The Free Social Media Strategy Template You Need

What Is Social Media Marketing?

Social media marketing refers to using social media networks as a way to promote your business through paid (social media ads, boosted posts, influencer deals) and organic practices (content marketing). 

With the right social media strategy, brands can:

• Build a loyal customer base
• Increase their brand awareness
• Boost their sales
• Create targeted ads to reach their potential customers
• Monitor their progress through social media analytics

What Is a Social Media Strategy?

A social media strategy is a document that contains all the marketing activities you plan for your social media channels in order to promote your brand and connect with your potential customers. 

Social media strategies act as frameworks that guide your every move on social media to help you stay on the right track and accomplish your goals in a reasonable timeframe.

Usually, a social strategy also contains the objectives and results you want to achieve at some point in time and the metrics that will allow you to monitor your progress.

How to Create a Social Media Marketing Strategy

Now that we know what a social media strategy is, it’s time to roll up our sleeves and get to work.

Here’s how you can create a social media marketing strategy:

1. Audit Your social media presence
2. Research Your target audience 
3. Run a competitive analysis
4. Set social media marketing goals 
5. Choose the right social media channels
6. Optimize your existing social media profiles
7. Assign roles and responsibilities to your marketing team
8. Create a social media content strategy
9. Use social media tools
10. Monitor & adjust your social media marketing efforts

We will now go through all of these steps and give you the information you need to understand every part of the process. 

1. Audit Your Social Media Presence

Before you plan your future strategy, it’s best to reflect on your past approaches and results, as well as the current state of your social media presence. 

And the best way to do it is by running a social media audit and compiling all the relevant data in one document.

We already created a social media audit and added it to our template. So, make sure you access it and start creating your strategy the right way!

Download the Social Media Audit Template!

Access the template below for a streamlined social media audit process.

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Why should you do this? Well, because you have to know your current situation (with both flaws and strengths) to effectively plan for the future. Otherwise, you will create a social strategy that will neither help nor improve your situation.

Here are some aspects you can evaluate through your audit:

• Account information 
• Content performance
• Audience details
• Paid social media practices

Perform a SWOT Analysis

Going for a SWOT analysis is great because it’s a fast and simple way of discovering your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats and using the insights to develop a new and improved social media marketing strategy.

Answer the questions below to complete your SWOT analysis:

Strengths

• What do you do well?
• What are your key resources?
• What gives you an advantage over your competitors?
• What do others praise your business for?

Weaknesses

• What do you need to improve to make progress?
• What resources do you lack compared to your competitors?
• What are the main criticisms you receive from others and your team?

Opportunities

• What are your main business growth opportunities?
• Are there any market trends you can take advantage of?
• How can you turn your strengths into opportunities?

Threats

• What external factors prevent your business from growing?
• How does your competition threaten your success?
• How can your weaknesses turn into threats?

Use Social Media Listening Tools

To run a complete audit of your social media presence you should also consider using social listening tools.

By using these tools you will be able to discover how your brand is perceived on social media by looking through relevant mentions and conversations about your business.

As a result, you will have a solid base of information you can use to develop a better social media marketing strategy, maybe rebrand your business or adjust your products and services to provide a better experience for your customers.

Not to mention that you can gather the same information about your competitors and see how you can overcome them.

And if you are not sure about what social media listening tools you should start using, we have some suggestions:

• Mentionlytics  – Mentionlytics allows you to discover your social media mentions through online conversations and it also crawls the internet to find relevant insights about your industry.
• Iconosquare – This Instagram social media monitoring tool allows you to keep track of brand conversations, analyze your competitors, track the performance of your hashtags, and discover new content ideas. It also lets you moderate and respond to conversations, and export the ones you find useful.
• BuzzSumo – BuzzSumo keeps track of brand mentions, industry news, and business competitors, providing you with all the social media marketing data you need to improve your strategy.

2. Research Your Target Audience

You should begin studying your target audience as soon as you have a viable business idea. After all, your potential consumers are the most crucial aspect of your strategy  — they are your source of income. 

You have to know far more than basic demographics (age, sex, location, education, employment, income, marriage status) to understand how to reach your customers and keep them engaged with quality content.

Here are the personal characteristics you should find out about your customers:

• Interests/hobbies
• Values
• Buying behavior
• Challenges/pain points
• Objectives
• Desires/needs
• Preferred social media platforms
• Types of content they enjoy

This information will help you develop messages that resonate with your customers and much more. You may utilize this data to improve your products and services and provide your customers with a better experience.

Create Buyer Personas

Now that you have all of the relevant information about your target demographic, it’s time to develop a buyer persona. This will improve your social media marketing efforts in the long-run. 

Consider a buyer persona to be a fictional character. You don’t have to write a story around it, just write a description that will help you and your social media team understand your ideal customer.

You are basically giving a shape to all the information you gathered about your audience and making it memorable. 

3. Run a Competitive Analysis

There are a few reasons you should analyze your competitors — and the goal is not to copy them, but actually learn from their achievements and mistakes.  

Media monitoring is a great way to get started with competitor analysis. You can use tools like Brand24 to analyze your competitor’s social media presence, assess their weaknesses and strengths, or identify threats and opportunities to your business.

Here is what your competitive analysis should help with:

• Keeping up with industry social media practices
• Finding relevant content ideas for your niche
• Identifying social media channels that add value to your business
• Looking for new target audiences

Start by making a list of your most important competitors, including industry giants that have a well-put-together social media marketing strategy.

Here’s the social media marketing information you should gather:

• Used social channels + links
• Follower count
• Posting schedule
• Post-performance (likes, comments, shares)
• Best-performing content
• Social media strategies
• Social campaigns
• Notable post ideas
• Social sentiment
• Strengths
• Weaknesses

Finally, try some of their best social media strategies, add your own unique twist, and see what adds value to your social media marketing efforts.

Social Media Competitive Analysis Template

Audit your competitors’ social media with this free template.

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4. Set Social Media Marketing Goals

What do you want to achieve through your marketing goals? How? And in how much time?

Consider these three questions as the starting point for your social media strategy. Try to be as specific as possible in your answers. This will help you identify the practices you can use to achieve your social media marketing goals and grow your business.

Here is what you can do to achieve your social media marketing goals:

• Align your social media goals with your business goals
• Set S.M.A.R.T. goals
• Track meaningful KPIs

A. Align Your Social Media Goals with Your Business Goals

In a social media strategy, everything needs to be, well, strategic. Meaning that even your smallest social media marketing goal has to be tied to a higher purpose. For instance, if a company wants to gain more Instagram followers, what it actually means is that it is looking to expand its customer base by exposing more and more people to its brand.

Every social media goal is tied to a bigger business goal that plays a role in a company’s profitability.

So, start by looking at what your business needs in order to be successful and translate those needs into social media goals.

B. Set S.M.A.R.T. Goals

If you need a clear structure to follow while developing your goals, the S.M.A.R.T. formula always works wonders. 

This is what it stands for:

• Specific – Mention how you plan to achieve your goals
• Measurable – Identify ways to monitor your progress
• Achievable – Make sure you stay realistic
• Relevant – Align your social media goals with your business goals
• Time-bound – Set a deadline for each goal

C. Track Meaningful KPIs

We mentioned before that S.M.A.R.T objectives need to be measurable.

What this actually means is that you have to add key performance indicators (KPIs) to each goal to be able to monitor performance and measure your social media marketing success.

For example, if your goal is to generate 100 more leads in the following two months by posting lead magnets weekly on your social media pages, then your KPI will be the number of people that downloaded your resource.

There are multiple social media KPIs you can use to track performance, and they depend on the type of goal you are setting.

Here are some examples you can consider for your future goals:

• Reach – post reach, impressions, share of voice, audience growth;
• Engagement – clicks, likes, comments, shares, mentions;
• Conversions – click-through rate, cost-per-click, bounce rate, social media conversion rate.

Social media KPIs

5. Choose the Right Social Media Channels

What many social media marketing teams learn the hard way is that not every social network is valuable for your business. You should only focus on a few marketing channels that benefit your business.

Not only this but, you also need to make sure you are able to manage and generate content constantly for every social platform you have. That way, your social media marketing strategy will be certain to succeed.

Try to go for three social media platforms and make the most out of them — this of course depends on the size of your team.

And to make your job easier, you can start using SocialBee to manage all your social media platforms from one place.

SocialBee allows you to create your social media posts from scratch and also post them to all your social media platforms without opening a second tab.

Start your 14-day free trial today!

Here are some aspects you should consider while picking your main social platforms:

• Follow your target audience – Find out the platforms your taregt audience uses the most by looking at the demographics of each channel
• Discover the features of each platform – Make sure the social networks you choose have features that can help you boost your results (e.g., targeted ads, incorporated store, analytics)
• Don’t forget about your goals – Assess how your social channels can support you in achieving your objectives
• Look at your competitors – Find out the platforms your competitors use and how successful they are on each one

6. Optimize Your Existing Social Media Profiles

Now that you know what platforms are right for your business, it’s time to reevaluate and optimize your existing accounts.

Here’s how you can optimize your social media networks:

• Improve the relevant ones
• Get rid of the ones that don’t add value to your social media marketing strategy
• Look for fake accounts that use your business name and report them

Next, evaluate your social accounts and make sure you:

• Have your business name as your social media handle.
• Use branded high-quality profile images.
• Add information in all the necessary fields (e.g., contact info, address).
• Provide useful links/business details/updates in your bio.

7. Assign Roles and Responsibilities to Your Marketing Team

Take this opportunity to also include the details that will make a difference in your social media workflow. 

Assign roles and responsibilities to your team from the get-go to save time and avoid any confusion. Additionally, make sure to add deadlines and any other details your team may find useful.

By taking the time to do so, you will know who you have to reach in case you need updates regarding progress and performance. Plus, you won’t have to constantly answer questions regarding new tasks and project details because you already provided those in the document.

And to make things even better, you can move your entire content creation process, along with your team to SocialBee — a social media management tool that allows you to create your content from scratch, make edits, schedule, and share posts from just one dashboard.

You can invite new users, assign roles, leave notes under posts, and tag your team members to make sure they see your comments — all this without opening a second tab.

Invite your team members to SocialBee and create better content together.

Start your 14-day free trial today and optimize the way you work with your social media team!