Social media marketing is crucial to promoting your SEO content.

Why?

Let’s say your goal is to get SEO traffic. Yes, SEO traffic is the gift that keeps on giving.

The problem is, even if you have a stellar SEO strategy, SEO is slow. It takes time to see rankings. Especially if your site is relatively new.

So if you are not the kind of person who enjoys watching dust settle, it may be time to create a social media marketing content strategy that can complement your SEO and earn you a huge audience of raving fans.

To be as useful as possible, I’ll be breaking this post into two parts.

In part one I’ll share a strategic approach to social media marketing that could potentially generate thousands of views and massive engagement.

In part two I’ll share a step-by-step checklist to implement your social media strategy.

Strategic Social Media Marketing Content Strategy – Part One 

Never forget that social media is part of your overall marketing strategy. This means you should understand that social media should work together with SEO as well as paid media.

Before I get into the minute steps and tactics needed to market your business on social media, we need to first understand a strategy that’s working now and bringing massive traffic to some channels.

How do I know?

Just a little observation. Meet Eddie Shleyner from verygoodcopy.com.

How on earth does Eddie get so much engagement?

True, Eddie’s content both on his website and on social media is spectacular. I for one read every post. What’s more, Eddie comes across as someone who genuinely cares about people. All this helps to build an audience of raving fans.

But…

When I signed up to Eddie’s email list I realized that although his content is excellent and how he positions it all contribute to his success, there is one more ingredient that is likely to be moving the needle. An ingredient that’s a force multiplier.

That ingredient is strategy.

So although I have no doubt that his social media content alone should generate a solid audience over time, his digital content marketing strategy is multiplying his efforts many times over.

Let’s break his strategy down so that we can do it ourselves.

Breaking Down Eddie Shleyner’s Social Media Strategy 

Eddie posts short form bite-sized content on his blog and personally, I **** these little marketing and copywriting nuggets. Each one has one simple actionable strategy that you can easily incorporate into your marketing.

Since I really enjoy his content, I signed up for his email list. And when I did that, I saw something brilliant.

Here is a screenshot of the end of one of his emails.

Do you see it?

At the end of his emails, he asks you to 👍 and comment on his LinkedIn posts. Now a percentage of his audience actually likes and comments. (I know, I’m one of them.)

When that happens, the LinkedIn algorithm sees the post getting engagement and reacts in two ways:

1. The people who engaged see new posts when he posts them
2. The posts get a general boost that results in new potential readers seeing them

This means other people see the posts too. Now that’s not all that Eddie does. Each post includes a link to his site which is designed to get readers onto his email list.

The more people that sign up and read his emails, the more people click through at the end of his emails and engage with his LinkedIn posts. And the more people engage with his LinkedIn posts… well I’m sure you get the picture.

This creates a snowball effect.

via GIPHY

But the best part is this strategy focuses primarily on people who want to engage. The more people comment and like his posts, the more those people will see his new posts. In other words, people who will potentially become raving fans themselves.

The net result?

Massive engagement and a growing audience.

We’ve just covered a big-picture strategic approach to social media marketing. The action steps are simple. Create an email marketing approach that feeds your social media posts. Then add a link to an email signup page.

Now that you understand the strategic approach to social media, let’s break social media marketing down into some actionable steps.

5 Steps to Social Media Marketing – Part Two 

Armed with the big picture social media strategy, you might be wondering how to actually implement the strategy. In other words, what do you post? How do you know what will connect with your audience? How do you know if it’s working?

Here are some simple steps to break your social media down into doable bite-sized actionable chunks.

1. Set Goals

The first step to implementing any digital marketing strategy is to first set up clear goals and KPIs.

This is crucial.

In other words, you must know what you want to get out of your social media campaign before getting started. Once you have your goals clear you can track and see if you are meeting them.

In order to figure this out, you must see how your social media fits into your business in general. Are you looking to:

• Generate traffic?
• Increase brand awareness?
• Generate leads or sales?

Once you understand where social media fits into your business goals you can then begin to break down your social media into measurable milestones.

So, for example, if you want to generate sales, you must understand your customer journey and design a sales funnel that draws your audience in and builds a relationship with them that brings them to a point where they will do business with you.

When you create a complex funnel like that you might need to build out multiple steps that incorporate multiple media. A typical social media sales funnel will start on social media and then funnel your audience onto an email list. To do this you can use Eddie Shleyner’s approach (mentioned above) to build a relationship with your audience. Once you have that working well, when appropriate, send out sales emails. The key is to focus primarily on relationship-building and only ask for sales when the relationship is well established.     

If that’s your goal, you would be targeting and tracking email sign-ups.

On the other hand, if your goal is brand awareness, your main goal would be targeted towards getting engagement. As I mentioned above, you can also use email to generate engagement. If you choose to approach your engagement that way, your main KPIs might be both engagement and email signups.

Once you understand your goal and you’ve broken it down into a key metric or KPI (key performance indicator), you can set clear measurable goals.

With that in place, you need to set up goal tracking.           

2. Track Your KPIs  

One of the most important steps in creating a successful social media content campaign is to track your results. By tracking your results you will be able to understand if you are meeting your goals. What’s more, you’ll be able to see what worked and what didn’t.

On the whole, if all you want is engagement, you can use the social media platforms themselves to track your progress. The problem with that approach is the data is minimal.

If you want to track clicks you’ll have to use 3rd party tools.

Here are some options:

Google Analytics

If you are trying to get clicks to your website, Google Analytics is a great tool. In order to see how many clicks you got from a given campaign, you need to add code to your URL. If you don’t know how to write the code have no fear, we got you covered. Check out our free UTM builder.

Rank Ranger Social Media Tracker

If you are looking for more data all in one convenient place, check out our Social Media tracking tools. The social media tools are a part of our Rank Tracker software. 

Rank Ranger Social Media Dashboard

By far the best way to keep track of any campaign is to set up an automated marketing dashboard. This means if you understand your KPIs, you can set up a social media dashboard that is designed to show you how your social media campaigns are helping your business meet your KPIs.

Here is an example dashboard. Since you can set up almost any metrics in Rank Ranger dashboards, you could simply include all your social media metrics.

Now that you have your goals and tracking set up, the next step is to figure out how to achieve them. To break this down, first, understand your audience.

3. Understand Your Audience

Remember, your audience is on social media for a reason. They might be looking to be entertained. They might be looking for industry advice or information.

If you want to reach your goals, understanding your audience’s motivation is crucial.

For instance, if you want your audience to engage with your posts, you must understand the kind of posts your typical audience will engage with. If they are looking to be entertained it would make sense to make your content entertaining. If they are looking for information it makes sense to make your content more informative.

Although this generally takes trial and error, it pays to learn from others before wasting hours on an approach that’s destined for failure.

To do this, simply look at what highly successful businesses in your industry are doing. In other words, don’t just copy one business and hope for the best. Rather, look at more than one competitor.

You might find that there are a variety of approaches that work. What’s more, you should use competitor analysis as a starting point. Once you’ve seen what works in your industry, don’t be afraid to experiment.

The reason is, if you experiment, you might stumble across something that helps you stand out from your competitors.

A great example of this is Dave Harland.

When Dave started his social media journey, he noticed that his competitors were posting dull and generic posts.

He added some bizarre humor to his posts and today he gets massive engagement.

Now, if you are not sure where to find the industry leaders, you can look at competitor analysis tools. Here are two great options:

Use the Rank Ranger free site explorer. Our free site explorer gives you some basic competitor analysis on your competitors. If you want to use it to see who your direct competitors are, type your domain name into the search field.

When you do that, the tool will give you some basic information about your site. Scroll down to the Top Organic Competitors report and you’ll see who your top ten organic and paid competitors are.

If you want to scale this research up, check out the paid version of our site explorer. The paid version does not limit you to the top ten results. What’s more, the paid version gives you a variety of other analytics tools. 

4. Choose the Right Platform

It’s important to understand that you don’t have to be on every social media platform. You’ll be far more effective if you focus on one or two platforms and actively engage with your audience there.

The key to choosing the right platform is to see where your audience is. This isn’t too difficult. You can easily lurk on each platform and see what interactions are happening. Look specifically at what the industry leaders and influencers are posting. Also, look at how each audience is interacting with their posts and look to see what kinds of posts get the most engagement.

You should be generally looking for a platform where people in your niche are hanging out and hopefully asking questions.

That said, before you do that research, here is a brief breakdown of each platform:

Twitter is a great platform for business professionals. Twitter’s 280 character limit has resulted in a fast-paced platform where a tweet’s life span can last a few minutes. The platform is perfect for interacting directly with customer support questions.

LinkedIn was originally built as a business networking platform making it perfect for B2B businesses. This means if you service B2B clients, you can use the platform to position yourself as an expert in your niche. What’s more, from experience, I’ve noticed that LinkedIn posts get much greater organic reach than other platforms.

YouTube is a hugely popular search engine that can benefit almost any business. Its video format provides video SEO benefits and could help you build a relationship with your audience by showing your human side. The biggest challenge that YouTube poses is producing video content is time-consuming.

Instagram is a great B2C platform if your business has a highly visual component. The reason is as a platform, Instagram is great at presenting photos in a highly engaging way.

Pinterest, like Instagram, is great for promoting product photos in a highly engaging environment. What’s more, due to the nature of the platform, if you work on your Pinterest SEO, you could get organic traffic for years to come.

Facebook, on the one hand, doesn’t offer much organic traffic but more than makes up for it in ad targeting. What’s more Facebook’s broad audience means that it can be a powerful tool for both B2B and B2C businesses.

TikTok is a great place to post if you are marketing to Gen-Zers. The platform features a short-video social media feed that users find addictive. There are big opportunities if you are able to produce short engaging videos designed to be found by the TikTok algorithms.     

5. Plan Your Content 

Once you know what you want from your social media presence and you understand what your audience wants to get out of their social media, it’s time to plan how you’re going to give it to them.

Before getting started, it’s always important to remember that social media is primarily ‘social’. This means even if your main goal is to generate sales, if you are constantly posting sales-focused content your posts will fall flat.

For instance, imagine someone on Facebook. What are they there for? In all likelihood, they are passing the time connecting with people in one way or another. They might be looking for entertainment.

One thing is certain, they are not in ‘buying’ mode. They are not looking for products or services.

This means even if you want to sell something, you don’t want to show up as a salesman. Being too sales-focused in an environment of people looking to be entertained is like a person trying to sell something at a dinner party. It’s highly annoying and will only turn people off.

This means before getting started, you should map out a variety of different content types.

• Entertaining posts
• Educational posts
• Informational posts
• Inspirational content
• Sales posts

Once you have a basic understanding of the types of content you should create, try to figure out the types of formats that will work best.

Social Media Optimization – The Final Word 

If you’ve gone through this post, you’ve probably seen how your social media is not just a place to get a few clicks to your latest blog post. It can be so much more than that.

With the right strategy and consistency, it can be a medium that you can use to:

• Generate a growing audience
• Build a relationship with your audience
• Generate sales
• Increase your brand awareness

Knowing what can be achieved with social media is just the first step. Having a clearly defined plan to achieve it is the next step and hopefully, this post has given you the strategy and some clearly defined steps to getting started.

The final step is doing the work.