In her MDM 2020 presentation, Kate Buck Jr. breaks down her social media strategy and gives you a simple way to approach content marketing for any business, whether you sell digital and informational products, physical and e-commerce products, or even brick and mortar or virtual service businesses.
Here are some of the main points of her talk.
We all know the importance of getting your audience to know, like, and trust you, but that is only the beginning.
When working on social media, there are three primary objectives: growing your audience, generating engagement, and making invitations.
4 Steps to an Epic Social Media Strategy
You are always dancing in all three phases because you always have people coming in on the growth phase, and moving their way through the engagement phase and ultimately to the invitation phase.
Let’s dive a little deeper into these three phases:
Phase 1: Growing Your Audience
The first phase of your social media strategy is audience growth. In order to do this, you need to connect with your potential customers by creating a consistent stream of content that allows you to expand your reach and get more people to want to follow you.
This phase allows you to get to know people in your audience, grow your brand awareness, and overall increase the size and reach of your audience.
You can use a combination of inspirational, entertaining, and educational posts.
Phase 2: Generating Engagement
The second phase of your social media strategy entails retaining that audience you have just attracted. Anyone can grow an audience. Nowadays, you can buy all the likes and followers you want.
But that doesn’t mean anything if that audience doesn’t ever engage with your content. In order for your audience to be an asset to you, you need to build some rapport and affinity with them and make them look forward to the content you deliver.
This is the time to educate them about what you do, and about what value you can provide to them.
Phase 3: Making Invitations
The third phase of your social media strategy is extending invitations to your audience. This is where you make your calls to action, that takes them away from social media and to your own properties so that you have the opportunity to convert them from a lead into a customer.
So, maybe you’re inviting them to subscribe to a newsletter, or inviting them to a webinar, or extending an offer to purchase a product from you.
Many people just don’t know how to implement a social media strategy because they don’t know what to post about, or what content to use and they really struggle in developing their own content plan.
If you don’t have tons of creative content ideas constantly flowing to your brain, then I want to show you a way to come up with some ideas.
Here are the 4 steps to creating a highly successful Social Media Strategy for any business:
Step 1- Content Planning
It’s important that you don’t go blindly into a content plan. By doing a little bit of research, you will be far ahead of those who don’t because you will be creating content that is current, relevant, and desired by your audience.
If you take the time to do some research, you will have no problem creating a content plan for the next month, three months, nine months, or even year.
Here are some of the tools to help you with this research.
Google Analytics. If you have an existing website that has traffic coming in, then you want to ask yourself where is the traffic coming from, where it’s going, what pages or topics are people interested in?
Keyword research tools. You can use tools like Word Tracker, Google keyword tool, SEMrush, or whatever keyword tools you like. Find low competitiveness, but high volume search terms related to the term you want to cover.
Answer the Public. This is a tool that will allow you to enter a search term and it will tell you questions people are asking on voice search from their phones. Many of the results could easily be used as headlines for blog posts or other media content.
Audience Insights. If you have a Facebook page this can give you some great info about the cross-traffic between your page and other similar pages.
Buzz Sumo. If you want to see the most popular articles that are already being shared, then this is the resource for you. Get some content ideas from things that are already popular.
Once you have done your research on what is popular and what people are searching and asking on google, then it’s very simple to create a content plan.
To keep it simple, Kate recommends creating 1 video a week and then modifying and repurposing that content to be relevant on just about every other social media platform you can imagine.
Really focus on what is working, by generating topics from your keyword research, and pulling ideas from that. Don’t try to reinvent the wheel, and waste time drumming up your own ideas that may not be relevant.
Use effective topic research, and once you have a bank of ideas for different topics, you can plan an entire year of content out by just focusing on one topic per week.
Step 2- Content Creation
Now that you’ve got your plan in place, it’s time to turn on the lights, camera, and action. Each week, you create a YouTube video about your chosen topic, and out of that one piece of content, you can create multiple pieces of content, including podcasts, blog posts, as well as posts for Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, IGTV, etc.
Just make sure you modify the content to match the network you are putting it on. Take snippets from the video to create stories for Instagram and Facebook, create memes or long-form posts for Facebook.
One way to make it more simple to repurpose content is to take your YouTube video and use a little site called TEMI, and transcribe the video and shape it up into a blog post.
Gradually you will break that one video into smaller and smaller pieces of content, including video intros or snippets, stories for Instagram and Facebook, quotes, memes, and long-form posts, all the way down to 140 characters for Twitter.
Remember that 94% of people are using their mobile devices all the time, so keep that in mind when creating and repurposing your content. Vertical video is the way to go on most platforms, other than YouTube.
Step 3- Content Distribution
You have all your content created for each of the different platforms, now it’s time to share the love and get the content out on all the platforms you are on.
You want to get the content that you’ve created out there to people so that you can stay top of mind, build rapport and affinity, educate them, and begin to move them toward the opportunity to eventually convert them as a subscriber, a prospect, a lead or a customer.
Kate says a best practice is to take your YouTube video and embed it into a blog post you created from the video, and then send that link to your blog out to your email list so they can choose to read it or watch the video, and they have the choice to consume the content in whatever media form they like best.
And then you will be posting all of the different video snippets, memes, quotes, or any other forms of content you have created from that video and putting them all on the different social platforms.
Step 4- Content Monetization
Now for the important part. If we spend all our time on the Grow and Engage phases and never step into the Invite phase, then you will never convert anyone into a paying customer. Here are some tips to best transition from the content work, into “show me the money.”
Calls to Action
This is where you need to focus on a call to action monetization. On your YouTube videos, take advantage of the end card opportunities, and make sure you ask them to like and subscribe or watch the next video. Make sure your descriptions are dialed in and that they link to your lead magnet, your phone site, or your blog or website.
Always make sure that all of your content sends people somewhere to be able to generate leads and get people to opt-in to your list. Get them to your funnel or Phonesite, get them to your blog, make sure that you create an appealing call to action that makes them want to join your list. Once they are on your list, you can let them know every time you have a new piece of content for them.
Content Upgrades
A cool way to get people to opt-in after consuming a piece of content is to offer a content upgrade if they enter their email address. So, maybe a pop-up that gives them a worksheet, checklist, guide or handout, or a link to a webinar that goes more in detail about the topic.
Retargeting
Make sure you have your pixels in place so that you can run retargeting campaigns to get your people to participate in contests, webinars, ebooks, quizzes, application funnels, tripwires, etc.
Boost Posts
Once you can see that people are opting into your offers, put a little money behind it so that you can get more eyes on it. and then just repeat the process.
This all sounds like a lot, but over time as you do this consistently, you can amass a huge content library for just a single campaign. To sum up the strategy:
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Research topics and plan your content.
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Create one YouTube video and transcribe it to make a blog post and email newsletter out of it, as well as multiple pieces of micro-content including video snippets, memes, quotes, long-form posts and distribute them across all social media platforms.
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Make sure there are clear calls to action to get them to opt-in and invite and extend offers after generating a lot of value to your audience.
If you do this consistently every single week, you will have a ton of content out there, and you will be seen as an authority in your space, and you will build your brand, your authority, and ultimately, your income.
To watch this talk in full, head over to Lnkw.co/MDM2020 to register for the entire event for free. We’d love to hear your takeaways too.
About Kate Buck Jr.
Kate Buck (aka “kbj” or @katebuckjr on Twitter) is a Social Media consultant and strategist. She runs a consulting agency in Austin, Texas with her business partner Jesse Jameson. Kate has worked with some of the top names in Internet Marketing as well as consulted with dozens of entrepreneurs, businesses, and nonprofits both around the globe.
She is the co-founder of Social Media Manager Pro, a training program for Social Media Marketing Professionals. Kate’s courses have trained more than 30,000 students. In addition to speaking at leading interactive marketing conferences and conducting training events around the world, Kate has also hosted wildly popular social events. Her website is www.kbjonline.com.
A student herself, Kate is fascinated with the technology that connects people of like minds and interests around the world. Kate is passionate about training and developing social media managers and teams in the most effective strategies for online marketing using social tools.
