Social Media Strategy Template: Free Download & Step-by-Step Guide
If you’re not seeing results online, it’s likely because you don’t have a Social Media strategy.
You might hear something like “You have to create a Social Media strategy” but not really understand what that actually means or where to start so:
What is a Social Media Strategy?
If you’d prefer to watch rather than read, we got you:
A Social Media strategy is the roadmap that will help you fulfill your goals as a business owner or creator. It’s what you’ll base all of your Social Media-related activities on, like content creation, copywriting, scheduling and more.
If you want to succeed in anything in life you need to have a strategy, and that goes for Social Media, too.
We actually put together a FREE Social Media strategy template for you - it’s a fillable PDF so if you’d like to go through it with us, download it here and follow along!
P.S. Our YouTube Members got it first 😉
Let’s get into this strategy!
Create Social Media Objectives
The first step is to outline the clear, measurable objectives you want your Social Media efforts to achieve. These should be tied directly to your business goals.
For example, if you own a Skin Care product line:
Business Goal = Attract New Customers
Social Media Objective = Increase Brand Awareness [it’s key that this is something you can measure]
Measurement = Increase reach by 30% this year, grow followers to 5000 on Instagram
If you have existing accounts, you can leverage your Insights as benchmarks so you can make more informed targets. If you grew by 200 followers last year, 5000 followers is a fair target, but 50,000 would be a bit wild. If you have a new account, we’d suggest keeping it conservative - 1000 followers on Instagram would be amazing for your first year.
Narrow Down On A Target Audience
If you try to market to everyone, you market to no one.
You need to be very clear on who your target audience is and what solution you provide them with. This is what will make them want to become a follower, customer or client. Here you’ll get very specific:
Demographics (age, gender, profession)
What are their interests?
Who else do they follow? This goes for competitors and similar businesses and/or creators to you - study them and take note of how they engage with the audience, along with what kind of content they share because you’ll use this in the next section
What social platforms are they on?
What are their current pain points?
How does your offer or platform solve their pain points?
Develop Your Content Pillars
Content pillars are the 3-5 topics or subjects that you’ll be posting about on your social platforms. These will be relevant to your target audience’s needs and ladder back up to your goals. This will be the foundation for all of your Social Media content.
A common misconception is that a pillar can just be “inspirational” - but that’s not a topic. A post being inspirational, educational or informative is more a broad theme or foundation to what makes great content because it’s tied to a feeling. And all good content makes you feel something.
Content pillars are clear topics you’ll speak on. For example, for the skin care product line we talked about earlier, a pillar would be “All natural ingredients”. We’d create content to highlight that which could be inspirational, educational or entertaining depending on the content.
Once you’ve created your content pillars, it’s time to do a massive brain dump - we left you a space for this in the PDF.
We also did a live step-by-step walkthrough with our YouTube Members using a fake business, because we know it can feel like a lot and we want to make it as clear as possible since it’s really important. We’ll leave a link to the live below, and if you missed it you can still access it as a Member using that link and ask us questions in the comments.
Decide On Content Types & Formats
This step is pretty straight-forward - you’re going to decide on the types of content (for example quick tips, day-in-the-life vlogs, memes) and formats (for example, carousels, short-form videos, long-form videos, Stories) you will create and distribute.
For the types of content, use what you learned about similar brands or creators to yours to find what is working well, for example, Get Ready With Me (GRWM) videos for a creator, or memes for a business.
For content formats, things to keep in mind are formats that perform well already. Short-form content performs well for brand awareness across multiple platforms, so you can create one video and potentially use it across Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube Shorts, Facebook and TikTok.
Choose The Right Social Media Platforms
You don’t need to be everywhere. You just need to be where your audience is, which you’ll know based on the discoveries from the Target Audience section. We recommend creating Primary Platforms that get your key focus and effort, especially when it comes to engagement and fresher content, and then secondary platforms that you can repurpose to. For example, Pinterest and Instagram could be your primary platforms, and you could repurpose that content to others like TikTok and YouTube Shorts.
Decide On A Frequency
Outline how often you’ll post on a weekly basis, commit to this number and stay consistent. Then select days of the month that you’ll dedicate to creating content, which should include filming if needed, along with design, editing, and copywriting. You don’t have to do all of this on the same day, just select the days that you’ll carve out time in your calendar to get it done. For example, you could do filming and editing every Thursday, and caption writing and scheduling on Friday or Sunday for the following week. We broke down a full process on what planning and scheduling looks like in the video below.
What Else?
To keep things simple, we’re only including those key elements mentioned, but you could also add the tools you plan to use, which could include:
Even some equipment.
Overall, you’ll always want to be looking at your Insights to make sure you’re on track. You could also include a section to your document to track your metrics - we have a metrics tracker in our shop.
So make sure you download your FREE Social Media strategy template, and check out the live walkthrough above for some extra clarity. Happy creating!
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