Creative Social Media Planning: Where do I start?
Another year has come and gone. It had its fair share of laughter filling the air, seasonal festivities, and marketing. Lots and lots of marketing. Companies use humor (Ikea), capitalize on timely, key moments (skims), participate in trending conversations (McDonald’s), work with celebrities and influencers (EREWHON), and leverage a variety of other tactics to catch your attention, appeal to buyer intention, leave a lasting impression and, of course, weave in some key messaging. At the surface, you see, “I like it” or “I don’t like it.” But you don’t see the many people behind the scenes ideating and creating this content.
It’s hard to capture audience attention, especially when large, well-known companies dominate our social media timelines. Creating something as impactful or viral as these brands can feel impossible. But it's not. Lucky for you, the only place you need to break through is with your audience.
Almost every social media marketer has been asked to make something "go viral," but the best content does not appeal to the masses; it resonates with its target audience, giving them a reason to come back for more.
So, how do you start the creative process of developing a post with assets and copy that leads your target audiences to like, comment, share, and save? The basic steps include:
This is the foundation of the creative process. A lot goes into each step, and the process differs for everyone. It’s your job to understand your audiences’ needs, pain points, and how your product fills the gaps. Because of this, we can’t provide hard and fast rules to follow, but we can share how we ideate, develop, and create content.
Our process starts with Associative Memory Retrieval.
"the ability to store and retrieve information based on relationships and connections between different elements. It allows a system to efficiently identify and utilize relevant knowledge for decision-making and inference."
This means starting with the main idea and letting your mind snowball as you think of anything related to the initial request. Then, write down anything that sticks. Doing this creates a foundation for you to build upon.
From there, the fun begins!
From Concept to Creation
Going from concept to post requires time, teamwork, testing, trial and error, and, most importantly, taking it easy. The following steps will help you organize and simplify your process.
Write it down. Whether you have a fully thought-out campaign, a single sentence, or five disparate thoughts, write them down because they’re likely to form into something later. You never know what might work together.
Look for inspiration. As Cady Heron once said, "The limit does not exist." So, when it comes to content planning: explore, explore, explore. But where should you look? Your saved campaigns, trending content, and favorite accounts are great places to start. Searching your company’s website for keywords is also great for brainstorming.
Here are a few pieces of content and campaigns that caught our eye as we scrolled back through some of our favorite accounts.
Recommended by LinkedIn
Conduct research. Developing strategic content requires research. Look at your past posts that highlight key moments in time, what competitors are including in their content (graphics or copy) that catches your attention, what content is trending that you can recreate, the latest platform/industry best practices to weave in and what you should avoid in terms of content, language, imagery, etc. The list goes on.
Brainstorm with your agency. Remember, you and your agency are one team. Not only will they provide great ideas with an “outsider's” perspective, but as their partner, you can help set parameters and communicate your goals from the onset.
Collaborate. Have you heard the saying, "Two heads are better than one?" Well, what if you had four or more? Teamwork does make the dream work. Collaborating across teams and departments leads to excellent outcomes—developing more eye-catching imagery, ensuring key messages are incorporated, including all relevant details, aligning content sharing with key moments in time, and more. Having this insight at the onset enables you to move into the development phase with all the information and elements necessary to produce content that will land with its intended audience.
It’s essential to give your teammates details and goals on the ask before the meeting so you can get the most out of your time. Don’t restrict your ask too much; you can always refine ideas down the road. Let the creativity flow!
Save it for later. Never get rid of an idea, especially if you love it. It might be the right idea but the wrong timing. If it doesn’t work right now, save it for another opportunity. You can pull elements from it or use it as a starting point from which another idea can evolve.
Don’t force it. Finally, take it easy. The best ideas come when you're not forcing yourself to think about them. If you're drawing a blank or hitting a wall, step away, let your mind roam freely, and the perfect idea might just come to you.
Analyzing Performance
Once the campaign is live, it’s time to see if it’s a hit, a miss, or a lesson.
Good or bad, content metrics tell you an important story and are essential for optimizing campaigns and building a successful strategy.
Analyzing key performance indicators (KPIs) like engagement (likes, shares, comments), engagement rate, and click-through rate provides insight into how well—or not so well—your content resonated with your target audience.
But quantitative data isn’t the only thing that matters.
Qualitative data, such as what someone says in a comment, also tells an important story. Inspiring someone to share a positive comment highlights sentiment toward content and can translate into quantitative data. Because of this, it’s important to include both types of metrics to tell the whole story.
The above resources enable you to develop content that will succeed with your audience, teach you what to change to ensure higher performance, and the data points you can present to stakeholders (Board of Directors, CMO, Social Media Director, Head of Content, etc,) when explaining why similar content should be shared in the future.
And if you see any comments like this:
Rest assured, include it in the performance summary.
Now that we’ve explored how to go from concept to campaign to performance, we’d love to hear from you! What does your social media creative process look like? Tell us in the comments or contact us at digital@inkhouse.com if you’d like to discuss our process or social media/digital capabilities further.
The best content doesn’t just happen it’s built on data, creativity, and a solid strategy. Excited to dive into this! Inkhouse