How to create a social media strategy for ANY brand

Hello, hello, and welcome to Freelance Friday. Today, I want to talk about how to create a social media strategy for any brand. Because if you're a social media manager, you know, sometimes you get thrown in on projects that you're like, I don't even know what this business is all about.

I don't understand. What they're selling, what they're doing, how I'm supposed to talk about it, where I'm supposed to be. And it is our job as social media managers to be able to figure it out.

Like I have the types of businesses that I kind of prefer to work with, but at the end of the day, I'm pretty confident that I could work with almost anyone and be able to get them to see results. And here's how the first thing you need to know is, uh, what your client, what your company, what you actually do and how they make money. When I first got started in the social media world, my first client was a CRM company, client relationship management.

And I know what that means now because I use a CRM in my business. But when I was, uh, 20, 21, however old I was, I had no idea what that meant. And it was really hard for me.

It was a really hard learning curve because I was. I didn't know how, how we actually made money. Like I didn't understand the connection that I was making through social media.

For example, if you take something like a good or direct to consumer good, like a handbag, for example. We know we can build out that customer journey. And we know that if we post on Instagram, if we post on TikTok shop, a viewer can just click on the button and be brought over to our website to purchase that handbag, right?

So I understand that I can conceptualize that. And in turn, as the social media manager, I can speak to the right metrics when I'm talking to my client. In that case, it would be website clicks.

Or if I can dig deeper into our analytics and be able to actually say how many sales that we drove through social media, even better. Now, again, going back to my beginnings, the CRM company that I was working with, you couldn't, you couldn't check out on their website. That wasn't a tangible sales metric.

Instead, what my goal was, was to get emails for them. So I wanted my social media posts. To drive over to their website, to get them to maybe download like an ebook or a white paper or something like that.

So then their sales team could sell to them typically over the phone or via email. And it's important to understand which way this is all going to go because your tactics are going to be different. The type of content that you're going to post is going to be different.

The platforms you post on might be different depending on the answer to that question. It's also important to note that the goal of all businesses. On social media is not necessarily to make sales.

I mean, any business's goal is to make more revenue, but sometimes social media doesn't really play a direct hand in the revenue puzzle necessarily. Sometimes it's more for brand awareness or customer care, and it's important for you to understand like which role you are supposed to be playing. So you can, uh, make recommendations accordingly.

The other reason that it's so important to understand what your client actually does and how they actually make money is for messaging purposes. So understanding your client's unique value proposition or the thing that makes them, them, you know, their secret sauce for lack of better terms, I kind of hate that one, but you want to know, you know, what they're really good at, what they bring to the table, who they're really targeting. Like all of that key messaging is going to help you build your social media posts.

And again, Make decisions on platform recommendations and all kinds of things. So you really need to understand that stuff. And lastly, what I'll say about this is it's important that you are setting goals.

That's the action that you should take after you learn how your client makes money and what they do. You should set social media goals that are based off of those business goals that your client has. That's always the number one question that I ask is what are your business goals?

You know, what, what do you want to do in the next year? And from there I can build social media goals. It's so important that you speak your client's language.

If this CRM company, for example. Their number one goal is to sell more packages or, you know, subscriptions. And the way that they do that is through email.

And I'm telling them, Hey, you got a bunch of likes on this post. Well, that might be nice. It might be a perk, but at the end of the day, it doesn't speak directly to their business goal.

And the same is true. If I'm telling. Uh, the handbag company.

Well, we got a bunch of people to sign up to your newsletter, but nobody's actually clicking on the product links. Yes, it can tie in and we can speak to how more emails is going to help longterm and yada, yada, yada. But at the end of the day, we need to be connecting our social goals to our business goals.

Oh, and by the way, if you want a little cheat sheet to go along with today's episode, be sure to check out the description box on YouTube or the show notes on the podcasting platforms. I've got a fun little checklist for you that goes into more detail and it's really satisfying because you can actually check the boxes in Google docs as you go through this. So that's totally free for you.

Link down below. Okay. The next thing to think about when you're building out a strategy is who they're talking to.

So you understand what their goals are. You understand what they do. Do they want to sell stuff?

Do they want to talk to people? Do they want to spread the word? Do they want to take care of their customers?

Now you have to understand who their customers are or who they are trying to reach. I guess it's parter. Who their existing social following is, which you can look at through their existing platform insights, unless you're building platforms from scratch.

And secondly, who they want to reach. I had, I worked with a skincare client once who for some reason was only attracting like really young kind of, uh, influencer types, if you will. And that was great.

But her skincare actually focused a little bit more on anti aging. There were like retinol products and things that maybe an 18 year old wasn't quite as concerned with. Also, the price point of her products was a little bit higher than your standard 18, 20 year old could afford.

And so that was one of the challenges that we worked on is understanding, all right, you've got this existing audience. You're spending a lot of time on Instagram. Maybe we should actually focus a little bit more on Facebook.

We're going to reach a little bit of a more mature demographic. And that's what we did. We started running Facebook ads.

We started nurturing her Facebook page a little bit, and we were able to really grow that demographic that she was looking to reach, who had a little bit more money to spend and who really understood the purposes of her products and needed, you know, the, the solution that she had to offer. So it's important to understand, like, who do we already have? Is that who we want to be reaching and who do, who do we want to be reaching?

How can we reach more of them? In addition to platforms, like I just mentioned with the skincare company, knowing this information is also going to help again with your messaging. If we are wanting to only reach young, 18 year old, you know, YouTubers and Instagrammers and Tiktokers who are interested in beauty.

Well, we're going to be memeing it up. You know, we're going to be posting memes. We're going to be paying attention to pop culture and trends that are going on and trending music, right.

To make sure that we are really staying culturally relevant to a younger age group. But if we're looking to reach somebody who maybe is a little bit older or You know, maybe just a different gender, right? There's so many different factors that can influence overall behaviors and trends.

We're going to be speaking in a different way. We might be using different language. We might be speaking maybe a little bit more academic and science based as opposed to kind of fun, flirty, cute.

So you've got to know this stuff. And you've got to really hone in on a target audience. You know, it's such a scary thing.

I think even for my clients, sometimes when I'm like, tell me about your ideal customer, because at the end of the day, all of us are like, yeah, I'll take money from like pretty much anyone, as long as it's legal and safe and all of that good stuff and aligns with our values. Like I'll take money from any, anybody. And that's true for sure.

That's definitely true for me. I have a wide array of people who watch my videos, who purchase my products, who enroll in my courses, who hire me to work with them. But I can tell you about my ideal customer.

I can tell you about my most likely customer. Maybe that's a better way to put it because I think Ideal sounds like I prefer people over one another. It's just, this is the person who is most likely to purchase from me.

Who is most likely to buy a retinol skincare product, which for those who don't know, it's like kind of an anti aging skincare product. It's probably not an 18 year old. It's probably maybe somebody in their forties, fifties and beyond.

So keep that stuff in mind and then look at. Platform demographics, research, audience sizes per platform per gender, per age group, per, uh, you know, area, city, state, country. Right.

And then you can make smart decisions on which platforms to focus on. Because here's the thing with a social media strategy. It's really hard to focus on them all.

Of course, like sure. If you've got an endless budget and a gigantic, ginormous social team posts on all of them. You're going to reach everybody pretty much, but typically we have to make choices if we're on smaller teams, if we're solopreneurs, if we're freelancers, if we're just, you know, on a, on a client's limited budget, we've got to make choices.

So choose to focus your energy on the platform or platforms where your ideal client or most likely client. Is, uh, most likely to be. And then the next thing to think about is creating systems to make the social media plan, the social media strategy actually work.

Because I know I've been there. I have created a beautiful social media strategy. I've created amazing, you know, content pillars based on their ideal audience.

And I've been like, Oh my gosh, we got to revamp this Pinterest page. Cause your ideal clients, they're hanging out there. And then I.

Give the strategy to a client. I send them on their way and it still has not been implemented years later. Right.

It's really easy to like dream up amazing ideas, but it's kind of hard to put them into practice. So figuring out. Your workload, your skillset, or that of your client or your team, it all just depends on the organizational structure that you're working with, right?

Typically the smaller, the client I'm kind of doing everything. I'm the creator. I'm the strategist.

I'm the community manager. I'm the analyst for bigger clients or for, you know, if you're working in house, for example, my last corporate job that I worked at, I worked at a fortune 500 staffing company and I was the social media manager. And then eventually I moved into a paid social role.

So I was just doing the, like, Facebook ads and things like that. And, uh, yeah, there, that was a little bit more siloed, right? I didn't need to think about, do we have a designer to create this social media ad that I'm recommending?

Because there was a whole graphic design team that I just outsourced my work to essentially. When I'm working with a small client, like a small boutique, I've got to think about, okay, how many Facebook ads can we realistically run each month? If I'm going to be the one.

Creating it and managing it and responding to the comments on it and doing all the reporting on it based on that client's budget. So you have to like really figure out what's realistic and how can you systematize it, which tools for example, are going to help you work smarter and not harder figuring out your content scheduling tool, your content calendar tool. You all know that I love Metricool for example, for that.

Figuring out your approval process is that another piece that can really slow things down. So again, Metro cool is great for that. Maybe you use Google drive or email, just figure out all of those different systems and what that is going to do.

The action that you can take from there. Once you say, all right, here's who we've got on the team. Here's who's available as you can then determine your posting schedule and you're posting.

It's great to say we're going to be on Instagram, but what does that mean? Are you going to do a weekly video interview with the founder of a company for Instagram reels, or are you going to work with their design team to batch out infographic style carousels every week? Are you going to post every single day on Instagram stories?

It's just you talking face to camera. Like there are so many different formats and frequencies that you can choose from. And it is important to benchmark this stuff, right?

Look at your clients, competitors, look at the industry averages to see how often most people in your industry are posting, what types of content, which formats are working for other brands. But you also have to marry that with the time, resources, people, skills that you have available. To make sure that you do not just get stuck and you actually put this strategy into action.

So those are the three top things I think are important to think about when you're building a social media strategy. Again, check out the cheat sheet that goes along with this. That'll have things in a bit more detail and it'll be a bit more step by step and in order for you.

So you can check things off and use it with your next client. If you want, use it to audit your own brands and build a strategy for it. I really hope that this resource is helpful for you.

And I hope to This episode was helpful for you as well. Let me know if you have questions about social media strategy or anything else. And I will talk to you in my next one.

Bye. Bye.