We hate to be a negative nancy, but posting without a plan = inconsistent results and wasted time. Sure, social media moves fast, and it can feel like you have to jump on all the latest trends to compete, but the truth? You need a social media content strategy more than you need a list of the latest trending audios. 

A social media content strategy helps you stay consistent, engage your audience, and drive real business growth. Without it, you might still see spikes in engagement, but you’re not going to be building a community that ultimately helps you reach your goals. 

If creating a social media content strategy seems overwhelming, fear not. We’re here to break down the steps to creating a simple, repeatable process. When you’re done, we promise you’ll have more time, less stress, and better results (yes, we’re ambitious).

Below, we’ll cover: 

• Defining your goals
• Understanding your audience
• Choosing your content themes
• Creating a realistic posting schedule
• Using AI & automation to make it easier
• Keeping it simple and repeatable

1. Define Your Goals: What Do You Want to Achieve?

Before you start posting, think about what you want to get out of your posts. You might think you want virality, but why? 

Maybe you actually want to grow your brand so you can compete more in your field. Or if you already have a solid following, maybe you want to focus on actually building engagement from your social posts. You might also want to make your social media profiles work harder for you by generating more leads and sales (without needing to post as much).

Reading that, we also know that you might be thinking, ‘Well what if I want all of that?’ But keep in mind that marketing takes time. We recommend choosing just 1-2 clear goals so you can focus on what matters the most before refining your social media content strategy from there. You can start with building your audience for a few months before honing in on engagement and then landing more customers. 

2. Know Your Audience: Who Are You Speaking To?

Once you have your goals in mind, let’s talk about knowing your audience. Using social media for business is different than having a personal account. Our personal accounts are for us. We’re choosing our favorite photos, posting about our thoughts and lives, and curating a feed that we like. 

When it comes to your business though, it isn’t about you. It’s about your audience. You want to be creating content and speaking directly to your ideal customer (even if your favorite Aunt is the only one watching). That’s why it’s so important to create ideal customer personas that you can reference as you’re working on your social media content strategy. What age are they? What are their interests? What pain points are you solving? Answering these questions will make it much easier to create content that’s for them. 

You also need to know where they hang out online. Is it Instagram? LinkedIn? TikTok? You might have a favorite channel based on the content you like to create, but ultimately your customer’s preferences should take priority. 

To get started, use insights from your social media analytics to see what’s working and what isn’t. What posts already get decent engagement? You can also ask your existing customers to hear more about the content they like and what they interact with the most on social media. 

Pro Tip: Sign up for Enji. We’ve recently updated our marketing strategy generator to include a social media marketing strategy that tells you which platforms you should be on and how often you should post. 

3. Choose Your Content Themes (or Pillars)

Next, you want to set yourself up to create consistent content. This is why it’s so important not to jump on every trend you see—it can make your social media feel a little all over the place. Instead, choose 3-5 key content themes, or types of content, that you can focus on. 

Once you have your core content themes, here are some different ways to use them to keep your content fresh: 

• Community and engagement: Polls, Q&As, and other relatable content about your business
• Educational: Tips, tutorials, and industry insights
• Entertainment: Behind-the-scenes peeks into your brand’s daily life
• Inspiration: Testimonials, customer stories, and before/afters that show results
• Promotional: Showcasing your products/services and asking for the sale

Once you have your content themes, you don’t have to come up with all of your content on your own. Enji’s AI copywriter can help you create posts that fit into each type of content (And our social media strategy generator? Will give you even more ideas too!).

4. Create a Posting Schedule That’s Realistic

Now let’s talk about your content calendar. This is where we see a lot of business owners get burnt out. We all tend to think that more is more, but trying to come up with multiple pieces of content for every day of the month is a recipe for serious burnout! 

If you have that time (and energy) all power to you, but most of us don’t. Instead, focus on quality over quantity. Be realistic about the time you have, and create your schedule from there. The good news is that Enij’s social media scheduler can take all of the posting off your plate, but it’s still up to you to determine how much time you have to think of post topics and create content. 

Speaking of coming up with ideas and creating content, doing that daily or weekly is sure to burn you out even if you’re creating a reasonable amount of content. To stay ahead, block out time to plan and create your content a month ahead. That one day of content creation will save you the stress of playing catch-up throughout each week. 

5. Use AI & Automation to Make It Easier

We’ve briefly mentioned Enji’s AI copywriter and social media scheduler, but we want to take the time to focus on how these tools can make your life much, much easier. 

There’s so much creativity that goes into social media content (and some of that can be the best part!) but it’s hard to come up with new ideas all the time. With AI-powered tools, you can generate captions and ideas with less work! You’re still in charge of what you want to talk about, but the AI copywriter can package your idea in a way that makes sense for your social platforms. 

Plus, automating your posting is also so important to staying consistent (and sane). You don’t have to worry about taking the time to do it yourself, and you know that you’re covered. With a social media scheduler, you can even have more time to think of new ideas and post about timely topics with less stress. 

Lastly, a KPI dashboard helps you see what’s working (and what’s not). Every platform provides its own analytics these days, but clicking into each one to get your data takes too much time. By having it all in one place, it’s easier to see if your social media content strategy is working, pivot when needed, and create new goals. 

6. Keep It Simple & Repeatable

Last but not least? If there’s one thing you take away, it’s that your social media content strategy can be simple. In fact, it should be!

By overcomplicating everything, your social media marketing can be harder to track, harder to stick with, and less targeted to your audience. Just plan, post, track, and adjust–then repeat. You also get to decide how much work you put toward your social media, so why overload yourself?

The great news is that Enji also has a marketing strategy generator and new social media marketing strategy generator that can do a lot of this work for you! Based on your goals and the time you have, you can see how social media should fit into your broader marketing strategy and what that looks like on your calendar. 

Curious to see how it all works? Start a free trial!