Spoiler Alert: there is no one-size-fits-all strategy for social media. That said, learning the basics can be quick and easy when you have the right information – and that means you can start seeing impact in a few short weeks once you get things organised. Read our Complete Beginner's Guide to Social Media Strategy, written by our marketing manager Shannon.
Spoiler Alert: there is no one-size-fits-all strategy for social media.
That said, learning the basics can be quick and easy when you have the right information – and that means you can start seeing impact in a few short weeks once you get things organised. Read our Complete Beginner's Guide to Social Media Strategy, written by our marketing manager Shannon.
A Complete Beginner's Guide to Social Strategy
Maybe you’re a large centre with a full marketing team looking for a few tips for optimisation. Maybe your centre has a small team and you aren’t sure where to start with social media marketing. Maybe you’re somewhere in the middle. This guide is for anyone looking for some insights on how to kick-start their content strategy for social.
Since MySpace first appeared on our radar in the early 2000s, digital spaces have informed customer behaviours. With the launch of Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, SnapChat, Tik Tok, and so many more marketers have had more customer touchpoints than ever before. As some platforms become more popular, and others fade away, we marketers have to keep up with where our customers are scrolling – and how we can catch their interest.
So, other than sharing photos and copy, what do you gain for putting effort into a clear social media strategy?
- Building Brand Awareness (and then Loyalty!)
- Connecting with your Community
- Leveraging Local Influencers
- Directing Traffic to your Website
- Generating Qualitative Data
- Adding Touchpoints to your Seasonal/Planned Campaigns
Building Brand Awareness
Social media is a wonderful tool for creating Brand Awareness. Whether you create a series of Instagram Stories that introduce your centre’s benefits or run a Facebook carousel ad highlighting your most popular retailers, you can’t go wrong. The more interesting content you post, the more potential customers you have.
Connecting with your Community
Never underestimate the power of a well-timed comment. Once you’re up and running, keep track of when your profile is tagged: responding to a tag with a friendly, relevant comment can take a customer’s interaction with the brand from pleasant to special in just a few seconds.
When your followers comment on your posts, engage with it: your Facebook Feed, Instagram Gallery, and LinkedIn profile are living spaces where your community is looking to engage directly with you. So don’t leave their messages unanswered!
Need to increase your community of followers (and potential customers?) Run a contest! There’s dozens of web articles that can help you create and optimise an Instagram contest. I recommend something simple yet desirable – say an €100 Giftify card. By using a simple ‘Like, Follow, Tag 2 Friends’ entry model and including key contest/giveaway hashtags, your Instagram contest will have new followers flowing onto your account in no time.
Leveraging Local Influencers
While growing your community, don’t forget to leverage trusted voices in your core demographics. Take some time to familiarise yourself with the top voices on your chosen channel. All you need to do is send them a direct message telling them you like their profile and want to offer them a shopping spree. In return, they will post all about their experience and tag your account. Just like with the contest, your only budget for this is the load amount on the Influencers’ Giftify cards.
Directing Traffic to your Website and Newsletter Sign-Ups
All social media channels include a direct click to your website. You can increase the odds of having potential clients visit your website just by being active on social media. Write a smart bio for your account that triggers the viewer to click your website and learn more about you. You can track this referral traffic easily with Google Analytics: this way, you’ve got one more piece of data to help define your social media ROI.
Generating Qualitative Data
Two words: social listening. Pay attention to what other accounts your community follow, what they comment about most often, why styles/trends capture their attention, and what content performs the best. Within a few months, you’ll have a mountain of qualitative data to use for optimisation both online and in-store.
Adding Touchpoints to your Seasonal/Planned Campaigns
This one should feel like common sense: if there are attractive sales running with your retailers, use their campaigns to your advantage. Drop a few posts on your social media accounts that announce the sales: the more potential customers who are aware of the sale, the more foot traffic you will receive.
For gifting periods like Christmas and Valentine’s, remind your community about what an ideal location your centre is for all their needs. And if they don’t know what to buy for their special someone? Good news, you have Giftify gift cards!
The Funnel
Marketing is all about the lead funnel: how your potential customer learns about you, engages with you, purchases from you, and learns to love you. For social media, I recommend adapting the traditional flow like so:
- Awareness
- Consideration
- Purchase
- Loyalty
- Ambassador (new!)
Awareness
Your potential customer learns you exist. This can happen due to seeing a social advertisement, viewing an influencer’s content about you, word of mouth referral from a friend, searching for shopping opportunities in your area, and more. As you can see, you have control over a few of these options – that lets you ensure that the potential customer’s first experience with your brand can be completely on your terms. This stage is all about establishing your brand.
Consideration
Your potential customer learns more about the retailers, services, and amenities your centre offers. The touchpoints for this are essentially identical to the awareness phase, as well as email marketing if your awareness campaign included information on how to subscribe to the newsletter. This is a make-or-break touchpoint: use images and language that clearly highlight your centre’s benefits.
Purchase
Your customer engages with a touchpoint that leads to purchase. For offline, this is tricky to directly attribute to your social media work although growth in engagement with your social media will almost certainly lead to an increase in customer visits to your centre. For digital, this is a bit easier. For example, you can run an advertisement that directs potential customers to your website where they can purchase a Giftify card via the online portal: a combination of your social platform’s analytics reporting and Google Analytics conversion goals tracking will give you a very clear idea of your advertising’s direct impact on your bottom line.
Loyalty
You converted customer continues to engage with the brand, and develops an emotional connection with your centre (confidence, satisfaction, aspiration, etc). Obviously if you have a loyalty programme you can direct customers at this level of your funnel there to reward their continued interest in your brand. But that doesn’t mean you can’t engage with the Loyalty level without a dedicated programme. You can use emails and social media to show appreciation for your community of customers; this will keep them interested in you and send them back to the top of your funnel for new purchases.
Ambassador
A happy customer is the best Ambassador you can have. To achieve this, your centre will need to offer excellent customer service via your social media and manage your digital reputation. A simple way to do this is by answering all reviews on your Google My Business account. 5* review? Say ‘thank you’! 1* review? Apologies for whatever inconvenience the customer experienced, and offer a support email address where they can send their feedback (and you can work on a solution!) Now, when potential customers search for you they will either see messages from Brand Ambassadors or from customers receiving clear support. GMB is a win/win, but so often overlooked.
For a more targeted approach, you also select a few key local influencers to serve as Ambassadors in a more official capacity. Offer them a Giftify card loaded with a few hundred euros and have them share their shopping spree on Instagram Stories: your centre and retailers will receive an awareness boost, and you can request the influencer’s data (impressions, reach, messages, best performing Story slides) to inform your future efforts. Never forget, Great Content is made using Clear Data.
The Planning
Whether you post 3x a week or 3x a month, planning your content in advance will save you from several headaches in the long run. I recommend finding a solution that suits your needs and your budget:
- HootSuite (Free and paid options: planning + scheduling for Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn; custom social listening dashboards and analytics)
- HubSpot (Paid: planning + scheduling for Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn; custom analytics dashboards)
- Later (Free and paid options: planning + scheduling for Instagram gallery)
- Sprout Social (Paid: planning + scheduling for Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn; custom social listening dashboards and data analytics)
If you’re going to put all your focus on Instagram, start with Later. If you want to experiment with a more complete platform, try out HootSuite’s free plan first: you can always upgrade to paid and unless you have several people working on your content the HootSuite free plan will help you get started
If you aren’t feeling ready to use a third-party social planning platform, you can always use a free calendar app to plan your content or build your own editorial calendar in Excel:
- Asana (Free and paid options: drag-and-drop editorial calendar planning)
- Trello (Free and paid options: drag-and-drop editorial calendar planning)
- Excel (‘Free’ option for centres with Microsoft Office: editorial calendar planning)
Do your own research and figure out what works for you. If you decide to use a third-party platform, try to pick one that is an Instagram API partner: otherwise your responses and data will be delayed by Instagram’s limit on non-partner API calls. Hootsuite, HubSpot, Later, and Sprout are all trusted API partners.
The Content
As they say, Content is King!
When you’re just getting started, I recommend researching your competitors’ most popular content then testing the same themes on your own channel. Some general guidelines:
- Use candid-feeling photos of happy shoppers
- Keep it bright and colourful, unless that's outside your brand guidelines (always follow your centre's brand guidelines for visuals)
- Photos with subtle graphic overlays can be a smart way to announce sales
- Captions with a clear sense of personality (aka your brand voice): the best captions engage with the reader and include 1 or 2 emoji
- Instagram Hashtags: do your research! Hashtags are essentially SEO - you're helping people interested in a particular topic to find your page.
- So, select 10 to 15 that cover your actions (#shoppingaddict, #style, #fashion, #retailproblems, #contest, #giveaway, etc), your retailers (#hm, #lolalizafashion, #HKMthelook, #JDSportsFrance, etc), and your location (#belgianbrand, #paris, #dutchfashion, #denhaag, #brussels, etc)
- Retailer highlights will help build awareness of your shops. For example, highlight that your centre has a big box of a popular retailer like Scotch & Soda
- Vendor highlights like candid-feeling images of people enjoying your restaurants, cafes, and seasonal pop-ups will help potential customers get a feel for the all-important vibe
- Seasonal themes like a Christmas countdown, Valentine’s promotions, etc
Each social media platform has its own requirements for photos, but the general guidelines are:
- Facebook + Instagram Story: 1080 x 1920 pixels (9:16 ratio)
- Facebook + Instagram Portrait posts: 1080 x 1350 pixels (4:5 ratio)
- Facebook + Instagram Square (carousel) posts: 1080 x 1080 pixels (1:1 ratio)
- Facebook + Instagram Landscape post: 1080 x 608 pixels (1.91:1 ratio)
- Facebook + Instagram Profile Picture: 360 x 360 pixels
I recommend using the 4:5 ratio for all your Instagram Gallery posts: you’ll take up more screen while your followers are scrolling through the home feed (note: Instagram will make the Gallery thumbnail ‘square’ from the centre of the image, so crop cautiously)
Colourful, fun, and a 4:5 ratio!
The Cost
The Good News: it’s completely free to set-up your social media accounts, and there are several free apps to help you manage your content
The Bad News: managing your social media accounts takes time, effort, and yes – some advertising budget - to maximise your engagement and ROI re: labour hours.
Building Your Strategy
And that’s it! That’s all the basics you need to know to get started with your social media strategy. Keep in mind that nothing happens overnight, especially not marketing. It will take time, trial and error, some thoughtful budget, and hard work to build up your community. In time you’ll learn what inspires them and what they want to see from you: from there its a matter of creating that content, targeting specific levels of your funnel with ads, and staying engaged.
Looking for something else?
Let us know what other social media themes you’d like to see:
Shannon will do her research and write about it!
