Transcripts
1. Class Introduction: Hello and welcome to this course on social media strategy. My name is Robin and I work as a creative entrepreneur
in Belgium. I run a small creative agency with one of my best friends, and I started a sub-brand called Rock Hopper
socks as well. In this class, I want
to help you define an effective social media
strategy for your brand that will help you achieve
actual business goals. So this is not just about
getting more likes or more followers about the
underlying goals you might have, like attracting new employees, generating more leads, are
spreading brand awareness. In order to do that, I
will share a template that I use for my own brands as
well as those of my clients. That starts with
your brand identity and your underlying
business goals and ends with what we call a
drumbeat of social formats. So what that actually means is I'll try to help
you come up with a set of specific content ideas that you can repeat every
month or every quarter. But if you want,
without becoming repetitive and making
sure that each of those specific content formats are actually helping you tackle at least one of
your business goals in your content strategy. So if that sounds interesting
or useful to you, I would be super
grateful if you decide to stick around and
watch this class. I promise I'll do my very
best to help you create a strong social media strategy
by the end of the class.
2. Why a social media strategy is important: Hello again. So the first part of
this course is about why a social media strategy
is actually important. So let me try to explain
a little bit what I think are the main
points to consider here. I'm trying to build a
brand on social media without a defined strategy can be totally
counter productive. I often find that clients are
just posing for the sake of it with little purpose or
reason to what they're doing. And as a result,
they're not seeing any return on their
investments or their efforts. At the same time, I
often get asked by brands if I can
help them improve their social media presence
without first having to spend weeks on market research
or strategy sessions. Although I obviously
understand that there's tremendous value in both time
and money for my clients. This approach of
trying to improve superficial results without thinking about direction first, usually ends up costing more
time and more money than, than would have been needed
if an actual plan was in place before anyone
started executing anything. So there are several reasons why having a social
media strategy is essential if you're
trying to build a brand for either yourself
or your business. The first one is that a well-made strategy
will help you get more engagement and more growth
on your social platforms. The second is that a
social media strategy will take the guessing work out of your daily or weekly routine. Because coming up with
a new creative idea every single time you want to post something can become very, very difficult after awhile. And this is something that I see all the time with my clients. They are so concerned
with what are we going to post this
week that they don't think about the underlying messages
that they're trying to convey with their
social media presence. But then the third,
and in my view, biggest reason is that a good social media
strategy will help you consider what your
actual business goals are and how you can work
backwards to create a sequence of posts that will support those business goals. So that would also give
you the opportunity to refine the quality of your content and enable
you to think about, you can get more creative
with individual posts. So to summarize, a good social media strategy
will enable you or your team to stop having to come up with a different idea for a post every single week or
every month or every day, whatever your rhythm is. Instead, there'll
be able to lean on a proper framework that has
basic ideas built into it. So that you can focus
on executing with higher-quality and
more creativity. In the end, that should take less time and get
better results. So I hope that convinces you about the importance
of goods social media, strategy, and I'll see you
again in the next lesson.
3. The components of the strategy template: Hagen. So in the rest of this class, I will guide you through the different components of my social media
strategy template. You can download the template in the class description
down below. So I just suggest that
you start by doing so. And then, as it will
be able to see, I've defined five components
in a social media strategy. Being brand identity, goals, channels, content formats,
and then content planning. And of course, my
ambition is to help you get really creative with
your social media strategy. But preferably, we would do
that in a thoughtful way. So I just wanted to
say if you feel like the first three components of the social media
strategy template, or a bit boring
or a bit obvious, please bear with me
because they are super important to guide our creativity in
the second part of the course and the template. So when you are ready, I will explain how
this template is meant to be used and why it is
built the way that it is. And I'll use my own
startup broker precise as an example throughout
the course. So go ahead and
download the template and I'll see you in
the next lesson.
4. Component 1 - Brand identity: So the first component of your
social media strategy is, and it should always be
your brand identity. Because if you're not 100% clear on the story you're
trying to tell. You. We'll never be
able to figure out how exactly you want to tell it. So same logic applies to your
goals in an x-component. If you don't know what
you're trying to achieve, you will never achieve it. And I don't want to go into too much detail on how to define a brand identity
in and of itself. Because I would assume that you already have a brand
identity in place. But also I have
different class on brand identity and how to
define it specifically. So if you feel like you need more context or more help
with brand identity, then what I'm about to share. Now, please go ahead and
hop over to my other class. First. It'll guide you
through all the steps in a model that is called
the breadth key model, which is quite an easy
framework to use and is the perfect preparation
for building your marketing or
social media strategy. For this specific class though, I will assume that
you already have defined your brand identity
in one way or another. And I feel like we can
move forward if you have a basic answer to
these four questions. The first question is, why does your brand exists? So this should be the essence of your brand existence and therefore of its
communication as well. The second question is, what's your competitive
environment? So who do you see as your main competitors
in terms of sales, but also in terms of
social media attention. And there are different ways
you can try to map them. So feel free to use
whatever method you see fit for your
brand or your case. And then the third question is, who are you most
trying to reach? Again, there are a
million ways you can describe or define
your target audience. In general, I would suggest
making a customer persona, but I often use
different ways of mapping a target
audience as well. So go ahead and choose
whatever method you prefer. And then the fourth
and final question we need an answer for. If you want to continue building our social
media strategy is what benefits are you offering through your
product or services. So these will be your unique
selling points, which, which I recommend listening
in two different categories, being emotional benefits
and functional benefits. Functional benefits are based on tangible attributes
that your brand is adopting that provide
functional improvement for your customer
or your audience. So this could be
quality improvements. It could be faster shipping, it could be good
customer service. On the other hand, emotional
benefits provide value for your audience or customer by making
them feel something. So that's a different nuance, different types of
benefits to offer. As promised, I'll
use my startup rock up for success as an example and formulate an answer to
each of these four questions. If you've watched my class
on brand identity already, these answers will
sound very familiar. Firstly, worker per socks exists to help the world
unlock uniqueness. Secondly, we have split our competitive environment
into three categories. First, house brands, socks by
big retail chains, second, socks by fashion brands, and then finally,
socks by sock brands. We know that there's
tremendous competition in the first two categories, but there is a lot less
in the third category, which is the category where we have positioned
ourselves as a brand. Then the rock up socks,
target audience. Shops at local fashion
boutiques instead of Prime Arc, drinks molecules are AAA and drive them all
time or not a BMW. And is a type of
person that would wear a tie to barbecue and a
t-shirt to a meeting. So in short, they are looking
for ways to step away from the norm without
being overly dramatic, are really seeking attention. And then the benefits that we offer through the Bragg
walk up for success. Our first emotional benefit number one node at
a product you're wearing has been made in a sustainable way and has had a positive
impact on the world. The second emotional benefit is we help you stand
out from the crowd. Our first functional
benefit is having comfortable feet because we
use really soft fabrics. Our second functional benefit is you can wear your
garments for longer because we have
greater attention for quality improvement. And then our third and
final functional benefit is rest assured if
anything goes wrong, we are there to help you. We are always at your disposal. So let's rock up for success
as an example of how you could answer these
four basic questions on brand identity. If you have formulated your
answer for your brand, you can move on to the next
component of your strategy, and I'll see you
in the next video.
5. Component 2 - Setting goals: Hi again. Now that your brand identity
is clearly formulated, the only condition we have left before we can really start building your social
media strategy is defining your business goals. Your goals are obviously
very specific to your own case and your own
brand and your own ambitions. So it's mainly up to
yourself to think about what you're actually trying to achieve with your
social media presence. And try to write down
two or three goals. If you feel like you have more. I'm trying to see
whether some of them might be connected to each other and whether they might
share an overarching team. If they do, you might be able to use a broader description for your goal and merge multiple sub items
into one main goal. If you have only one
main business goal with your social media presence, you could also try to think about any added benefits
that you wouldn't mind experiencing if you are going to be present on
social media anyways. So this might be something like attracting
better employees, are attracting more employees, building trust with your
existing customers, or something like that. For rock upper
socks, specifically, our goals for social media
are showing off our designs, sharing our sustainable
way of working, and then showing off
quality of our products. When you are ready, defining two or three goals and
you've written them down on slide five of
the strategy template, you are ready to move on to Component number three of
the strategy template, which is choosing
the right channels are derived platforms
for your brand.
6. Component 3 - Choosing your platforms: So the first real decision
that we're going to make in your social media strategy is choosing which channels are, which platforms to use. The entire point of social
media marketing is to put your brand in contact with its most receptive audience. And it's obviously
than not advisable to choose a platform where your
audience isn't present. Unfortunately, there's
no field of dreams, opportunity where
your prospects are, your audience will start using the social media platform of your choice just because
you start posting on it. Instead, it's a much
better idea too. Analyze which platforms
your audience is already using and then adopt
dose for your brand. Now, the key here
obviously is considering your previously defined
audience and your goals. You know who you are
trying to reach, and what you're
trying to tell them. You can narrow down the platforms that
they use and figure out what they are looking
for on which platform. So a couple of ways you
can go about finding out where your audience
is hanging out online. One of the most
straightforward ways is doing customer surveys, asking questions about what
social sites they use, why they are using it, where they get
their information. Online. Influencers they might
follow, et cetera. Another way to get information about your audience is through the social media
sites themselves or for paid advertising. All platforms can tell you a lot about your
ideal customers. So they could estimate
audience size for you. They can estimate the
demographics, etc. So you can use built in analytic tools to see
who your audience is, how bigger audience is, and what they are doing
on which platform. Once you have identified the right platforms
for your brand, you can use slide seven in a strategy template to
link them to your goals. Not every platform will be
as relevant for every goal. Linkedin might, for example, be great for employer branding and attracting new employees. Whereas Instagram might
be the place where you do community building and engage with your existing customers. So on the slide, you'll be able to adjust
the importance of each goal for every specific platform
that you want to use. If you've done that,
you can finally start getting more creative. And component number four, which will be figuring out which content
formats you want to use. I'll see you in the next lesson.
7. Component 4 - Content formats: Alright, you made it past the
boring part of this class. So now it's time
to get creative, because now we're going
to try and come up with different content formats that each deco at least
one of your goals. So first of all, what do I mean when I
say content format? You can look at a content
format like a type of post that has a creative team or a creative idea
already built into it. So basically, a content format
is just one good idea that can be turned into
more than one boss. The easiest example that I
can give that we've all seen online is inspirational quotes. For example, Rock
Hopper socks could post a different inspirational quotes about standing out
from the crowd, which is one of our goals. We could do that every week or every month or
whatever we want. And this is one
idea that tackles the same goal every time
that can be recreated, every week or every month
in a different way. So that's what we call
a content format. So what I want you
to do now is get really creative and
come up with a couple of ideas for every
social media goal that you have written down, what type of posts might work well to get you
closer to your goal. For example, if your goal is
to attract new employees, you might want to
share testimonials from existing employees. Or you could show off your amazing company
culture by posting grades, pictures from your
afterward drinks on Friday on your Instagram
story every week. Or if it's your goal to show off the robustness of your product, you could come up with
a monthly video where you test your product in the most crazy ways
you can think of. So, for example, by
setting it on fire one week or pulling it apart
with two cars the next week, or throwing it off the roof of your office building,
anything like that. So as long as your idea
can be reproduced in different ways while still telling the same
underlying story. It's a great idea. Once you have a couple
of content format ideas, you can look at slide nine as an example of how
you can visualize them. There are a couple of things
you should consider here. Firstly, on which platforms is your content format
going to work? Every platform has
its own algorithm. Every platform, as we've
already discussed, has its own audience as well. So not every platform
will respond the same way to your content
format or your idea. Think about what the end
product is going to look like. Is it the vertical video is that the horizontal video is
picture, is it a visual? And then think about what platforms you think
it could be relevant for. Secondly, you should
consider what the goal this idea or this content
format is tackling. You can see that I've changed the opacity of the three
goals on the slides. So you can put the opacity on 100% for the goal that this specific content
format is trying to tackle. If this content format
is tackling two goals, you can put two goals
on 100% opacity. And then thirdly, and
also very important is how will your
content format look. You can see a visual mock-up
of posts by we created, which is my social media agency. And use that as
inspiration because it's important to make a
visual mock-up of your content format because it can show how your
idea will show up in the social media feed of the platforms that
you want to use for this specific format. Once you've turned
on your formats into carefully built and
considered slides, you can check if there are any inconsistencies that already are showing up in your strategy. Because remember, you've thought about which goals are
important to you. You've thought about on which platforms you are going
to emphasize which goals. So check whether your content formats
reflect those decisions. If you have five
Instagram content formats that help you attract
new employees, but you are going
to use LinkedIn for employer branding and Instagram
for community building, then you should make it change. Try to align your content with your strategy and your
previous decisions by adapting or formats so that they work
on the platforms you need them to work on. If you have enough
content formats for every goal and
every platform, then you're ready
to move forward and start making your
social media drumbeat. So I look forward to seeing
you in the next video, which will be component
five, content planning.
8. Component 5 - Content Planning: Hi again. Congratulations on
making it this far into my class on social
media strategy. This is the last component of the social media strategy
template that we are using, in which we will
focus on turning your content formats into
a social media drum beats. So in essence, your drum
beat is nothing more than the rhythm of posts that you will adopt for the next period. So probably a year or so. One thing you might notice
I haven't mentioned yet is how often I think you should post on your
social media platforms. And this is because I
believe that frequency of posts is something that a
lot of runs over thing. And it's something that
should be looked at on a case-by-case basis because it's completely
dependent on your brand, your audience, your budget, your time, and your ambitions. So the good news though, is that frequency of boasts doesn't really matter in this strategy
template because it's more about having a
fixed content rotation and not necessarily about
the speed of that rotation. But first, what I would
like you to think about is whether the social media
goals that you have previously defined
change throughout time. Often, brands and companies have a pretty good idea of what to expect throughout
a normal year. So for example, I know that rock up or socks
generates almost half of its revenue in the
month of November and December because
of the holidays. This means that my goals for social media might shift
throughout the year as well. In winter, I focus more on sales and converting
customers on my webshop. Whereas in the spring
and summer months, I focus more on brand storytelling and
community building. Another reason your goals
might shift throughout a year is if you are launching a
new brand or a new product, where if you're building
towards a launch, your main goal might be
awareness and reach. Whereas three or four
months after your launch, those goals might shift a little bit and you
might focus more on brand storytelling and
community building as well. So if this is the case for you, you can use a
visualization in slide 15 as an example of how you can emphasize certain goals in certain phases of your
social media strategy. After you've mapped out your
goals throughout the year, you'll be able to create
your drumbeat for every platform and every
phase in your ear. If you look at slide 16, you'll see I've created a weekly rhythm for three
social media platforms. In this case, you'll see that all three platforms will post the same content
every single week. But this can obviously
be different if you have created different goals
for different platforms. The key here, and I'm going to look straight
into the camera. And because this is where
everything we've talked about comes together
into an actual plan, is that you rotate your
content formats in a fixed way while thinking
about your social media goals. If you have three goals and they are all equally important, you shouldn't make sure
that each goal is equally represented in the content
formats that you plan to use. That means that, for example, you might create a
rotation of six, pose a drumbeat of six volts. Which means that if you have six posts and three goals and they're all
equally important, you should have two posts
focusing on goal number one. To post focusing
on goal number 22, posts focusing on
goal number three. On the other hand, if you have one important goal and then two, nice to have lesser
important goals, you might want to
create a drumbeat of foreign content formats where the first two posts focus
on goal number one, which is the most
important goal. And then your two
lesser important goals, each gets one content
formats dedicated to them. So this might sound
terribly simple to you now, but it's so important
to make sure that the content you
post is actually helping you achieve
your goals and actually communicating what you're
trying to communicate. I see so many brands
and lose sight of their social media strategy because they're trying to come up with a different idea for a post every week or every day. And it'll become such
a daily struggle to come up with a good idea. And the question becomes, is this a good post instead of what is this
post communicating? What are we trying to
communicate with this post? So once you have created
a drumbeat for yourself, you can lean on it and
you can know that it was properly thought out,
properly mapped out. It takes into account who
you're trying to reach. It takes into account what you are trying to
communicate as a brand, and it takes into account
your business goals. So knowing that those three
important factors are all being hits and having
creative guidelines for what type of post should go online every week or
every day will allow you to shift your energy
and put more effort into actually creating the
content that you need. And then actually that is a good segue into my next point, which I will
elaborate on a little bit more in the next video, which will also be the
last lesson of the class. Because now or social media
strategy is complete. You know what to post, when to post, and you know
why you're posting it. With that last part,
in my opinion, being the most important part. But having that strategy in place will enable
you to think about what's next and that's what I will touch on
in my next lesson.
9. Next steps & wrap up: Hi, and welcome to the very
last lesson in my class. If you're watching this,
then I assume you've used my social media strategy
template and have managed to build your social
media strategy successfully, which means that you are now ready to start executing on it. Although my ambition with this class has already
been fulfilled, if you have managed to build a strong social media strategy, I just want to add my
class by saying that the work in the creative
process doesn't end here. Obviously, I'm having a drumbeat of strong content
formats should be tremendously helpful for you or your team when creating social
media posts in the future. But it's still super
important to get creative with every single
individual posts as well. In fact, I believe that
the real added value of having a good social media
strategy is exactly that. It allows you to get really creative with
individual posts. Individual captions are
individual pieces of content because you already know how you're going to be
used and most importantly, why they are going to be used. So please use your
social media strategy as a guide you can follow
and a framework you can lean on so that you or your team can focus
on enjoying the ride and creating great pieces of content Indians that should
get results sooner or later. And that leaves me with only
having to thank you for listening to me and watching this class all the
way to the end. I'm very grateful for your
trust and your attention. And I really hope that I've
managed to at least match, but hopefully exceed
your expectations for this class and for your
social media strategy. If I did manage to do so, I would be even more grateful
if you took the time to write a review and share
any feedback that you have. This is only my second
online course that I give. Any feedback is
more than welcome. So thanks again, and I'll
see you in the next class.
Robin Denis, Entrepreneur & freelance creative
