17 Jan Three Steps to Help You Develop Your Content Strategy
If you’re reading here, you already know there’s more to social media marketing than posting pretty pictures to Facebook. In fact, a lot of thought, time, and work goes into building a plan long before any content is ever posted. Here are three tips to keep in mind when creating a social content strategy from scratch, or refreshing one that already exists, to make sure your hard work works for your brand.
- Know your brand’s audience. The very first step in any successful social strategy lies in the audience. In fact, Forrester has an entire methodology starting with people first that we love and use constantly at Ignite.
What do their lives look like? What’s important to them? What are their interests? When it comes to branded content, why would they care and why would they share? These may seem like a lot of questions to answer, but having a full understanding of your audience is the key in breaking through the noise and making a meaningful connection with them on social media.
- Build your brand’s content themes. Once you have a full understanding of what makes your audience tick, you can combine that knowledge with your brand’s objectives to start building out your content strategy, beginning with content themes. These themes define what your audience wants to hear from your brand and are the categories that each social post will fall into.
For example, if your brand is an industry leader with a wealth of information to support their purpose and/or product, “Educate” may be a content theme that makes sense as a way for your brand to share that knowledge. If your product is something that helps consumers create something, “Inspiration” may be an appropriate theme for the audience see how your product can help them achieve a desired result.
- Brainstorm collaboratively. Now, it’s time to get creative! When your content themes are established, they need some substance. Here at Ignite, we love to brainstorm together with our clients to flesh out content themes with the ideas and topics that social posts will contain. We’ll break off into groups and think of anything and everything our content themes include, then regroup as a team to identify any trends that lend themselves to content series and campaigns, plus other evergreen topics. You can even start roughly build out what this content might look like.
Now, you’re ready to tackle the TACTICS … determining what post types and platforms make sense for your content and the assets you’ll need to execute your strategy. Need a hand getting started? See how we can be partners.
