Social media platforms have evolved into powerful tools for driving brand awareness, engaging target audiences, and fueling business growth, so you can’t just post across every platform. Brands need a well-crafted strategy to foster customer connections and gain leverage over competitors.
Walk through seven key steps to developing an impactful social media strategy for brands and meet audiences throughout the entire customer journey.
1. Define SMART Goals
Goals provide direction, giving brands something to work toward. But you can’t just say, “I would like to do this,” without knowing how to get there. SMART goals are helpful when creating a social media strategy for brands because they provide a baseline for concrete actions you can track.
SMART goals are:
- Specific: Clear and detailed that make the goal easier to carry out
- Measurable: Trackable over time via metrics to monitor progress and understand success
- Attainable: Challenging, yet achievable, benchmarks that factor in obstacles and how to overcome them
- Relevant: In line with your brand’s mission and priorities to drive the business
- Time-bound: Deadline-based, with set timelines to adhere to and encourage urgency
What your social media SMART goals could look like
SMART goals are designed to be highly specific so brands like yours can create clear benchmarks, adhere to deadlines, and assess progress. Each one should include the SMART ingredients, such as in the example below:
In two months, increase newsletter signups from social media 50 percent with a weekly Instagram giveaway campaign and by promoting it in three additional Instagram posts per week.
2. Define Your Audience
Every brand fits a niche, so what’s special about your audience? Understand what motivates them and what they need. A social media strategy for brands helps to define audiences to communicate key messages.
Create personas
Personas are fictional representations of your ideal customers based on real data to better answer their needs. You can use a combination of customer surveys and analytics to create personas and understand the demographics, interests, and behaviors of your target groups. By taking this extra step, your brand can better create personalized social media content that resonates with your target audience.
Identify customer pain points and preferences
What’s weighing on your audience? Take the time to determine what questions, comments, and challenges they have—as well as what they want. Social listening tools can help suss out keywords in posts, highlight positive and negative sentiment, and both refine your buyer personas and address concerns that impact buyer behavior.
3. Choose Your Social Channels
Instagram or Pinterest? Your brand doesn’t have to be everywhere. Creating a social media strategy for brands includes aligning the platform with your message. Focus on the platforms that align with your industry, audience, and brand values.
Select platforms based on your personas and goals
Are you wondering where your audience spends their time and which platforms could bring the best ROI? Research where similar brands are active on social media and the content they share to get a feel for how audiences engage and inform your strategy.
But don’t stop at setting up an Instagram or YouTube account. Bring all of your channels together under one roof. LTK’s platform-agnostic solution makes it easy to monitor and enhance every channel for optimum performance.
4. Define Key Metrics and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
Sync business objectives with performance. KPIs track your social media efforts so you can understand if your content is paying off.
KPIs to consider
KPIs help to measure the success of every social media strategy for brands, and they should be unique to each campaign. With a firm grasp on your SMART goals, choose KPIs that match:
- Awareness, including impressions, reach, and brand mentions
- Engagement, including likes, comments, shares, and interaction rates
- Conversion, including click-through rates, conversion rates, and sales
Remember that your metrics may vary by platform. Plus, you can adjust your strategy based on performance.
5. Engage in Competitive Analysis
Your social media strategy doesn’t have to start from a blank slate. Analyzing competitors’ social media presence can inform the path you take.
Get inspired by competitors
Ever see a competitor’s social media and think, “We should be doing this, too?” Crafting a winning social media strategy for brands includes taking the time to understand what’s working and what isn’t for your biggest competitors, analyzing everything from the social platforms they use to their messaging.
Along the way, take note of the target audience each platform serves and any shifts in brand style and content that reflect this. Are your competitors posting more videos and blog articles or leveraging polls and gated content? How often are they posting? Take these aspects into account as you assess competitor content and customer engagement—and unlock new opportunities for your brand.
6. Plan Your Content Calendar
You may personally post to social media on a whim, but brand social content is much more deliberate. With this in mind, devise a content calendar that makes sense for your audience to engage in.
Identify your content strategy
Your content strategy forms a road map to support both your brand and specific campaigns. Decide on a balanced mix of assets to educate consumers or promote products—from blog articles and infographics to videos and stories—and cross-promote them on social media.
Making influencer partnerships part of your content strategy can expand your opportunities even further. Today’s shoppers trust Creators over ads and celebrities; these voices influence the entire customer journey. In fact, LTK’s own research shows that 56 percent of the population at large buys from Creators. By publishing shoppable posts and videos, influencers pull in audiences of thousands of consumers who not only shop with you but also share with their own networks.
Identify the right times and frequency to post content
A content calendar doesn’t just cover the what—it also covers the how and when. Use yours to plan and organize the ways to incorporate social media.
Hootsuite suggests optimal times to post across different platforms, including:
- Instagram: 5-7 a.m. Wednesdays
- X/Twitter: 10 a.m.-1 p.m. Mondays and Tuesdays
- Facebook: 7 a.m. on Saturdays
- TikTok: 3 p.m. on Thursdays
Combine your calendar with social media automation tools to schedule posts across platforms, repurpose content, and post at the right times. By looking at post analytics, you can unlock patterns in engagement, reach, and click-through rates to understand top-performing posts and inform post frequency.
7. Evaluate and Improve Your Strategy
Do you see any trends in how your content is performing? Social media isn’t “set it and forget it.” Understand how your brand is doing with performance monitoring.
Use analytics tools for ongoing evaluation
Google Analytics, platform-specific analytics, and even reporting from LTK 360 can zoom in on top-performing content, audience engagement, and optimization opportunities. With a full view of your efforts, your brand can quickly pivot based on audience behavior. And don’t forget: Industry trends are constantly in flux, and so is each platform’s algorithm! Use your data to adapt.
LTK Tools to Maximize Your Social Strategy
As an influencer marketing leader reaching 4 million shoppers, LTK offers a proven suite of tools to drive social media success. From taking the guesswork out of finding Creators to executing and reporting on campaigns under one roof, we can send your social media into the stratosphere.
LTK Match.AI
Simply finding Creators to support a social media strategy for brands can be time-consuming. LTK Match.AI leverages AI to enhance collaborations between Creators and brands. Using a proprietary dataset, It analyzes more than 100 million data points, incorporating 12-plus years of Creator, shopper, and brand data to match brands with Creators, improving social campaigns and return on ad spend.
LTK 360 reporting
Manage and monitor campaigns in one place. LTK 360 includes comprehensive Creator tracking and reporting with full-funnel metrics, allowing brands to understand the entire customer journey and optimize their influencer marketing. With LTK 360, you can identify top-performing campaigns and access 24/7 reporting across various areas, such as upper and lower funnel performance, traffic visualization, earned media value, campaign layering, and data from the LTK app and web.
LTK Marketplace
Ever think, “I wish Creators would just come to us”? LTK Marketplace allows Creators to directly pitch brands for collaborations to turn your wish into a reality. Similar to an RFP, brands turn to Marketplace to post campaign needs and receive pitches from vetted Creators that you can approve quickly to accelerate campaign timelines.
LTK Leaderboard & Power Gifting
Give Creators their due—both by seeking out the most successful ones and by showing them your appreciation. LTK Leaderboard & Power Gifting helps you evaluate top-performing Creators to inform your strategy and offers opportunities to reward performance with obligation-free gifting and discount codes.
Launch Your Social Media Strategy with LTK
Creating a robust social media strategy for brands is a key component of digital marketing success. But it takes work. Defining the right goals and metrics, selecting the right-fit platforms, and building your social media presence with content that resonates form the building blocks for your efforts.
Start building your social media strategy with LTK! Our proven solution delivers expertise to optimize your brand's social media presence. Plus, you can access thousands of influencers to push your efforts over the top.
