If there’s one constant working in social it’s CHANGE.

(Don’t get us started on Threads, X, and the trend of the week.)

There’s a very likely chance your social media plans have been disrupted, and the past reporting period maybe didn’t turn out how you expected for… a variety of reasons.

That’s OK.

A new period means an opportunity for a fresh start with a focused brand vision and a hard reset on your goals. It also means your marketing budget is up for review (again), and you have three major tasks:

1. Evaluate the success of your social media activities.
2. Set the new social media marketing strategy based on previous performance.
3. Determine the resources needed to succeed.

As you start exporting data and compiling summaries, you might wonder if you achieved what you set out to do in the previous year.

• Was there a clear and energizing goal for social?
• Did you make progress on it throughout the year?
• Did you waste too much time chasing shiny objects or in a never-ending chain of approvals?

If your social strategy is stale, but your goals are solid, you have two paths to take:

1. Do more.
2. Do less.

Do more

• Variety: find your next format
• Channels: explore new terrain
• Spend: ratchet up targeted reach

Do less

• Variety: double down on winners
• Channels: focus on primaries
• Frequency: better, not more
• Spend: pause and reinvest

Why more?

You can’t learn much from a small sample of data, or irregular activity. If you’ve just been “keeping the lights on”, start here.

Why less?

If you’ve been on auto-pilot for a while, nursing an outdated program, or at the receiving end of requests from too many stakeholders, you may benefit from focus.

Start with one variable and one action.

Maybe you’ve been here before. Know that you’re not alone. Social media marketing has expanded in functions and roles, and is no longer restricted to the marketing department. Hence, figuring out strategies that work is very complex.

It’s time to fix that.

Let’s kick off with clarity on the elements that encompass a successful social media strategy.

The Complete Social Media Strategy Framework

1. Set energizing goals
2. Identify target audiences
3. Establish a channel strategy
4. Design your content strategy
5. Amplify your content distribution
6. Plan your execution

Before we dig in, let’s define what makes a practical social media strategy framework to use as an example.

Social Media Strategy Example: What’s Included?

A social media strategy is typically presented as a text document or slide presentation.

Here’s an example agenda of what belongs in a social media strategy presentation:

1. Social Media Strategy Context (Why and What)

Set up the social media strategy by providing context on the established business challenges and brand strategy. This is why we’re defining the social media strategy.

• Summary and agenda
• Strategic goals
• Business/comms challenges
• Brand strategy overview

2. Social Media Audience Evaluation (Who)

Define the audience(s) that will influence your strategy. Use research and examples as appropriate to make your case. Compare that with how your audience breaks down today on the web and social media channels.

• Ideal client profile or audience overview
• Audience analysis snapshot – current

3. Tactical Planning & Execution (How)

Show how your social media strategy comes to life with specific recommendations.

• Strategy summary
• Channel – roles & practices
• Content framework – Topic pillars or themes
• Creative direction – concepts & examples
• Content publishing plan
• Community management practices
• Voice & tone guidelines
• Paid media – campaign breakdown
• Influencer program
• Editorial or campaign calendar
• Measurement and KPIs
• Division of responsibility
• Crawl, walk, and run plan
• Implementation steps

Keep in mind that all of these sections are optional. Your client or marketing team might prefer a 2-page summary versus a 50-page deck.

Social Media Strategy Template Example

We put together two templates that you can use to start off on the right foot.

Our template will help you clarify your social media strategy using the proven 6-step framework. Inspired by the social media strategies we build for brands at our B2B social media agency, this framework aligns teams and delivers results.

The free template sets up your strategy in an actionable word doc (see below). The paid template walks through each section in a plug-and-play slide presentation (coming soon—preview it here).

How to Use the Social Media Strategy Template

Maybe you’re thinking, “cool, this template sounds great but, it’s just another empty document. What do I put in it?”

We had a hunch you might feel that way. Keep reading for a breakdown of the six step framework and concrete examples of how to adapt these ideas into actionable strategies.

Step 1. Set Energizing Goals

Like all things in business, we begin with goals. Goals come in all shapes and sizes, so let’s set some ground rules on good social goals.

What defines a good social media marketing goal?

1. Goals should be SMART. Welcome back to business basics. Your goals should follow the time-tested formula: specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound.

2. Goals should be audience-centered. Social media is a human-centric medium. Translate your customer’s journey into audience-specific goals.

• Awareness = capturing your customer’s attention
• Conversions = driving your customer’s actions
• Advocacy = earning your customer’s referral

3. Goals should be tied to organizational impact. A good goal is an outcome, not an activity. What does the business need to happen in the next year? While top-line revenue growth is always up there, what else impacts the bottom line? Keeping customers happier? Keeping employees longer? Translate a social media goal for an area where you can move the needle.

4. Goals should start big, then break down into KPIs. To keep on track, you should establish big but achievable goals. Then break them down into monthly and quarterly social media key performance indicators (KPIs). We recommend identifying two types of goals in your planning:

• Primary goals that describe your top priority contribution to the marketing goal.
• Secondary goals that describe your objectives and success measurements for each channel.

Your primary goal is going to answer, “If we only hit this one goal this year, we’ll know we’re successful.” This is where I’m going to push you to re-think ‘increase brand awareness.’ In Quickbooks’ example, the “Backing You” campaign is a massive multi-channel awareness effort that Quickbooks rolled out to emphasize its goal of saving small business owners money and time. As they qualify the success metrics of their awareness campaign, the social goal should break down further to be more actionable and measurable.

What’s a good B2B social media goal?

As a B2B organization, marketing is often responsible for brand awareness, demand generation, and lead nurturing (pipeline). It’s reasonable to expect your B2B social media marketing to contribute to moving the needle in the sales funnel either directly with paid advertising or indirectly through brand awareness and community management.

An example of a primary social media marketing goal might be: Acquire 50 SQLs from social media channels in FY 2023.

Would your company be happy with 50 new qualified leads after a year’s effort and investment? Adjust accordingly.

Note #1: This is a social media marketing goal. Social media may live within different departments and teams. Your team’s goal could relate to other areas of business impact—improving customer satisfaction scores by X percentage points, reducing response times by Y minutes, or increasing customer or employee retention rates.

Note #2: A goal for an entire year is a big, audacious guess. Instead, consider establishing goals on a campaign basis.

Next, identify your secondary social media goals. This is how we measure the success of our execution. Often, these are the metrics tied to performance on each individual channel. They are tracked as part of your execution plan monthly, for each channel. These will not be equally valued among your organization, so be selective.

A few examples of social media KPIs:

1. Measure for Brand Awareness

• Frequency: Number of posts published
• Direct Traffic: When users access your website by typing in your URL directly to their browser. Although direct traffic can indicate ‘dark social’ channels are at work, it also means users had to recall your domain name to find you.
• Mentions: The number of times your brand or product has been mentioned directly on social channels.
• Brand Search Volume: The number of times people have typed your brand name on search engines as a keyword.
• Reach: The total number of people exposed to a social media post.
• Audience growth: Audience growth is your follower count.
• Brand Mentions and Share of voice (SOV): A brand mention is when your brand, product, or URL is in a unique piece of user-generated content on social media. Brand mention can be a tagged mention that links to your name directly. Or an untagged mention where they are talking about you.

2. Measure for Engagement

• Conversation / Comment Rate: The (average) number of comments and responses on each post.
• Applause Rate: The number of reactions or likes per post.
• Amplification / Share Rate: The number of ‘shares’ per post.
• Video Views & Duration: The number of plays of your video, and the level to which viewers stuck around.
• Clicks Per Post: Measuring the number of times users have clicked on your link helps determine if your headline or article was compelling.Advanced: These metrics can be broken down and compared by the social media channel, month, content format, or theme for deeper analysis.

3. Measure for Conversion (and Cost per Conversion)

• Cost Per Lead (CPL): Calculate how much it approximately costs you to acquire one lead. This metric can be aggregated for all social networks but works best as a comparison metric across paid campaigns and channels. If your CPL is higher than your benchmark, you need to reconsider channels and approaches.
• Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL): It’s great to have loads of leads, but if none of them matches your lead qualification criteria, then all of your efforts will have been in vain. Measuring your MQLs will ensure that you are targeting the right audience.
• Customer Lifetime Value (CLV or LTV): Predicting the net profit a prospect will generate over a period of time and assigning that value to each new customer is integral to measuring social media ROI.
• Close Rate Per Channel: A careful examination of which channel generates the best leads for your brand is an excellent way to determine which platforms are worth pursuing and which aren’t.
• Average Close Rate: Keep track of the quality of your leads to help you determine if you’re attracting leads with high conversion potential.
• Newsletter Signups: Newsletter Signups is a non-revenue conversion. However, the number of signups for your newsletter determines your conversions. So, you can measure your conversions by how many people signed up.

4. Measure for Reputation

• Feedback and Reviews: This is a customer service KPI that can also measure reputation. Feedback and reviews can come in comments, emails, or calls.
  You can count the inbound and outbound.
  • Inbound (wk): How many did you receive?
    52 messages, 20 negative, 32 positiveOutbound: How many responses did you make? How many tickets did you create? Solve?
    40 responses solved

Remember when we talked about breaking those goals down into smaller pieces? Those 50 marketing-qualified leads won’t appear overnight. To inch closer to your total, in the month of March you might set goals such as:

1. Generating X thousand 10-second views on a new marketing video
2. Decreasing cost per action on retargeting ads to X dollars
3. Improving conversion rate on Facebook-driven lead magnets from X to Y%

There’s only one way to eat an elephant: One bite at at time. Start big, then break down small.

To recap: First, you need to identify…

1. A primary goal: If we only hit this one goal this year, we’ll be successful.
2. Secondary goals: This is how we measure the performance of our execution.

Then, ask yourself and key members of your organization:

1. Are these tied to our most important business goals of the year?
2. Are they SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, time-bound)?
3. Does leadership support the decision to focus on these goals?
4. Have we identified the KPIs that will help us measure our progress towards these goals?

Helpful? Download our full social media strategy prep list here, including the 25 questions to ask first >>

Step 2. Identify Target Audiences

Do you have a defined target audience associated with your goals? Having clarity on your most valuable and important customer types precedes this step. If marketing, sales, and service haven’t had that discussion yet, start there. For the purpose of social media strategy planning, there are three main audience groups we care about reaching:

1. Your most valuable customers.

Focus on your MVP (Most Valuable Personas) for your primary goal. Building a better relationship with this audience—and attracting more like them—will drive the greatest return from your social media investment.

You might find this part challenging. Brands often have multiple customer segments they speak to across product lines. And while social advertising lends itself well to micro-targeting multiple personas, it’s hard to grow an audience organically and implement a content strategy speaking to lots of different people.

So while your business may want to recruit employees, attract customers, and engage with influencers—your primary content and channel strategy should be formed from your most valuable prospects and customers.

2. Your aspirational audience.

This segment represents the audience you want to grow into next. This group might be necessary for business growth in the next 5 years. Often it’s a younger generation you hope to influence or consumers of an emerging business segment. They might not be an immediate priority, but they should be identified and understood.

3. Your influencer audience.

The segment who can lift up your brand and reach your customers. Who influences your customer? Defining this group can be key to unlocking earned media and traffic. Note: You can swap “customer” with the designation that makes sense – client, donor, guest, or member.

Next, dig into the details of your customer persona. Once you’ve confirmed your target audiences (congrats on being decisive!), the next step is to describe them at a deeper level. The better you know your audience, the more effective your content strategy will be in engaging them. To define your persona, ask questions like:

• What are their (relevant) goals, motivations, pain points, and questions?
• How would you describe them demographically?
• How would you describe their lifestyle, personality traits, values, and attitudes?
• How else would they describe themselves as an audience?

Your juicy content ideas will come from the answers to these questions, so it’s important to get authentic, qualitative feedback—ideally from your customers.

You can keep your audience engaged by:

• Having Q&A sessions
• Creating exclusive content for your followers
• Sharing your customers’ stories
• Creating contests that require users to submit user-generated content.

To recap: First, identify your most valuable, aspirational, and influencer audience segments. Then ask yourself and key members of your organization:

• What are their (relevant) goals and challenges?
• Which attributes describe them as an audience?
• How else would they describe themselves?

Step 3. Establish a Channel Strategy

Selecting the right platforms is key to a focused social media program. First, you need to identify…

1. Primary channels for organic content and paid campaigns.

Where will you focus most of your effort building a presence? Your primary social media channels are the answer. There should be a direct link between investing time and resources on that platform and the priority goals you set. If your top tier goal is customer engagement, you better be sure you can reliably reach and track your customers there. Otherwise, it becomes a secondary channel with less investment. For most brands, there are 2-3 primary channels to prioritize. Remember that more channels to maintain means more resources to manage. Choose (and cut) wisely.

Examples of common primary social media channels may include:

• TikTok
• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Instagram
• Facebook

Missing a few? Preferences will vary, but that’s where secondary channels come in.

2. Secondary channels for future growth and opportunities.

Gone are the days where following best practice meant being “everywhere.” (Remember Peach, you guys?) Still, there is tremendous upside in being an early adopter. If your audience is starting to make their way to a new platform, it should be on your radar. B2B TikTok, I’m talking about you. Think 80/20 with the 20% representing a smaller subset of your bandwidth tied to experimentation and growth.

Examples of common secondary social media channels include:

• TikTok
• YouTube
• Reddit
• Facebook Groups
• Snapchat
• Slack Communities
• Clubhouse (JK)

As an example, a B2B manufacturing firm might find their core business customers use LinkedIn professionally and Facebook personally, while their aspirational audience is more of a DIY creator, so increasingly more TikTok and Instagram-heavy. Their social media channel strategy might require investing 80% of their time and budget on LinkedIn and Facebook efforts where they’ve proven the value, and up to 20% on TikTok videos, Instagram posts and/or ads. This channel mix should be evaluated on a quarterly or semi-annual basis.

(Yes, there are B2B manufacturers on TikTok, really.)

3. Channel-specific features to enhance performance and engagement.

Often, the devil is in the details. With Facebook, for instance, thinking beyond organic Facebook Page posts can unlock tons of opportunity. Products like Messenger, Groups, Shops, Stories, Marketplace, and Events all grew heavily in daily usage and require a strategy of their own.

Our rule of thumb is if a platform publicizes and promotes a new feature, it’s recommended to use it. In 2023, Instagram will push their creators to use Reels to boost their reach, for instance. Don’t be afraid to experiment!

Which social media channel features are worth testing in 2023?

In previous years, it was easier to organize social media channels into Facebook and not-Facebook. While that’s changing with the growth of usage on TikTok, Clubhouse, LinkedIn, and others, let’s start there.

Facebook Trends 2023 — A few things to keep on your radar:

1. Explore Creator Studio with Meta Business Suite.
2. Get personal and generate leads with conversational marketing in the form of Messenger automation.
3. Use new Facebook Group features such as Reels for Groups, and other admin features to boost engagement.
4. Facebook Shops are streamlining e-commerce and connecting the dots between consumers and commerce.
5. Schedule reels through Creator Studio.
6. Create Reels from existing videos.

*After Facebook redesigned their experience around Groups and Events, you have even more incentive to lean in to those features.

Instagram Trends 2023 — Explore these opportunities:

1. Use native app reel scheduling feature.
2. An increased focus on driving user behavior around Reels discovery and IG Shops/shopping (big win for e-commerce).
3. Continued development, promotion and user adoption of Stories.
4. Redesigned profiles with more prominent call-to-action buttons.
5. Custom stickers to engage your audience like quizzes, donations, and challenges.
6. Instagram Notes to communicate with groups of your Instagram friends in 60 characters or less.

4. A clear plan to grow your presence and audience on the channel.

Organic reach isn’t what it used to be, but if you’re investing time on a channel, you should invest in audience growth. From invite-to-likes to the proactive following, engagement groups, and retargeting, there are many tactics for growing your audience. The shiny object of the moment will change, but if it’s a ‘white hat’ and working for peers, it should be on your radar.

Audience growth tactics include:

1. Inviting your LinkedIn connections to follow your Company Page
2. Proactive commenting on accounts with high relevance and reach
3. Hosting giveaways and contests with follow-to-enter messaging
4. Asking intriguing questions that prompt discussion
5. Getting shoutouts, tags, shares, and mentions from influential accounts

Social Media Channel Strategy Recap

To form your channel plan, ask yourself and key members of your organization:

1. 1. Are our primary channels vital to hitting our primary goals?
   2. How will we grow our reach and audience on these channels?
   3. Which channels should we keep on our radar to grow into next?
   4. Which features will we employ regularly to maximize our impact?
   5. How will we measure and ensure we’re reaching the right audience?

Step 4. Design Your Content Strategy

An effective social media content strategy structures your content plans and outlines what you’ll publish across channels. This social media framework could be used as a blueprint for organizing one-off campaigns, or your entire ongoing content strategy.

Here’s how it works.

Social Media Content Blueprint Breakdown

The content blueprint is organized into 3 core components:

1. Content purpose

2. Content pillars

3. Content subtopics

Get a free copy of the content strategy table here (not gated).

Content purpose statement: Your social and/or content marketing may be guided by an overarching idea or purpose. That overarching idea should be associated with the mission of your organization, or at least, the mission of your marketing.

Ask: “What do we stand for?”, or, “What do we help our audience do and accomplish?”

In the example above, our content purpose statement stems from our company’s core values — Hustle & Heart. With this in mind, all content we share should help companies grow faster (find their hustle), and connect emotionally with a human touch (embrace their heart).

Content pillars: Social content often stems from 3-5 high-level topics — your content pillars. Think of these as the building blocks for all of your supporting content ideas.

In the example, these are big ideas like the “Future of B2B social media”, which could break down into posts featuring trend research or expert interviews.

Note: Topics, pillars, themes and buckets, are often used interchangeably, and preference varies marketer-to-marketer.

Content subtopics: Underneath your pillars you can get more granular and share more specific content topics.

In the blueprint example, spotlighting our culture is a pillar topic. Therefore, posts may take audiences behind-the-scenes of on-site photoshoots, or celebrate client wins.

Organizing content in a social media framework this has two main benefits:

1. You can plan and produce content in batches. One of the most common pain points cited by social media marketers is the labor required to create interesting content—consistently.

By developing a whole series of related posts for a given campaign or month with a similar theme, you can stockpile relevant content and schedule them as needed. Think of the massive time you could save by avoiding the daily grind of answering, “what should we post today?”

2. You can measure the success of each content theme. What’s resonating with our audience? Which content themes perform better at different stages of the customer journey—cold awareness audiences versus fan and customer audiences?

Organizing content in this framework allows you to analyze your content by reach, engagement, and conversion KPIs more easily.

Some brands separate their ongoing (organic) social media content strategy from their paid social and content marketing strategy. If this is the case for you too, your content blueprint may look a little different.

• Content purpose: How you serve your audience.
• Content goals: What specific objectives does your content address. For instance, the stage of the funnel.
• Content topics: Examples of content types and topics that address those goals.

Examples of Social Media Content Strategy Topics

Now that you have a framework, ask yourself… Does your existing content enable you to post with purpose? To post with purpose, use what makes your audience care, share, aware, and convert. Let’s break those down:

1. Content that makes makes your audience care.

What type of content makes audiences care? The general mantra in social media marketing is don’t interrupt what interests people—be what interests people. Research from Paddle Consulting shows that interesting content breaks down into the following categories:

🤣 Funny Content: Help people laugh.

Funny content isn’t limited to jokes and memes (though there’s a place for that). Finding your funny can come in the form of your playful brand voice in post and reply copy, or relatable observations and videos that resonate with your audience. (At Sculpt, we’re fans of the latter: Watch “ Social Media IRL “)

Who and what makes your audience laugh?

Today more than ever, the comment IS the content. To leverage this trend, pay attention to popular and viral posts on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn (ideally, catch them before they go super viral). Your snarky, relatable memes here has a high likelihood of earning free reach and significant distribution.

B2C brands like Wendy’s know that best, and has amassed millions of engagements and earned impressions as a result.

*Dolphin noises* pic.twitter.com/AWi27iAoSa

— Wendy’s (@Wendys) September 27, 2022

👩‍🏫 Useful Content: Help people learn something new. 

Informative, relevant, and interesting is the key here. What would your target audience value learning more about? Useful content varies across the customer purchase journey, but could include topics like:

• Top of Funnel: Advice from internal (and industry) experts, timely tips, facts and stats, and curated resources. Publish these often.
• Middle of Funnel: Lead magnet resources, case studies and customer success stories with clear takeaways. Publish these with paid, or moderately organically.
• Bottom of Funnel: Proprietary tools, tripwires, and core offers to solve their problem now. Publish these with paid, or infrequently organically.
• Ascension / Re-engagement: Interesting and creative ways to use your solution, or improve their results. Publish these moderately to often.

Best practice would say keep useful content—like all social content— ‘snackable.’ As in, bite-sized advice.

While I generally agree, the rule changes with the format and affinity to your audience.

Tutorial and demo videos that walkthrough a process step-by-step will get devoured on Youtube and Facebook—especially Groups.

On the other hand, you might experience better engagement breaking down blogs into 5-6 individual Instagram Stories versus one long text caption in a post.

The more the content delivers on the value it promised, the more likely it will get consumed

😍 Beautiful Content: Help people fall in ‘like.’ Stunning visual content has a powerful effect on engagement. Regardless of your line of business, strive to find your brand’s natural beauty.

Tips for Creating Beautiful Visual Content

1. Think “thumb-stopping.”
2. Embrace natural light in photography.
3. Keep shots condensed, closeup, and interesting.
4. Use primary and consistent colors to strike a chord.
5. Bring out your people’s personalities.
6. Tell a story through a series.
7. Incorporate slight movement to bring still photos to life.

Pro tip: Long gone are the days where photographers held all of the keys to great social content. Experiment with mobile editing apps like Canva, Flixel, or Mojo to make beautiful content on the fly.

😮 Inspiring: Help people feel inspired through storytelling. 

Your customers are aspirational—they’re striving to become a better version of themselves. You can help with stories of people (and customers) overcoming odds and reaching their potential.

YETI positions their uber-successful, video-based content strategy around a mission to inspire through stories. “We celebrate stories from the wild. If adventure and grit is at the heart of the story, then it’s a story that YETI will tell.”

If video isn’t an option, try a still photo series similar to how Humans of New York tells stories for its passionate community of 18+ million on Facebook: Close-up, natural shots of people exhibiting raw emotion with accompanying quotes.

2. Content that makes your audience share.

What type of content makes audiences share?

Engagement is an emotional connection. Research shows that high arousal emotions like excitement, humor, and happiness heavily influence online sharing.

(By the way, ever wonder why divisive political news ends up in your feeds so frequently? Anger, anxiety, and stress work the same way.)

If you’re interested in the psychology behind going viral, I highly recommend reading Contagious: Why Things Catch On, by Jonah Berger, or watching his course on LinkedIn.

Another fascinating philosophy on sharable content comes from the data science team at BuzzFeed (surprise, surprise). According to Publisher Dao Nguyen in her TED Talk, every piece of content has a ‘job’ to do for your audience. To influence sharing, focus on these jobs:

1. Content that reinforces our sense of self-identity. (“This is so me”)
2. Content that help us connect with someone else, and reinforce a shared experience, sense of community, or relationship. (“This is so you” or “This is so us”)
3. Content that improves our lives by teaching us something about ourselves, and contains wisdom worthy of passing on. (“This explains everything…”)
4. Content that makes us feel something and touches on high arousal emotions. (“This restored my faith in humanity.”)

3. Content that makes your audience aware.

What types of content generates brand awareness?

According to author Daryl Weber in his book Brand Seduction, a brand is a collection of unconscious associations in your consumer’s mind. Help your audience recognize those associations – all of the things that make you valuable, unique, and relevant in their lives. Brand awareness content may include content that…

1. Features your people, place, products, & process.
2. Keeps a consistent visual voice by incorporating your brand identity (colors, assets) and a signature style.
3. Highlights and educates customers on the problems you solve.

This example from ICR IOWA‘s Talent Attraction campaign is a good example of all 3 principles rolled up in one.

And finally…

4. Content that makes your audience convert.

(Sorry to break the rhyme.) By following these steps you’ve designed a content strategy full of value. Now, it’s time to make your ask. Or as Gary Vee would say, your ‘jab, jab, jab, right hook.‘

Content designed to convert often comes into play in your paid media strategy, but it should be part of your planning, too.

What types of content makes your audience take action?

• Content that speaks to their motivations, anxieties, impulses.

Remember the persona research you did when digging into your most valuable customers? That’s going to come in handy. What issues (related to the problem your business solves) keep them up at night? What stops them from taking action?

• Content that speaks to your audience, directly.

Remember that your customer is the hero of your brand story. With some exceptions (privacy matters), referencing your target audience in copy the same way they identify themselves will be highly effective in driving action. For instance, “5 things Digital Marketing Agency Owners Need to Stop Doing to Grow” would get my click.

• Content that reduces the friction to taking action.

Make it easy to take the first step. For instance, social media contests provide a valuable incentive—the opportunity to get something free or first—in exchange for an action that’s valuable to the brand, like gathering contact info.

For retailers, limited-time, social-media-exclusive discounts can lower the risk in trying a product.

For service providers, demo, tutorial, or webinar videos can demonstrate the value of a solution before hiring them.

• Content that incorporates proven formulas.

No need to reinvent the wheel. There are dozens of copywriting formulas that have proven to influence conversions. Buffer covers 27 here, and Copyhackers has a few more.

Step 5. Amplify Your Content Distribution

What will you do to amplify the distribution of your content? Let me say it louder for the folks in the back: It’s time to put an end to the “just boost it for $5 and see what happens” strategy. 2023 is the year you take amplification seriously.

There are two main ways to amplify your content:

1. Paid social advertising strategies
2. Influencer and earned media strategies

1. Use paid social media to amplify reach to your most relevant audiences.

Paid social is a powerful channel to reach people where they are and with what they want. And to be honest, it’s mandatory in a pay-to-play world. With declining organic reach on Facebook channels and algorithmic feeds all around, navigating the world of paid distribution is key. Here’s what you need to identify before paying:

• A minimum monthly budget for paid social media.

The exact figure will vary based on your total marketing budget and target cost to acquire a customer (CAC). It’s common practice to spend at least 5% of your total revenue on marketing—split between brand awareness and sales activation.

It would be wise to separate paid social media into at least two buckets:

1. Awareness & Acquisition: The budget to reach your prospects and convert them into customers. Ad examples might include top-of-funnel video ads, retargeting lead generation ads, or abandoned cart ads.
2. Retention & Advocacy: Budget to reach your customers and convert them into, well, happier customers. Paid social media ad examples might include product and feature announcements, new blog posts, and exclusive promotions and offers.

• Proper conversion and visitor tracking.

Install platform tracking pixels to measure conversions and retarget visitors with custom audiences. Unfortunately, if you want to use the ad technology native to each platform, you will have to install their tracking separately.

The most common conversion tracking tags include:

• Facebook Pixel for Instagram and Facebook properties
• LinkedIn Insight Tag
• Twitter Conversion tag
• Quora Ad Pixel
• Reddit Conversion Pixel
• Pinterest conversion tag
• Snap Pixel for Snapchat
• TikTok Pixel

A tag management solution like Google Tag Manager is vital for keeping track of all of these codes and making sure they fire appropriately. You will thank me later!

• The ‘warm’ audiences relevant to your goals.

These retargeting audiences are going to have a straight-line connection to your goals, and should receive the majority of the spend. In (mostly) order of value:

1. Known customers and high-value customer lists (CRM)
2. Lead and email subscriber lists
3. Website visitors on key pages
4. Website visitors on any page
5. Video Viewers (Facebook/IG feature only)
6. Page Engagers (Facebook/IG feature only)
7. Page connections and Followers

If you have questions about setting up this targeting, send us a note through chat. 👍

• Identify cold (new) audiences relevant to your goals.

These audiences are associated with new potential customers. When you’re ready to expand your reach, this is how to target them.

1. Lookalike audiences based on customer lists
2. Lookalike audiences based on traffic or engagement
3. Relevant interests, behaviors, or keywords
4. Demographics and Geography
5. Friends of Page connections (Facebook only)

Finally, you’ll want to decide which of the content themes you identified will be amplified with paid spend. Not every post or tweet needs to be promoted. It would be reasonable to devote a monthly, fixed budget for boosting organic posts and adjust the distribution of spend towards the top-performing posts.

2. Build relationships with community and customer influencers to amplify earned media.

The second method of amplification is earned, not paid, media. Earned media helps your brand message and content go beyond your own community without paying to promote it. Sounds good, huh? Here’s how you leverage it.

• Identify categories of influencers within your community for content distribution.

These humans have the ability to reach your target audience organically to carry your message further. You can break them down into two categories.

1. Employees, fans, and customers with large (social) networks and great reputations.

→ Ask: Which customers and fans have engaged networks of prospective customers like themselves? Which customers have the ability to write and create content?

→ Action: Through direct message share content directly with them with a call-to-action to share. Or, feature and tag them in content so it shows up in their connections’ news feeds.

2. Identify blogs, publishers, creators, and authors that you could collaborate with and pitch.

→ Ask: Who does my customer trust?  Where do they get information? Who do they follow to learn new things and be inspired?

→ Action: Co-create content with them and use their networks for reach. This can come in many forms, like a sponsored shoutout on Instagram, an article mention in Forbes, a guest appearance in a Twitter chat or podcast, or a long-term co-creation partnership where they contribute user-generated-content. The ladder is the most common for micro-influencers.

To organize your outreach, and determine where the biggest bang for your buck lies, make a spreadsheet and begin populating people and opportunities. This guest blogging template on Airtable can help you get started. On an ongoing basis, make a point to check in and follow up with people you contacted.

To recap, make sure you have:

1. The proper tracking in place to measure success from paid advertising.
2. Data from your website and CRM that you can use to retarget prospects and customers.
3. Pages, ad accounts, and a Pixel setup in Facebook Business Manager.
4. Relevant blogs, publishers, and influencers identified for collaboration opportunities and outreach.

Finally…

Step 6. Plan Your Execution

With a solid foundation in place, it’s time to evaluate your people, process, and publishing plan. Your execution planning should answer – are the right people in the right seats? Are they focused on the right tasks? And how will we improve the plan as we go?

1. Select the people responsible for the five main social media roles.

There are five main roles responsible for executing a social media marketing strategy. In most (small) organizations, the social media or marketing manager will wear all of these hats. (Way to go, you!)

The five main social media roles include:

1. Strategic Planner
2. Community Manager
3. Content Creator
4. Ad Buyer
5. Analyst

Strategic planner: The planner or planning team is responsible for overseeing this lovely strategy, ensuring that it translates into quality output, and is organized neatly in an overarching editorial calendar.

Community Manager: The social media community manager is in charge of growing and engaging with your audience. Tasks include social listening and monitoring, responding to comments 1-on-1, following and unfollowing accounts, and publishing the scheduled and real-time content you’re producing.

Content Creators: Content is the lifeblood of a great social media program, so the role of the creator is an important one. Of course, many individuals may contribute content, including front-line employees, volunteers, and customers. Your customers are hungry for a range of formats across channels, from story-based videos and still images to articles like this, so the person in this seat should bring a breadth of skills to the table.

Ad Manager & Analyst: Sometimes a split role, the ad manager and analyst is an optimizer. They bring a data-driven approach to your social media program by keeping a watchful eye on ROI, reporting up results to stakeholders, and managing the spend and pacing of your paid campaigns.

Each role is also responsible for selecting the tools and resources to do their jobs well. For instance, the community manager might evaluate a scheduling tool like Buffer, Sprout Social, or Loomly. The content creator might request editing tools like Canva for Work or Adobe Spark.

2. Define your social media tasks on a quarter, monthly, weekly, and daily basis.

Quarterly social media task examples:

• Evaluate the quarterly goal pacing against annual goals.
• Plan a high-level editorial calendar which may include allocating slots for content themes, key events, and paid campaign windows.
• Produce a pillar piece of content that will feed your campaign (sometimes called cornerstone content).
• Review the list of influencers you’re targeting or the ROI from those relationships.

Monthly social media task examples:

• Fill out the calendar with more detail for daily content, including assets and copy, and slots for real-time stories.
• Measure and report on monthly KPIs.
• Create and schedule a batch of planned content.
• Review and adjust the hashtags and publishing times you’re using based on engagement.

Weekly social media task examples:

• Create and schedule more timely content to fill in gaps.
• Amplify (boost) the top performing Facebook posts.
• Review progress on paid campaigns towards the monthly goal and budget.
• Follow/unfollow accounts and invite-to-like fans to grow the audience.
• Proactively engage and comment on other peoples’ content.

Daily social media task examples:

• Monitor for notifications, reviews, and mentions on your accounts.
• Interact with your audience and reply to comments.
• Share timely, immediate content sourced from employees.
• Engage with and repost user-generated content from customers.
• Interact and monitor in Facebook Groups (or customer communities).
• Update daily stories.

3. Establish a time period and process for evaluating progress with your team.

A few tips for continuous improvement and learning.

• Ask your customers and colleagues for feedback.

Is our voice resonating? Is our content helpful? KPIs are important, but qualitative feedback goes a long way.

• Keep a swipe file of content that works, and why.

When an ad or content performs well, there’s a good chance it will work again. Create an internal record of ads and content that resonated—both your own, and others you find. Task colleagues to do the same to build your collection and strengthen your organization’s competency for recognizing good content. Screenshot and log the copy, creative, and offer. Tip: Start with a Slack channel. (Ours is called #good_social.)

• Hold a monthly retrospective.

To stay agile, embrace “Agile.” At least once per quarter, bring the core team responsible for social together to share and learn. Everyone should be briefed to be prepared, honest, and open to improve the quality of your takeaways. In your retro, ask four key questions about the process and performance of your social media program:

1. What worked / what should we keep doing?
2. What didn’t / what should we stop doing?
3. What did we learn / what should we try next?
4. What puzzles us?

• Hire an experienced social media strategy partner to conduct strategy R&D.

It’s hard to see the forest through the trees when you’re in the thick of it. Having an outside advisor look at your internal data and process can make a big impact in setting the course for the year. A social media strategy partner will synthesize your brand’s strategy by analyzing your past performance, distilling your goals into monthly objectives, developing content themes and ideas, and training your team on implementation. (And likely get the job done faster.)

To recap execution, decide as a team:

• The people responsible for the four main social media roles.
• The tasks you will complete on a daily, weekly, monthly.
• The tools you will use to organize your calendar, community management, and reporting.
• The retrospective questions you will ask, like “What’s working, what isn’t, and what will we try next?”

Frequently Asked Questions about social media strategy

What are the best times to post on each social media?

The best time to publish social media content is when your audience is paying attention, or seeking out information. That’s a pretty hard nut to crack. The first step is to review your own data—do you see better engagement when you post in the morning, afternoon, or evening? How does your content perform on weekdays or weekends? Which ones?

For specific industry research, Sprout Social has published research on the best times for brands in education, healthcare, consumer goods, and tech on Facebook and Instagram.

Some general rules on when to post on social media:

• Survey your customers about their own behaviors.
• Monitor your competitors and their posting frequency.

The truth is ‘time of day’ is less important now than ever before. With algorithmic feeds, your content will be prioritized based on its relevance to the user—meaning a more engaging post can have a lifespan of 2+ days, while others may stop picking up reach after 2 hours.

You can learn a lot from social media experiments. Remember: More important than ‘when you post’ is often ‘what you post.’ Before drilling down time of day, consider the format, quality, and topic of content your audience likes most.

How much should you budget for social media?

The industry standard calculation would be dedicating at least 5% of your expected revenue towards marketing, and 10-25% of that budget towards social media marketing. You can then break down that total budget for social media campaigns, ad spend, tools, and agency services. That budget includes people and time, and the benchmark used by marketing teams varies on your industry, maturity, and desired level of growth. You can dig into all of the budget factors in our article on setting B2B social media budgets.

How many posts should you plan for each social media channel?

The right frequency depends on your ability to create enough valuable, interesting content. To stay engaged with your audience, start with at least one post per week on each social media platform. Most companies post at least 2-3 times per week and up to once-per-day. On the other end of the spectrum, large, digital media publishers like BuzzFeed post several times a day. Outside of outbound content, make sure to allocate time for daily responses to comments and direct messages.

Who are the top B2B brands on social media?

In 2023, you would be hard-pressed to find a B2B brand that isn’t on social media. According to IDC, 75% of B2B buyers use social media to make purchase decisions. Brands like Dropbox, Shopify, Cisco, and UpWork frequently win new customers (and big awards) from their B2B social media campaigns.

The best way to find relevant B2B examples is to search marketing award directories, sort social media benchmarking websites by your vertical, or use the tried and true method of guessing and checking. LinkedIn search, Twitter recommendations, and Facebook Ad Library is your friend.

Here, you can get a swipe file full of 30+ exceptional social media content examples.

🙋🏼Have other questions? Send them along or leave a comment below.