Writing a social media strategy can seem like a daunting task. But your social media strategy needn’t be a complex piece of rocket science, in fact it works best as a clear, concise document that encapsulates your plan of action. It’ll include what channels you’ll use, what your goals are and how you’re going to reach them.
In this blog, Rank Your Keyword digital marketing tutor Tess, gives 3 pointers to consider when writing your strategy.
1. Your client persona
Thinking your social media audience is ‘everyone’, is not a road you want to go down. Here’s a quote that sums it up pretty well; it’s from the godfather of advertising and inspiration behind Mad Men, David Ogilvy:
“If you find yourself one fine day saying the same things to a bishop and a trapeze artist, you are done for.”
What made Ogilivy sell so well, was that he always considered the individual reading. Social media marketing is no different. You don’t want to be aiming your content at every Tom, Dick and Harry. Instead, you’ll want to talk directly to your client persona — and we’ll come back to how you can create a one in a moment.
So why do we need to create a persona? Getting into the nitty gritty of who your customer is, helps you imagine them as a person; and this makes writing social media content much more personal and targeted. Which of course builds trust, and when someone trusts your brand, they’re more likely to buy.
Just for good measure, here’s another noteworthy Ogilvy quote, I really like:
“Do not … address your readers as though they were gathered together in a stadium. When people read your copy, they are alone” — David Ogilvy
So, how does one make a client persona? Your ‘ICP’ is your ‘ideal client persona’ or ‘customer persona’, which ever suits. It’s an imaginary person based on who you think your customer is, and yes, you should give them a name. This is helpful for creating content, you can ask yourself: ‘what would I say to Dave, writing this Facebook post?’ or ‘does this Instagram reel resonate with Susan?’.
Demographics are useful, but more important are the psychographics: this is how your customer thinks, feels and what their needs and wants are. The better you can understand these, the more you can tailor your social media content to your customer. And in turn, the more content will appeal to them!
Here are a few pointers when making your ICP:
- Demographics such as age, gender identity, income and location can all be helpful
- Interests
- Pain points
- Hopes and dreams
You might be scratching your head on how you can pluck these details, well the place to start is usually… your current customers! It’s worthwhile doing some surveys and research into your current customers to help inform your ideal client persona. We go into this in more details in the Supercharge your Socials 1 day course.
2. Brand Personality
The idea that brand’s have ‘personality’ was brilliantly modelled by Jennifer Aakers, who created the Aaker brand personality model in 1998. This chart is a super inspiring way to start looking at what your brand personality might look like.
Before embarking on any social media strategy or campaign, you’ll want to be in keeping with your brand personality. We dive into brand personality in a lot more detail in my Supercharge your Social Strategy course.
3. Social media tone of voice
This is something easily missed out of strategy meetings, yet it’s so integral when approaching social media content.
Tone of voice is the way you speak to your customers and should be consistent with your brand values and mission. Brands like Innocent Smoothies and Duo Lingo are great examples of how tone of voice can be unique to a brand, they use irreverence and humour to stand out from the crowd.
I suggest thinking about a few things when creating your social media tone of voice:
~ Your tone will set you apart from the rest and make your channel distinctively you. You might find that you have a different tone for each platform; for instance your TikTok tone of voice could differ from how you speak on LinkedIn.
~ Is your tone sweet-tempered and personal? Or more scientific and serious? Is it uplifting and fun? You’ll want to go back to your client persona which we discussed earlier and think about what tone will ring with them most.
~ It’s also important to consider the language you use. Are you using accessible language, or do you need more scientific and technical language to appeal to your audience? Are the words you’re using more casual or formal? Will you use slang or colloquialisms? Tone of voice is really as in-depth as deciding between ‘bbz’ and ‘babe’, or ‘what’s up!’ and ‘how are you today?’
~This is when some A/B testing can be useful if you want to experiment with a few tones of voice before deciding on the best one for your company.
~It’s great to have this written down in your social media tone of voice guidelines, so that anyone who joins can hit the ground running and has some clear guidelines when creating content for your channels.
Hopefully that’s a good starting point. This is a WHOLE other topic and we do a module on social media tone of voice, marketing analytics and A/B testing on the 1 day supercharge socials course.
Finishing words
Having your brand personality, social media tone of voice and client persona nailed before creating content and executing your strategy is going to help you create content that emphasises with your audience and builds confidence in what the offering is.
By building a strategy, you avoid ‘selling’ on social media, and build a brand presence that reflects your mission, values and vision. People want more from businesses, so it’s integral to any strategy to connect with the heart of your customer.
Also Read: How to Buy Facebook Likes