Red Cow Media’s Social Media Strategy Guide for Dummies

Stephen McCance July 3, 2015

Social media is now a key element in digital marketing, and without it consumers aren’t able to interact with your product. As is it always progressing are you able to miss out on these opportunities? Here is Red Cow Media’s social media strategy for dummies…

Before you begin to start thinking about ideas for your campaign/ strategy you need to do your research. This can be done in two ways, researching your competitors and your audience. Researching competitors is something that you have to keep on top of, because if they are attracting more attention than you, you definitely need to analyse why they are. So ask yourself, or rather write it down, what are they doing? What are other creative industries doing? What aren’t you doing? And why aren’t you doing them? And then obviously write that down too.

The next step, and one of the more important steps, researching your audience. For example if you are Lynx and you aim your campaign at females, you are doing something very wrong. Targeting your audience is key to the initial stages, so you can then build your campaign around YOUR audience. Think about a couple of things like age, gender, interests etc, and again make sure you write this down.

Mind mapping is the next step, and can be a pretty draining activity. Once you have competitor analysis, and a target audience you are able to channel your thoughts/ creativity around that. Branch your ideas out to every extent, and make sure that absolutely everything is written down (however ridiculous it may seem at the time) so that you can explore the different channels of information you have written down. After the mind mapping, pick the best ideas, and slowly pick them apart and show HOW they apply to your campaign. Remember that an idea is never a BAD idea.

Planning is now your fourth step, and this has to be the most precise of all. Planning what, when, where and how your strategy works are all as equally important. ‘When’ is key, because it gives you the ability to use time to your advantage once the planning begins. What channel of social media to post on is your ‘what’, and you need to think carefully about the format of your social media campaign for each social media. For example Instagram will be a visually stunning image with less texts and hashtags, Facebook is going to be your longer posts, with images and NO hashtags. Whereas Twitter will be your short and snappier posts (Only 140 characters remember).

Now the most important part of your social media campaign, launching your campaign. This is the most important part of your social media campaign, because it will test whether you are successful in what you have researched and planned. But it doesn’t end there, because you have to MEASURE the success of your campaign, and make sure that you change what is needed to make this hit your target audience.