So you’re ready to spread your wings and have your social media marketing take flight? We can’t wait to see you soar! But before you fly away and start posting, let’s take a beat, and use these three steps to give your social media results the best chance of success.
And if you’re already on social media, you can use these steps to audit and improve what you’re already doing! Let’s get into it.
1. DEVELOP YOUR BRAND IDENTITY FOR SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING
Developing your brand identity is critical to representing your business’ expertise, building meaningful relationships with your audience and ensuring your success across social media. Brand identity encompasses all the elements of your brand, from colours to logos and tone of voice, as well as identifying what is not part of your brand.
- The basic steps to develop your brand identity are:
- Auditing your brand; figuring out what you need, what you’re missing, and what your audience wants.
- Creating brand-appropriate messaging
- Developing the creative elements you’ll use for your brand i.e. logos, colours, fonts, tone of voice.
- Deciding which channels you’ll use to regularly connect with your audience and deliver your brand message.
To fly high you should continually analyse and refine your brand identity to stay aligned with your business goals and your audience’s needs.
2. BUILD A STYLE GUIDE FOR YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA
It’s time to put pen to paper and use the brand identity you’ve developed to build a style guide outlining the elements of your brand. Your style guide will be used by anyone who creates content for your brand and will allow your messaging to be consistent across all channels.
The style guide will outline the specifics of your brand: tone of voice, grammar and formatting, fonts and colours, plus images and videos. It defines the use of logos, the dimensions and compilation of your assets, to ensure your brand is always represented the same way.
3. CREATE AND GATHER YOUR CONTENT
Once you’ve developed your brand identity and built a style guide, it’s time to create and gather the content you’ll use for your social media marketing. There are a variety of different content types you can choose from. A healthy mix of content types will ensure your campaign engages with your audience.
Content types include:
- Images, videos and gifs
- Short-form content like blog posts
- Long-form content like white papers
- Social proof, like testimonials from customers
It can be helpful to collate content that aligns with your brand identity and style guide on a monthly or weekly basis in a content calendar. Once your content calendar is created you can simply schedule your posts to regularly engage with your audience.
WRAPPING UP
By following these steps, you will have reinforced your brand identity for improved recognition from your audience, created a style guide to keep your messaging consistent across all channels, and gathered all the content you need to effectively engage with your audience.
Now you have the three-step formula to social media marketing success, it’s time to spread your wings and soar!