One of the most important parts of any marketing strategy is social media. However, it’s important to make sure that your content is consistent with the rest of your marketing strategy. To help you with that, it’s important to put together a social media content plan. You’re probably wondering “how do I create a social media content plan?”. Well, we’re here to help!
Social media is a vital tool that you should most definitely be utilising in your marketing strategy. Although it is often regarded as a way to connect with your friends and family, social media can also be used to raise brand awareness and engage with your customers. However, the thing to remember with social media is that people are the key.
You need to make sure that your content appeals to your target audience. If your content isn’t interesting or engaging, it won’t achieve the goals that you’re aiming for. Planning out your content is a good way to ensure that you are optimising your content for your audience. This can be done by implementing a social media content plan. Putting together a social media content plan is a simple process when you know the steps to follow.
So, how do you create a social media content plan?
The thing to be aware of is that if you want to create a social media content plan, it’s not just a simple as putting some ideas into a calendar. You need to think about all the separate aspects that will help tie your brand into everything you post and elevate your identity.
Brand Identity
In short, your brand is how your audience perceives your company. It’s more than just your name and logo though. It’s the tone of voice you use in content, the colour that you use and the type of content that you share.
Utilising your brand identity across your online presence helps make your content cohesive and consistent. Your audience will recognise it as belonging to you and will help strengthen brand awareness.
Need help creating your brand? Have a look at our guide to creating a brand for your business!
Content Pillars
Once you have a clear idea of your brand identity, including tone of voice, your target audience and your key message, you can move on to the next step. This involves outlining topics (or ‘pillars’) that your audience can relate to.
They are typically topics that they will be interested in and likely to search for using a search engine.
A good place to start is by making sure you have a good understanding of the customer you are trying to target with your marketing strategy. For example, at Dynamic, our content pillars could include topics such as website advice, social media marketing tips, business owner support and behind-the-scenes sneak peeks.
Utilising these content pillars, we can create content such as:
Brainstorming Ideas
Once you have your content pillars, this will guide you in deciding what topics to focus on. This ensures that you are creating specific content for specific types of audiences, ensuring that you don’t miss anyone out!
Using these pillars, you can brainstorm more precise ideas. This can help you tremendously in the long run. For example, if one of your topics was Travel Advice, this could lead to ideas such as:
- Tips for Local Travel
- Tricks for a Smooth Trip
- Navigating the Airport: Things to Remember
- Useful Advice for Visiting London
- Help Planning the Perfect Holiday
By doing this, you’ll quickly see your content ideas list fill up. It’s also important to remember that you don’t have to do the brainstorming all by yourself. Utilise your team and see if they have any fresh ideas. Also, don’t forget that you have a very valuable tool at your fingers tips that can help you with brainstorming – your audience! Pay attention to what they respond to, questions that they ask and research what they are searching for online. This can give you plenty of inspiration for your content.
Create Your Social Media Content Plan
So, you’ve defined your content pillars and put together a long list of content ideas, but what do you do with it all?
After you’ve done your research and put together your ideas, the next step is to put this all into a plan. Here are some quick tips:
Frequency
Before you put anything into your social media content plan, you need to establish how often your content will be published. Will it be 5 times a week? 4 times? Twice? Once you’ve decided this, you can start to plan where each content idea will go.
Timing
You don’t want to be posting the topics at random times of the year. You should try and coincide with other campaigns as well as seasonal events and national holidays. Put topics that could be Christmas-themed towards the end of the year, keep in mind school holidays and maybe research alternative national ‘days of the ear’ such as, Cancer Awareness Month, National Chocolate Day, or even World Designer Day. The possibilities are endless.
Content Types
The format of your content also needs to be thought about. If it’s going to be on social media, you need to think about which platforms you’re going to be posting to. Facebook is great for a wide range of media types, whereas Instagram is more suited to visually pleasing content.
Creating Your Content
Creating your content is a lot easier than it might sound, especially if it involves artwork. There are a large number of free tools that can be used. For example, if you’re looking to create imagery, Canva is an extremely useful online tool with free features. You can also use Adobe Spark with its free features that can create artwork as well as videos. Scheduling tools are also essential for keeping on top of sharing content. Great tools include Hootsuite, SproutSocial and more!
Keep an eye out for our guide to useful content creation tools!