As you expand your brand’s presence, social media is an integral part of your marketing mix. But, the reality is that marketing your business across so many social media platforms can be exhausting. 

Creating a successful brand presence online is not a one-and-done posting process. It takes proper planning and resources to make sure you’re maximizing the optimal use of each platform you choose to be on. Between content ideation, content creation, pre-scheduling, in-moment posting, shifting trends, and news, staying on top of technology updates, keeping up engagement, coordinating collaborations, and measuring metrics to make data-driven improvements, it’s a lot to take on as a busy professional!

I’ve been there. Growing my brand online over the years has taken many revisions to learn not only what works for my business’s growth, but what works for me as a business owner and marketer. From one busy professional to another, not every resource or system will work. 

To help guide you toward the social media marketing process that may work best for you, here are some of my own tips and tools.

Start With Setting Goals

The first step in organizing your social media marketing process is to know what you want to accomplish with your social media marketing plan. Goal setting should always align with your vision.

Are you a startup that should focus on brand awareness and lead generation, an established thought leader focusing on conversions and customer experience, or working on rebranding and wanting to focus on reintroducing your business to the public? 

Depending on your goals, your strategies will need to be fine-tuned.

Here are some questions you should ask yourself as a busy professional, and my suggested solutions if you get stuck.

1. Do I have a social media branding guide?

Your imaging, messaging, and voice should align with your brand story and the reputation you want to project online, plus be consistent across all content created for social media channels.

This should, of course, include visual branding elements like your color scheme, fonts, and filters. Also include examples of how you would respond to direct messages (DMs), acceptable types of memes or emojis to use in posts, and how hard or soft you’d like to promote your offer or CTA (call-to-action). This is also a good place to have your brand story laid out so that you can always refer back to the perspective from which your brand voice originates. You can use tools like Canva and Google Workspace to create and retain your branding guide.

2. Which social media platforms will best help me reach my goals? 

First, consider your customer persona and where they spend their time (and money) online. If you haven’t already created a profile of your target audience, absolutely make one!

By looking up keywords that your customer persona might use to find businesses like yours, you can discover which social media platforms get the most hits for that search query. Plus, researching keywords related to your industry will help you see which platforms your competition is posting on. You can use tools like Google Ads Keyword Planner, Google Trends, and WordStream to scope out your brand’s relevant keywords.

3. Does my brand intend plan to run paid ads through social media? 

If you choose to run paid ads then you need to have a marketing budget for such campaigns. For example, boosting your posts on Facebook or Instagram can be as little as five bucks. But depending on how far you want your ad campaign to reach, the period of time you want your campaign to run, and how many ad sets you run, the more expensive it will get.

Create a budget plan. If you have advertising money set aside in your social media marketing budget, then you have per-platform choices of advertising as well as Google Ads depending on your campaign type and targeting settings (for example, Google Video Ad types can be displayed on YouTube). This is another area where you need to select where you run your ads based on which social media platforms your audience uses.

4. What other marketing strategies do you use? (Other digital strategies could include email campaigns, an accessible and mobile-friendly website, a blog, a podcast, or a high-quality email campaign.)

Expand your digital marketing strategy to social media. Repurpose those emails, blogs, podcasts, and web pages on your brand’s socials! Let your audience know where to sign up, learn more, tune in, and check out your business so you can convert followers into customers. You can even do this with traditional marketing strategies like postcard ads, “thank you for shopping” cards with shipped products, and signage outside/inside brick-and-mortar locations by having a CTA and/or QR code that directs people to your social media so they can upload a post showing off your products or rate your services.

Pro Tip: Another way to boost your social media strategy is to have a well-structured and knowledgeable social media team behind you. For example, if you want to partner with an influencer, you may need an Influencer Marketing Manager on your team. Then, once you have an in-house social media team in place, make sure they’re training regularly on the constant shifts in social media technology and best practices. As a busy professional, one way to get started is to hire a Virtual Assistant to take some minor day-to-day tasks off your back. Once you’re ready to go big, check out my guide on growing your social media team!

Your Social Media Ideation Process

Coming up with social media content ideas can sometimes feel hit-or-miss due to the ever-changing mood of the internet. However, here are some jumping-off points to help you ideate consistently successful social media content for your brand:

5. What Are Others In Your Industry Doing? Are other businesses in your industry getting lots of traction on their YouTube videos, articles on LinkedIn, and photos from their followers on Instagram? Take a peek at both your competitors’ and your inspirers’ social media pages to see what post formats and topics tend to get the most engagement from your industry’s audiences.
6. What Stands Out About Your Business? What makes your brand your brand? You started it for a reason, and no one can do it like you. Think about ways to show off the uniqueness of your brand. Behind-the-scenes content about your brand story, your work style, your products or services, and even the content creation process itself are all ways for audiences to get to know what it is about your business that they should support and follow.
7. What’s Going On With The Platform? Certain formats of content perform better on different social media platforms, so research what works best for the networks your brand uses. You can also turn one piece of content into different mediums to cross-post; for example, writing an article for LinkedIn that you repurpose into a YouTube video.
8. What Are Your Analytics Reports Telling You? Making data-driven decisions to improve your social media marketing is crucial. If your brand has been on social media for a while, then put your metrics to work for you. Look at your high-engagement content as a starting point for similar ideas, give them an update, recycle them into different forms, and more. If your business is brand new to social media, track your analytics and take note of what’s working so you can adjust future ideas accordingly.

Your Social Media Content Creation Process

Whether on a yearly (calendar or fiscal), seasonal, or even monthly basis, be thinking ahead about when you want to use certain social media marketing strategies. I highly encourage you to work from a content calendar. This way, you can plan content ahead for holidays, around industry events, and for key promotional periods. Plus, you can plan content themes for different weeks or months, compile content items like branding assets and client- or user-submitted photos, and keep track of any necessary approval processes all in one place.

I also recommend batching your content (doing a bunch of creation in bulk). This will help you meet your calendar deadlines because you’ll already have the content done. This is especially helpful when you may need to rearrange your calendar based on shifting news and trends that can come up on the fly. 

Your Social Media Posting Process

As I said, social media trends and news can change on a dime. This is where social listening is key. Huge world events like the COVID-19 pandemic changed everyone’s marketing strategies, and viral soundbites from TikTok or Instagram Reels can have an almost daily turnaround. Make sure you keep your ears and eyes on the social landscape before hitting that “Post” button.

One thing that makes the actual post-drafting, scheduling, and publishing organization easy for the whole team is publishing platforms. Most social media networks are now able to pre-schedule posts, but if you want to set up all your socials in one place, tools like Sendible and Hootsuite can integrate all your top social media apps. They can also track each post’s metrics so you can analyze engagement and other important performance indicators.

For more insights on social media marketing topics for busy professionals, check out my 10 Minute Marketing podcast, where I peek behind the curtain at how entrepreneurs leverage online marketing to grow. You can also reach out to discuss booking a social media marketing training or a VIP Day discovery session!