6 Steps to Plan Your Social Media Content for 2023

If you’re a knowledge entrepreneur, course creator, or coach who wants to boost brand awareness for your products and services online, showcase expertise in your field, and engage with your audience, social media is one of the best platforms to use.

In 2016, Social Media Examiner found that almost 90% of marketers claim their social marketing efforts have increased exposure for their brand and 75% say they’ve increased traffic. Meanwhile, 44% of local businesses depend on social media for brand awareness and 41% for revenue growth (eMarketer, 2016).

By consistently showing up on socials and giving value to your target audience, you can use the power of the propinquity effect to your advantage.

One way to do this is through social media content creation.

But it takes time, effort, and resources to sustainably create high-quality content that will help you achieve your business goals. You, my friend, need a plan.

A social media content strategy is a dynamic plan that determines the following:

🧑🏻‍💻 Your target audience and how to reach them

🎯 How your social media objectives align to your business goals

📀 The focus, format, and frequency of your content

While there are countless frameworks out there, it all boils down to a simple 6-step cyclical process:

1. Research

Do you really have to dance to get engagement on Reels and TikTok?

Should you even be on these platforms in the first place?

While it’s tempting to hop on every trend, be present on every platform, and chase cheat codes to go viral, following random tactics can be a waste of time and resources.

Creating content without a clear strategy is like throwing darts while blindfolded—hitting a bullseye would be a miracle.

At Prodigy, we see marketing as the act of creating value for customers to capture value from them in return. And in content creation, we follow the same principle: we start with the customer. Without knowing who your target market is, you’ll struggle to come up with content that resonates with them or helps them solve a problem. The catchphrase “know your customer” sounds basic and vague, though. How do you know and understand your target market?

This is what the first step of social media content planning is all about: Research.

Remember your buyer persona? This is the time to use it!

While buyer personas may come in different formats, ideally, they contain these buyer insights that help you create relevant and interesting content for your dream customer. 👇🏼

1. Pain Points

   What problem is your dream customer trying to solve? What would trigger them to finally invest in a product or service like yours? What pain are they trying to ease?

   Through this information, you can come up with content topics that bring real value to your audience and position you as someone qualified to help them.

2. Dream Results

   What are they hoping to achieve when they work with you? What results are they expecting from your products or services?

   When you know their desired future state, you can be strategic in selecting the customer reviews you share, as well as the features and benefits you highlight. You have to make them feel like their goal is achievable—better yet, show that others have achieved it through your offers.

3. Perceived Barriers

   What are their doubts about you, your offer, or your indus1.try in general?

   You can address their objections through the stories, results, and stats that you weave into your content. Plus, you can inject little nuggets of assurance at every point of their customer journey so when the time to buy comes, all they’d need is a gentle nudge.

4. Buyer’s Journey

   Speaking of, the buyer’s journey is one of the crucial pieces you need when creating content.

   It tells you who the decision makers (and influencers) are, how your customer prefers to consume industry content (Do they read newspapers, sign up for newsletters, or listen to podcasts?) and engage (Do they prefer phone calls over emails? Are they social media savvy?).

   Mapping out your buyer’s journey helps you focus on the right channels and the best type of content for your target audience.

5. Deciding Factors

   When comparing you with competitors, what factor are your customers considering the most? Is it price, convenience, or prestige?

   When you know their non-negotiables, you can simplify your product’s value proposition and spotlight the benefits they care about.

Since buyer personas often start off as fictional profiles of our dream customers crafted based on limited data and loads of assumptions, they're not supposed to be static documents.

We have to continually gather feedback and update it as we get insights from our real clients and advocates.

We can do this through:

• Qualitative research

• Interviews

• Buyer legends

• Big data

• Web analytics

• Social listening

Intimidated? Here are 4 ways to start gathering data:

🔎  Read reviews

Pore through customer reviews and mine for golden insights.

What are your ideal customers struggling with? What features or benefits are they looking for? Pick the remarkable and relevant phrases they use and incorporate those statements into your copy.

We recommend reading reviews from your own site or social media pages, your competitors, and online feedback on other products and services in your industry. Keep digging till you find something interesting!

💬  Get content ideas from forums

Think Quora, Reddit, Facebook Groups. Wherever your dream customers are hanging out, go there. Lean in. And listen to the conversations happening.

What are they asking? What are they curious about? How do brands in your industry fit into their life? What are their fears, doubts, or bad experiences with services or products like yours?

Then, answer their questions through the content you create!

👂🏼 Talk to your customers

You might be surprised by how willing your loyal customers are to help you with your messaging—and how valuable their inputs are!

By interviewing real customers, you can verify the assumptions you made about them.

Maybe you thought your dream customer is always on the hunt for big discounts—only to find out they don’t mind shelling out more as long as they get what they pay for. So instead of always promoting heavy discounts, you can then focus on highlighting the benefits and features that make your offer look valuable and irresistible.

⚙️ Invest in tools

You can also invest in audience research tools like Sparktoro to quickly access important data on your target audience’s online behavior: where they hang out online, the influencers in your industry, the podcasts they tune into, and more. You can also explore Google analytics as well as the native analytics feature of the social media platforms you currently use to spot patterns.

Reference: Revella, A. (2015). /Buyer Personas: How to Gain Insight Into Your Customer's Expectations, Align Your Marketing Strategies, and Win More Business/. Hoboken, New Jersey: Wiley.

P.S. Here are 5 customer discovery interview mistakes to avoid.

2. Plan

Targeting everyone is a rookie mistake in marketing. So is being everywhere all at once, regardless of available resources.

Yet many entrepreneurs dabble in several social media channels, thinking the way to win is to spread oneself thin or be present on every platform for the sake of it.

Are you making the same mistake?

Let’s do a quick audit. ✏️

1. What social media channels are you currently using?

2. Where are you most active?

3. What channels have you put on the back burner?

4. How much time and resources are you spending on these channels?

5. Are you seeing the results you want for every channel you’re on?

Choosing the right social media channels for your business can be tricky.

With more platforms sprouting on the internet, the audience is split into smaller fragments with varied online behavior.

Some consumers spend hours answering emails, while others scroll their TikTok feed every time they’re bored. Some spend more time on their desktops, while others prefer to get things done on the go through mobile phones. Some enjoy audio content, while others appreciate visuals more.

So with all these complexities in the consumer’s online behavior, how do you produce the most effective content type on the most appropriate platform for the right audience?

1. Let’s start with WHY.

   Not to sound too woo-woo here, but why do you want to show up on socials anyway?

   What’s your top goal? Your why will influence how you build an effective social media content strategy, from setting up the right platforms to creating content in engaging formats.

   Buffer listed some social media goals that you can set for your business, and here’s a rundown:

   • Increase brand awareness

   • Drive traffic to your website

   • Generate new leads

   • Grow revenue (by increasing signups or sales)

   • Boost brand engagement

   • Build a community around your business

   • Create an effective social customer service

   • Increase mentions in the press

   • Gather insights through social listening

   You can check their article here for specific KPIs you can track for every goal you pick.

   Note: We often hear business owners say, “Well, I want to achieve ALL of that!” But the truth is, unless you have a huge budget for socials, you’re better off prioritizing one to three goals at a time.

2. Figure out the HOW.

   After the research phase and goal-setting, you now have the data to help you select the appropriate core and secondary social media channels for your business.

   Here are the prompts to guide you in the right direction:

   • Where is your target audience hanging out online?

   • What type of content do they enjoy?

   • What content format do they find engaging?

   • What channels are on your buyer’s journey? How can you give value at every turn?

   • What makes sense for your budget and resources?

   After you ponder these, you will be able to identify the best core channel and supporting platforms for your business.

3. Work on the WHAT.

   What topics should you talk about? What formats should you follow? What channels should you use? Read the next section to find out!

Reference: Digital Marketing Institute, Strategy & Planning

3. Create

Here comes the fun (yet sometimes dreaded) part: content creation.

Because this has a rabbit hole of its own, let's focus on the 3 F's of content creation.

Pick Your Focus

Content bucket, content pillar, content category—whatever you call it, let's establish that knowing what to focus on will make content creation (and your life, really) easier.

By identifying your content buckets, you won't waste your audience's time (and yours) with random posts. Instead, you can be intentional. You can create relevant content that attracts your target audience, asserts your expertise in the industry, and ultimately converts social media followers into customers.

So how do you exactly pick a focus?

Based on the data you gathered during the first step (Research), choose 3 core content buckets.

These will be the overarching categories of your content, so make sure these are the main topics that you want your brand to be known for and that your target audience finds interesting.

Content Bucket 1 This is the general category that is relevant to your brand and appeals to a wider segment of your target audience.

Content Bucket 2 Choose a niche within your general category.

Content Bucket 3 Identify your target audience's industry.

Let's say your company sells personal knowledge management courses to health and wellness content creators. Here are the content buckets you could have: General Category: Personal Knowledge Management

Niche: Building a digital garden on Obsidian, Logseq, Roam, and Tana

Industry: Health and wellness

Reference: [[https://www.ship30for30.com/post/online-writing-frameworks][Ship 30 for 30]]

Select A Format

Do you enjoy sitting in front of the camera and sharing your ideas? Or do you prefer writing down your thoughts?

While you don't have to stick with only one content format, it's best to discover the type of content you enjoy creating and what your target audience prefers consuming.

When you find that sweet spot (let's say it's video), you can then focus your energy and resources on creating high-quality video content that you can repurpose into other formats later on.

Note: If you have the resources and bandwidth to do all three? Go for it! Experiment and do more of what's working.

Use Proven Frameworks

If we examine the best-performing content in the wild, they often follow foundational frameworks.

With frameworks, you can create several content pieces out of one idea.

For example, you want to write about marketing funnel tactics. By running that single idea through a framework, you can bank the following content ideas:

• 3 tips for building your first marketing funnel (actionable)

• The marketing funnel tactic that brought X company X results (analytical)

• 5 lessons we learned from launching our first sales funnel (aspirational)

• How the law of reciprocity influences buyer behavior (anthropological)

You don’t have to choose one framework to follow for all your content. Mix, match, and experiment with these frameworks to find out what resonates best with your audience.[Insert a photo of the AAAA Framework]

Reference: Ship 30 for 30

4. Publish

We met a lot of business owners who fuss over the when. They ask questions like, "How often should we post? What time of day would be best for engagement?"

Our role is to reduce their overwhelm and help them hone in on the essentials: value and consistency.

Pick a pace that makes sense for your goal, set a posting schedule, and stick to it.

It's not the one who posts very often who wins—it's the person who regularly shows up and helps their target audience win through the content they publish.

Pro tip: While consulting industry benchmarks for the ideal publishing cadence can be helpful, it’s better to observe your own audience and how they interact with your content, track the results, and adjust accordingly to serve more of what they’re responding to.

Now, let's talk about content distribution.

In the third step, we discussed finding the sweet spot: the type of content you delight in creating, and your audience loves reading, watching, or listening to.

In mapping out your content distribution, we have to decide on your core content channel and supporting channels.

1. The idea is to set a core content (usually long-form content—can be video, audio, or written) that you can repurpose into other content formats. This makes sure we get a lot of mileage out of each long-form content piece.

2. Align your repurposing strategy with your business objective. For example, if your business objective is growing your YouTube audience, your supporting channels should help drive awareness and traffic to your YouTube channel.

3. You don’t always have to use multiple channels. If you’re low on time or resources, focus on your core content channel and experiment with different formats until you discover what works best in that channel.

Here's an example:

Core Content Channel: YouTube Long-form Video (~20-minute videos)

Supporting Channels:

1. Instagram

   • Reels (snippets from core content)

   • Static images (pull quotes/info from core content)

   • Carousels (turn core content into a digestible carousel)

2. Twitter

• Twitter threads

• Tweets

5. Measure

Don't post and forget.

Remember the goals you set in Step 2 (Plan)? This is where those will come in handy. Monitor your KPIs, so you know when you're off-track. Remember: You can't improve what you can't measure.

Content plans are like maps — they help you see the big picture of where you’re going.

But don’t fall in love with them.

Let your audience’s response be the compass that guides you toward effective social media content marketing.

6. Analyze

Did you hit your goals?

What worked well? What didn’t? What are your insights and recommendations?

It's not enough to measure the results of your social media marketing efforts. You also have to make sense of the data, ponder on them, and generate thoughtful insights to inform your future content.

After this step, carry all that you've learned and start again with Step 1.

Rinse and repeat until you see the results you desire.