Mindbody Video
How to Build a Strong Social Media Strategy
Summary
If you're struggling with your social media strategy, you aren't alone.
We visited Liber8Fit in San Diego, California, to talk with them about social media and how building a strategy for their social channels can boost their brand awareness.
If you're like Liber8Fit, you can develop a marketing strategy for your social networks, too! Anyone can be a social media marketer—all you need is a phone, a target audience, and focus. After watching the video, sit down and follow these three simple steps:
1. Ask what social networks your target audience is on.
Different demographics utilize social media differently. Think about the big 5: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest. Where does your ideal customer spend the most time? Knowing which social media platforms to use is the first step to developing a strong, cohesive social media marketing plan.
Liber8Fit's marketing strategy focuses primarily on Instagram. They find their target audience engaging more with videos and photos that showcase the studio and its' clientele.
2. Determine what social content you will create.
Every brand is different. Some will leverage influencers, while others will focus more on blog posts. While you know your brand best, also consider how your target market uses social media. If they spend more time on Instagram, focus on video content and user-generated content from your customers. After all, your customers are micro-influencers! On the other hand, if your audience is all about health and wellness blogs, create shareable, long-form content on your own website. At the end of the day, your strategy is unique to your business, so don't copy someone else's social channels and marketing!
We advised Liber8Fit to create a social media contest with their customers, leveraging a branded hashtag to create user-generated content that was shareable on their account. When they used this strategy, they saw increased engagement with their followers and similar social profiles.
3. Decide how many resources you'll put on social media marketing.
Managing digital marketing can be time-consuming. Planning for how many resources you'll put towards social media will help you build a social media marketing plan. Will you hire someone to solely focus on your social media marketing strategy? Will you purchase a social media management tool like HootSuite or Sprout Social? The easiest way to determine if the effort is worth it is to set social media marketing goals and business objectives and align your team on how to hit them.
Liber8Fit's team is small, so it's important that they spend their time, effort, and marketing dollars on the things that will help them grow the most efficiently. To do this, teachers take images of classes when there are breaks in the action, and post them on Instagram stories. If they do social media advertising, they make the ads time-bound with clear CTAs like joining their email list or taking a reduced-fee intro class.
Social media marketing doesn't have to be expensive or time-consuming. Following these tips will help you create a strong social media strategy.
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We're here to help you improve your social media, too.
View the guide[00:00:10] Hi Angela. So I'm really excited to meet with you and talk to you about social media today. So as background for you, I actually managed Mindbody's social media for four and a half years - now so I want to bring some of that experience for you. And also I work with customers around the world to help find out what they do and learn their best practices. We're going to share some of those ideas with you. So I know you have your phone with you, so I'd love to kind of scroll through your account and point out some things I noticed. I did noticed that you you guys are really great about using Instagram stories featured us in our class last night, which is really great but when you do that sometimes doesn't translate into your feed exactly so you want to pull out your phone.
[00:00:44] Sure.
[00:00:47] So here we have your photos. You can see that there's a lot of people but there's not always a consistent look and feel. So a lot of research has shown that if you have three in a row when you look at that full grid you can figure out what that cohesive brand experience should be. So you have a lot of teal and purple in your space. So if you try to mimic those colors and bring them into your account it's going to make your brand stand out on your customers' phones and their friends' phones.
[00:01:12] And also think of it in terms of each photo should stand alone in its uniqueness but also work together. When you see here, you have a lot of photos that worked by themselves but they don't necessarily look good with the next one by it. So when you think through your Instagram account, think about blending all those things together.
[00:01:30] We actually have a guide about the information for you. And you guys are really lucky because your colors are more based on Blue which research has shown leads to more interaction. So you guys should stand out in feeds with some of those techniques and tips that will give you.
[00:01:43] I can definitely noticed that it's been a bit of a test to build followers and to stay active and just that little piece of the puzzle that we definitely need a little more love and attention towards and open to it. So that sounds amazing.
[00:02:01] And one thing that I noticed during class that you guys, when one of you that's not teaching we'll be taking photos and things in the class. Do you make that accessible to your students after the class besides in your Instagram story.
[00:02:11] Yes. So we really encourage them to add to their stories, to post to tag us, to check in. And yeah so we've really just as we're building our following and just trying to get out there really encouraging them to use us as we're using them I guess I would say, as a platform to get out there.
[00:02:29] And that's a great thing. What we want to challenge you to do is actually to do a social media contest with that. So at your front desk you have a list that's saying what people are grateful for this week.
[00:02:38] Yes.
[00:02:38] So I want to challenge you to make that into a social media campaign and have them post it. Use a hashtag. And then that way every post that your customers are putting out there, their friends are going to see. And give them a set amount of points and whoever gets the most amount of points in that time frame gets Liber8 swag. And then you get more swag in the community, too. So you're just becoming a megaphone for all that activity. You can also do it for reviews on the Mindbody App, on Yelp, commenting on your photos. Basically any interaction you get is going to keep going out in the world.
[00:03:09] So think about doing something like that maybe create a plan before you meet it out BOLD.
[00:03:13] Ok.
[00:03:13] We'll will work on getting that same thing and after that we'll figure out some way to do some Instagram and Facebook ads based on those user-generated pieces.
[00:03:21] That would be great. Thank you.
[00:03:23] Really excited today to keep on and make this work.
[00:03:26] Us too, they thank you so much.
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