How To Create A Media Strategy

Day 11: Develop your buyer persona

Transforming your social marketing strategy may require you to either revisit your current buyer personas or to create new ones from scratch.

Buyer personas help you better understand current and future customers, so that you know exactly who you are marketing to and can create relevant content and offerings. Start by writing down everything you know about your target customer and perform research to fill in any gaps. For a robust buyer persona, try to capture the following information.

Demographics
Backstory
Lifestyle
Career
Purchase Behaviors
Finances
Goals, Challenges, Pain Points

Day 12: Listen to your audience

Listening to your audience can help you gain insight into the minds of your followers, so you can be more strategic in your social marketing efforts.

Using social media listening , you can learn a lot about your audience (even when they're not directly interacting with your brand) to inform a more effective strategy.

Sprout Social's Listening Performance Sentiment Summary

Here's what you should listen for on social media:

What your audience is talking about and what they are sharing most often
What your audience is saying about your brand, industry, products, services and competitors
What your audience is sharing on forum-style platforms like Reddit or Quora.
How your audience engages with influencers, trending topics and relevant events

Day 13: Research industry trends and topics

To create relevant content and establish your brand as an authority on social, you must stay up to date with what's happening in your industry.

Join conversations surrounding high-interest topics. Perform ongoing research to make sure that the content you produce and share aligns with the current interests of your community. Here are a few resources that may help guide your research.

Newsletters

As social marketers, research is one of our most valuable skills. Instead of browsing aimlessly through content, rummaging through thousands of social profiles or running endless Google searches, an easy way to streamline research is to sign up for a solid mix of newsletters.

Newsletters provide insights into the state of the industry, changes in technology, updates to social networks and emerging trends and best practices.

Here are a few newsletters that social media marketers should add to their resource list:

Social Media Examiner helps you discover how to best use social media to connect with customers, drive traffic, generate awareness and increase sales. Their newsletter shares articles, expert interviews and reviews of the latest industry research.

Social Media Today focuses on original analysis on what's happening in social media today. Their content is platform focused, providing social marketers with insights on how to adopt new features and where other brands are finding success.

SocialMedia.Org is a membership organization for leaders in the social media marketing space. Their weekly newsletter, The Shortlist , highlights member stories as they share what they're working on and what they're keeping an eye on in the space.

Webinars

Webinars can have a huge impact on social marketing strategies by generating new leads and prospects, nurturing existing relationships and demonstrating expertise in our industries. During webinars, many businesses will live-Tweet along with their users to answer questions and keep the online conversation going.

Webinars can also provide a way for us to learn, which can spark content ideas during our brainstorming sessions. Social Media Today provides a wide variety of webinars specific to social marketers. You can register for upcoming webinars or watch from their library of on-demand sessions.

Forums

Forums provide an effective way for marketers to identify the topics that are spurring the most conversation online. Quora is a great resource to discover topics of interest, ask questions and engage in conversations relevant to your brand. As a brainstorming tool, forums can help social marketers build social content plans that address questions people are already asking.

Blogs

Adweek (and publications like Digiday and Marketing Land ) are terrific because they give you the anatomy of the latest, most creative campaigns out there, and also fill you in on the most recent news. The Mission (and Medium generally) is great to turn to for thought leadership and gauging the pulse of our industry and the visionaries in it.

Day 14: Connect with other departments

As you continue researching industry trends and topics as inspiration for your content creation, connect with other departments within your organization.

Remember that marketing is just one aspect of the business and other teams can provide insight about your organization that can help you brainstorm content ideas.

For example, try speaking with members of your sales team. Our sales teams are often the first points of contact for consumers, and they can provide insight into customers' needs, challenges and successes. This insight can help us generate content that addresses these needs or highlights successes.

Your human resources team can also provide insight into ongoing employer brand initiatives. Collaborate with HR to investigate how employees and potential hires are engaging with your brand on social. Their understanding of your workforce can help you identify what content is most effective for this important group of stakeholders.

If you're having difficulty working across social media with your team you should look into a social media collaboration tool to streamline your efforts.

Day 15: Choose your content types

Start thinking about the types of content that will benefit your brand the most, while keeping your audience engaged.

Refer back to the buyer personas you created to determine if an image linking to a blog post would perform better than a Twitter chat or a Facebook Live broadcast. Consider the resources available to you to determine if you can create a high quality how-to video, or if you need to scale down your efforts and create an infographic using the same content.

For the best results, diversify your content to keep your audience interested. If you post the same type of content day after day or week after week, your audience will inevitably disengage.

Here's a list of possible content types you can start incorporating into your social marketing strategies:

Memes
GIFs
Infographics
How-to's
Polls
Contests
User-generated content
Photo and video
Livestreaming
Audio

Before you start searching for content to share on social, you need to figure out what your audience actually likes. One way to do that is to look at past social media posts to see which were most successful.

Pull all of your unique social media analytics with a tool like Sprout Social , Twitter Analytics or Facebook Insights . Below is an example of how to view your published posts with Sprout ( available with a free trial ).

Sprout Social's Cross Channel Post Performance Report

Make sure you're sorting your posts by the metric that is most important to you, whether that's clicks, responses or total reach. Once you have an idea of what kind of content works best, you can move onto the next step.