Steps to Build a Creative Social Media

 Advertising Strategy

The key ingredient for doing social media marketing well is having a strategy.





Without a strategy, you might be posting on social media platforms for the sake of posting. Without understanding what your goals are, who your target audience is, and what they want, it’ll be hard to achieve results on social media.

Whether you want to grow your brand through social media or to level up as a social media marketer, developing a social media marketing strategy is essential.

Here’s one way to do it.

But let’s start with your overall strategy.

1. Why does your business want to be on social media?

The very first question to answer is the Why.

This relates to your social media goals. Are you on social media to promote your products? To drive traffic to your website? Or to serve your customers?

In general, there are the nine social media goals you can have:

  1. Increase brand awareness
  2. Drive traffic to your website
  3. Generate new leads
  4. Grow revenue (by increasing signups or sales)
  5. Boost brand engagement
  6. Build a community around your business
  7. Provide social customer service
  8. Increase mentions in the press
  9. Listen to conversations about your brand

    10. You’ll likely have more than one social media goal, and that’s fine.

    Generally, it’s great to focus on just a handful of goals unless you have a team, where different people or groups within the team can take on different goals.

    For example, at Buffer, the marketing team uses social media both to increase our brand awareness and drive traffic to our content while our Advocacy team uses social media to provide timely customer support.

    2. Who is your target audience?

    Once you have figured out your Why, the next thing to consider is your target audience.

    Understanding your target audience will help you more easily answer the following questions on what, where, and when you are going to share.

    For instance, if a travel and lifestyle brand (like Away) knows that its target audience loves to read about new places and travel tips, it could share such content on its social media profiles.

    3. What are you going to share?

    When you see this question, you might be thinking about the types of content to share. For example, do you want to share videos or images?

    But hold on for a second!

    We’re talking about your social media marketing strategy here so let’s take a step back and think on a higher level. Instead of the types of content to share, “theme” might be a better word.

    4. Where are you going share?

    The next step is to determine where you are going to share your content. In other words, which social media platforms does your brand want to be on?

    5. When are you going share?

    The last key part of your strategy is figuring out when you want to share your content. You might be tempted to jump into a research for the best time(s) to post.

    Pause. And breathe.

    Let’s take a step back and look at this from a higher level again. Before deciding exactly which time of the day and days of the week you want to post, consider the behaviors of your target audience.

    When do they usually use social media to find the type of content that you’ll share?

    Here are some examples to consider:

    • Sports fans are likely on social media just before, during, and just after sports events to find and interact with content about the event.
    • Athletes might be on Instagram while they are cooling down after their morning or evening workouts.
    • People who love to travel might be more active on social media during the weekends when they are planning for their next trip (or during their work breaks when they are dreaming about their next trip).
    • Mothers of babies might be scrolling through social media when they are breastfeeding in the middle of the nigh