brilliant. Obviously continue creating those, but you may not have tried video content before, but you may be incredibly good at it. I used to hate recording video, had never sat in front of a camera before. And now, I now create courses and YouTube videos and record podcasts. You name it all of these different things. I love sitting in front of a camera, but I didn't know that until I actually tried it. And video content is one of the things my audience love the most about my content because it's more personal. They get to see me, but video content as well for what I do, really allows me to display my expertise because it's much easier to write something down on a carousel, consistently chop and change it until it's perfect when it is to sit in front of a camera, ramble away about something for however long and it still makes sense and be valuable. So split test continued doing what works, but try new things every now and again. Gary V, I'm sure many of you have heard him. If you haven't check him out, he used the owner vein a media incredible amount of followers on social media. But he has this series on his YouTube called Trash talk. Now, Gary the owns or nine figure media agency. Yet for this piece of content and he was going around called boot sales or jumbo cells or yard cells as you call them in America. And finding this out and this old trash from people's houses and flipping it on eBay. This is a guy that works with billionaires, going around into people's houses and rummaging through the old items. Now, if you look at this, you copy paste turn to together a guy that works with billionaires. But he's spending his spare time on weekends looking in people's trash. And you'd think at first, okay, how is this going to work with him? He's all about making more money yet, what it really did was hit on the emotional level, like I mentioned, your content needs to with the audience that followed him who were currently starting off their businesses. Because not many people are in the position he's in. I'm working with billionaires, many people following him because of the lessons he provides and in helping them to get to the point where he is. He was showing in those YouTube videos that you could pretty much start from nothing. He was spending one or $2 on these items and flipping them on eBay for 25. That's $24 profit right there. And he was showing you do not need a high startup capital. You can get five, 10, 15 grand within three or four mumps. If you go all in on, go into car boot cells and yard cells. And that series consequently became one of his most popular on YouTube. And then he was able to re-purpose that content for Instagram Reels, Instagram videos, TikToks, you name it. So from that piece of content, he gained the millions, the view millions of use, preheated and thing that was going to work, but he tried it. He split tested, he went away from the norm, and he put it into strategy. And that's why it's important to yes, double down on what's working. But every now and again, try something new because you never know you may strike gold at some random piece of content that you just have some wacky idea about. So yes, I am all for meeting the needs and the wants of your audience, and that is what you should make the majority of your content on. But every now and again, pick out a new idea that you think might work. It's obviously got to still relate to you and your audience some way. But if you can then find that new piece of content that becomes an absolute goldmine. You're going to love yourself for testing it. So it's a roundup that point, I know I went a little bit off topic. You need to be assessing your analytics. What's working, what's not? Double down on what's working, cut out what's not. Because if you want learning from your mistakes, if you want looking at your analytics and seeing what's going wrong and then adjusting them accordingly. You're always going to stay stuck or you're going to grow a very slow rate. You want to give yourself the best opportunity of growth. And to do that, you have to look at your analytics and assess what's working and continue to produce the content that that's work. That's the formula. So assess your analytics and adjust and improve your content and strategy accordingly. 9. Adjusting Your Goals: Well, we are now on the final part of the social media marketing strategy. Now, I very, very briefly mentioned this in the very first step. And obviously the very first step was establishing your goals and what you actually want to achieve from social media. But the final step is an ongoing step. The final step is something that's going to change over time because social media is something that can change pretty quickly. So the final step I want to talk about is adjusting your goals. And I'm also going to mix in some other things into this point as well. As I mentioned, social media is one of these things you can't really predict. Instagram, for example, one day you could be getting one to ten followers 24 hours. You make it a vital piece of content one day and then you get two hundred, three hundred, four hundred followers that day. So therefore, you might hit a surge and engagement in your count grows quicker than you originally might fall. Same of tick tock. Tick tock is one of those platforms where you can post a video and overnight get a million views and then you wake up to 40, 50000 more followers is NAS, it's crazy. But that makes social media unpredictable. So it's always key to make sure that your goals are moving with your account over time. You may experience slower growth, so you have to adjust and set goes in line with adjusting your strategy and creating new content or on-boarding new people to help certain things. Or you might achieve faster growth. So you have to set yourself bigger goes and you had before. But it's important to understand that the first goal is you set yourself, especially when you're completely new to social media and haven't created a social media marketing strategy before. You are probably either going to say, goes far above what you're actually ever going to achieve. Or you're going to really underestimate what you're going to achieve. Very rarely do you hit it, just right. So it's good to every now and again, evaluate where you've come from and how far you've got to so that you can readjust your goals and your plan accordingly. Because once you begin to gauge how well your content does perform and your growth and the amount of client or getting depending on what your goal at the beginning was, as you begin to get 678 months a year down the line, you can begin to pinpoint sorted the direction you're going in. Now obviously you want to stretch yourself. You want to set yourself big goals and things you could definitely hit, but they are going to be a reach. So you've got to really work hard to get there. So making sure you adjust these over time because you're going to reach your goals as well. And then you gotta set yourself nu goes. So being able to adjust those goals over the course of your social media marketing strategy is very, very important. Now I did say that was going to mention some other points in there. So I'm going to try and piece them together so they make sense on the point I've just made. But I did say that you want to plan ahead. So to plan ahead, you want to have a content plan. Now it's got nothing to do with goal was, but I thought I had to find some interlink somewhere. So this Final module wasn't just all over the place. So if essence, having a content plan with my social media strategy, I've just felt incredibly organized and on top of what I'm doing, I will sit down at the beginning of every single month and plan out my post for every single day. That way. I know that I've always go to post for every single day I post daily. But because I've sat down at the beginning of the month and I've just brainstormed. I've gone all in four right there and right then I'm not panicking for content ideas on the day of which I need to post because I do another thing as well. I'm going to mention it in a minute. But coming up with everything at the beginning of the month just eliminates that need for any stress or panic further down the line. So at the beginning of the month, all my content is planned for the following month. Every Sunday, I batch create my content. So on a Sunday, or look at my content calendar and I'll sit down and I go, okay, look, I need to make these seven posts for the week because in the week I'm super busy. I'm responding DMZ and go into my outreach and doing different things with current clients. So I need to make sure that I'm not spending too much time creating content. Because although creating content is very important for me in generating bleeds, there's much better ways that I could be spending my time. So if I'm just doing this all on a Sunday batch creating all seven posts to take me up to the following Sunday. I don't have to worry about any content creation throughout the week so I can maximize the time I'm spending on the other talks I have to do from that Monday to the following Sunday. No, I do really, really encourage you do this because again, you're on top of it. You're not waking up in the morning and going, Oh my God, I haven't made a post for today what we're gonna do and need to think of an idea. I'm going to Russia and when you rush things, the content you produce is going to be mediocre at best. And in reality, you probably should have just skipped today of posting. Because if you've been keeping up a certain level of quality with your content and you suddenly go in with a piece of content that's mediocre, your followers are going to take us, taking a bit of a downturn now and they won't engage with it. And that's not going to be good for you because it'll probably discouraged you. So the content you are producing needs to be of high level of quality, like I mentioned in the content point of the social media marketing strategy. So if you are pre-planning your ideas at the beginning of the month and batch creating your content. You can avoid all of that stress. Be organized, be really on top. Ensure that you have that high quality content so that you are giving yourself the best opportunity possible. Now, the final thing I did want to mention that this only may apply to some of you. If you've got a personal brand, it won't. But if you are a business and you have a team, and you've got other employees working for you, and you've got lots of people working on their social media strategy. Your communication between each other has to be on point. You have to be organized. You can't have one person thinking you're doing one thing, they're doing the other and you will just clashed at the end of the day and everything's an absolute mess for everyone understands their role within the strategy. You can be incredibly organized. You can have someone that comes out with your content ideas. You can have someone that actually creates the content ideas. You can have someone that does all of the outreach, can have someone that replies tool in the comments. If you have this organized, you can make your social media strategy incredibly streamlined and easy to maintain. A lot of businesses don't have a social media strategy because they think it's going to take up too much of their time. When in reality, if you get it organized and have set task for certain people so everyone knows what they're doing is not much effort as who is obviously going to be a lot of effort if you put the burden on one individual and say, look, you need come up with content ideas you need to post every day. You need to come in and reply to everything and you need to be the face of our social media is quite an overwhelming task, especially if you are quite an established business. I mean, as a personal brand, like I am, you have to do all of that anyway. So yes, it is really hard work. You can split up the process and make sure that communication with everyone in your team is on point. Social media strategy is going to be a piece of cake for you guys. So making sure that your communication is On Point is everything. And that rounds up everything you need to know about creating your social media strategy. So now let's jump into the course conclusion, or I can just let you know about your class projects and we'll do a quick roundup of everything that I've mentioned. 10. Course Conclusion & Your Project: There you have it. That is everything you need to know about creating your social media marketing strategy. So let's just recap over each point that we went through. So number one, you need to start by understanding why you're actually on social media. What do you want to achieve? Because then you can set specific goals to a targeted, to your business. And what you want to achieve to you need to be doing your competitor research. There's so much information out there, but you do not need to guess nowadays. You can do the research, see what's working, model your strategy off of the things that do work. Why change something when it already works? Take all the guesswork out of it, see what your competitors are doing, see what your target audience likes. And then run with that. Take notes and mode your strategy around those points. So competitor research, number three, you need to understand your most important metrics. Looking at your goals, find out which metrics closely relate to those. If it's brand awareness, you want to be looking at your reach, its website traffic. You want to be looking at your link clicks. You see the correlation. Understanding your metrics allows you to understand the performance of your social media marketing strategy. Number four, we're doing our target audience research. Who is your target audience? Where are they? What social media platforms you want? You need to be understanding. If you are targeting Gen Z, then you want to be on Snapchat TikTok, Instagram, LinkedIn probably isn't going to be the place to find them. But if you are in B2B or B2C and you've got a product or service. There is great for those people that are interested in professional services. There you go. What wasn't good for Gen Z is now good for these people and you can be on LinkedIn. So understanding the platforms that your target audience is going to be on is the next point we need to understand, number 5. Now we're actually moving on to the content creation and picking our theme. Your content needs to be powerful. It needs to hit on those emotions. It needs to be enjoyable, it needs to be memorable. All of the points I mentioned, go back and listen to that module again because it is really, really important, but the content you produce is the next part of the strategy. Number 6, we spoke about timeliness, understanding that you need to be on top of your social media. You need to take it seriously, treat it like a business. You need to be ready to respond to comments, replying to DMs, responding and being grateful people that are complimenting you, be timely with everything you do. Next, we had assessing our goals, assessing our current strategy to see what is working, doubling down on what's working when f is not working, getting rid of it. So looking at your analytics is key so that you can adjust your strategy accordingly to make sure that you're optimizing your journey to give yourself the best opportunity. And then finally, we had the adjustment of our goals. As I said, social media can be unpredictable. You may not reach your goals that you set. You need to adjust them, downgrade them accordingly so you can go forward and make your goals more attainable. We may achieve your goals, so you have to stretch even further and change or goes as a result. Social media evolves, a new platform might come up that you have to start introducing and therefore putting it into your strategy so you'll go change. So adjusting those are really, really key. But we did also touch on a content plan. Having a content plan is key to your organization and helps you plan in the future. So helped you achieve those goals that we just mentioned. And then if you had a team, we spoke about how communication between each other is really, really important so that you can really streamline that strategy. And that is your social media marketing strategy. Now, I really hope it did. Open your eyes to how you can create your own, what you need to understand before you start and how you can give yourself the best opportunity succeed. So for your class project, I want you to bullet point each of the eight things I mentioned. And then underneath each, I want you to plan out your social media marketing strategy taken each when I've mentioned into consideration, and then applying that to your personal brand or your business. This can be done in a Word document. It's really, really simple, could be done on the notes on your phone. You can make it as detailed or as brief as you want, but that is what I want you to do for your class project. I want you to create your own social media marketing strategy using all of the points that I've mentioned in today's class. I will leave all of the details of that in the project section. So don't worry about remembering it. Just click on the Project tab and you will find it there. But it's not a difficult task, but it's one you need to do. So if you are not one to normally do the project section of your Scotia classes, please try and do this one is that you don't have to post it if you don't want to. But trust me, it will assist you. It will help you understand your audience. To help you understand the content you need to produce. It helps you understand. It just helps you in your journey as a whole. We need to have a strategy who cannot be going in blind. So make sure do begin creating your social media marketing strategy. I hope you've consumed this class because you wanted to do that in the first place. But as I said, you don't actually have to post your strategy if you don't want to, but please do it anyway. Now if you did enjoy today's class, thank you for tuning in. I did just want to mention that I do host a podcast social media marketing school. If you enjoyed this class, you will enjoy the podcast thoroughly. I release episodes every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. We talked about paid ads, we talk about Instagram growth, we talk about entrepreneurship in general, when social media, you'll love it. Just head over to Apple, Spotify, Google, you name it pretty much any of the podcast platforms, and you will find it there. Now, if you've got any questions with regards to anything I've mentioned in this class, you can reach out to me on Instagram at the marketing, Ethan semi hit the M and I will get back to you no matter what. Or alternatively, if you've got a question right now, leave it as a discussion point. But if you want to keep it a little bit more private, just leave me a message on Instagram. I will get back to you. But I did just want to finish off by saying, if you have made it to this point in the Scotia class, I really, really hope you enjoyed it. Check out my other classes, but thank you all for tuning in.