Social Media Strategies

Strategically grow your channels to increase reach, engagement, and sales.

 
 
 

Are you frustrated with the lack of growth of your social media channels?

 

Do you spend countless hours on social media with no real ROI in sight?

 

Our strategies are perfect for brands that:

  • Want proven channel-specific strategies that can increase reach, engagement, and revenue.
  • Seek to understand, communicate, and take advantage of the massive opportunity social media provides.
  • Desire a step-by-step playbook that clearly outlines each channel's programming and engagement strategies.
 

What's Included?

Our Signature Audit

Our team of experts rely on decades of experience collaborating with education brands along with advanced analytic tools to assess the current state of your social media channels. Your channels' current performance will be assessed, and we'll also dive deep into your programming and engagement tactics.

  1. Current Performance Assessment: While the current state may not be as exciting to you as other elements in the audit, it's extremely important to understand how your growth channels are currently performing. This is the beginning of your journey of improving these channels, so where we start is an important part of the story.
  2. Analytics: To determine each channel's overall health, we look at a variety of analytics like audience demographics and behaviors, growth rates of followers/subscribers, reach (impressions), open and click-through rates, quality of engagements, engagement rate, video views and retention, referral traffic from branded and organic social media campaigns, and negative feedback/attrition.
  3. Programming: What you share on your social media channels represents what your brand cares about and is the way to attract engagement from your target audience. We look critically at your current programming strategy, evaluating programmatic choices like post type and resource type and overall programming cadence. We also review key programming elements, such as copy, imagery, and voice.
  4. Engagement: How you engage with your target audience is the foundation of EVERYTHING you do on social media, and social media platforms are prioritizing meaningful engagement more than ever. We assess your overall community engagement and management efforts, which may include analyzing your response rate, quality of response, and member-to-member interactions.
  5. Competitive + Industry Analysis Do you know how your brand compares to your competitors? We look at your direct competitors and industry standards to provide us with benchmarks to assess your current efforts. The benchmarks also help inform future OKRs/KPIs. We look at information that is publicly available for organic and paid growth. The amount of competitor we analyze will be determined by you but we typically start with at least three competitors. We also compare your followers, post cadence, engagement, and overall post quality with competitors and in relation to industry benchmarks.

Channel-Specific Social Media Strategies

Our customized social media strategies provide a step-by-step roadmap to grow your social media presence. Each channel strategy includes specific programming and engagement tactics to help you achieve your goals.

  1. Social Media Marketing Mix Strategy: If you choose us to create at least two social media channel strategies for you, we craft and overall social media marketing mix strategy, which determines what channels you should spent the most and least times on. We then form strategic and specific goals for each channel (see 2 and 3 below) and aggregate those goals and results to inform this overall social media strategy.
  2. Overarching Strategic Goals: What's the number one thing you are trying to accomplish? Many jump into a channel expecting to do it all but if you try to do it all, you more than likely will end up doing nothing.
  3. Specific, Measureable Goals: We craft goals for every stage of the marketing funnel: Reach (brand awareness), engagement (brand consideration), traffic (brand consideration), and revenue or sign-ups, etc. (brand conversions). We set these goals based on industry best pratices and your current performance analysis, along with weighing other considerations, such as a paid social media advertising budget and the level of capacity available.
  4. Persona and Voice Development: Mature brands have one unified voice and tone. It's important that no matter who is behind your social media, the same personality is experienced by your audience. We define your channel-specifi persona and give you tips and guidance on how to phrase things that are most appropriate for your brand.
  5. Programming Strategy: This is the heart of your social media strategy and is directly linked to your goals. We include a breakdown of posts by cadence, post type, and topics/products. We even provide a schedule of when to program each post.

Where applicable, we'll provide the following resources:

  • Hashtag strategy (Twitter + IG)
  • UTM encoding spreadsheet with guidelines on encoding.

Presentations and Communication

Ensuring that you are in lock-step with our process is very important to us. At any point, you should be informed of our timeline and have the ability to talk with us to ensure we have all of the resources we need. We invite our clients to a Slack channel and/or can be available via email.

We also present our findings from our audit and more importantly talk you through our recommended social media strategies in a virtual 1.5-hour presentatation, where the primary goals are two-fold:

  1. Understand our findings from our audit. Consider this your social media education and ask as many questions as you want!
  2. Provide feedback on our strategies. It's important that these strategies 100% fit your needs. We then use your feedback to adjust our recommended strategies.
  1. Kickoff Meeting: We kick off our work together with a virtual one-hour meeting, where we'll reveal our overall timeline, specific milestones, key dates, and deliverables. We'll also work together to ensure we have the access we need to get started analyzing your accounts and crafting social media strategies for you.
  2. Audit Findings + Strategy Presentation Our findings from our audit and recommended social media strategies will be presented in a 1.5 hour virtual presentation. There is a lot to go over between the audit findings and the strategies we create, so we'll also try to keep it as informal as possible. This way, you can ask all of the questions you need to fully understand our findings and recommendations. We'll go into detail about the specific programmatic and engagement tactics we recommend and talk to you about the potential of each channel including goals for reach, engagement, and traffic when applicable. We deliver your strategies in Google Docs, and they will constantly be updated based on your unique audience's reaction to them if we are selected to implement them. The presentation is in Google Slide format, and we record the virtual presentation so you can access it at any time.

Our 6-Step Strategy-Creation Process:

 

Kickoff

We kickoff this project by outlining our process and overall timeline in a one-hour call. We'll also reserve time to talk about the access and information we need to get started.

Create

We craft the entire go-to-market strategy, promo kit, and pitch kit.

Feedback

We walk you through the resources and you provide feedback to ensure you have what you need to launch.

Handoff

We give you editable versions of the kits for you to use when your product is ready to launch.

Execute

We create, manage, and optimize a paid ads strategy and campaign for two+ months in various social and ad platforms.

Reflect

We provide you with our campaign reporting template and paid ads performance reports.

 

We're looking to partner with brands that:

Have a new resource or product to promote

Want to grow their social media presence

Seek methods to engage and reach their audience to

Value community and desire to form meaningful relationships with their audience.

 

Sign up to get started!

We do have limited capacity and only plan to take a select few clients in 2020.

sign me up

 

FAQs

 

Since every brand and audience is unique, there is no guarantee to match the results you want. However, we get on a call with you to understand your initial goals and match them with what we can deliver in this package. This combination of PR, paid ads, social media, email, and content marketing is powerful and will provide significant insight on your audience and give you a solid foundation to build future campaigns. Many clients that use this service see an increase of overall reach, engagement, and leads. We will provide estimates of the results we think your brand can see once we know more about your resources, audience, and budget.

We love doing this! If you haven't yet built a parent audience on your social or email channels, we can use our advanced audience targeting techniques and work with you on partnering with email services where you'll be able to reach parents.

No problem. While we would love you to have a sizeable email list so we can create lookalike audiences and craft email campaigns for them, we can also use advanced targeting techniques for our paid ad services and introduce you to email purchasing services that we've seen work for many of our clients.

$7,500 is the lowest media spend that we can provide, due to the high set up and on-going management services we provide. Also, anything less than that won't provide you with statistically significant insights about your audience. You can always choose to spend more too.

We currently provide strategies and posts for Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, and LinkedIn when appropriate. Every brand and audience is different, though. So for each client, we first look at what social channels your brand has invested in so far and then consider where we think your intended target audience will engage with the most. Then we craft a comprehensive campaign social media strategy specifically for you on the channels that are appropriate for your brand. We include bonus social media series ideas and give you image templates you can use to create more images. We build out a certain amount of posts on each social media channel, which includes everything you need to just quickly post to the channel (images, copy, time to post etc).The amount of social posts provided depends on the number of social channels your brand is on and whether it is appropriate to post on for this campaign.

Yes! We work with many B2B brands that target education administrators. If you're targeting this audience for the first time, we can also identify audiences we know that work and help with the purchase of emails, if that's of interest.

This is 100% where our team shines. Every single one of us, except our paid ads team, where we collaborate with them to supply all ad creative and targeting criteria has either been an educator or has spent a majority of our careers working in education. We get education and in fact, it drives us absolutely crazy when we see emails, social media posts, ads, and PR pitches that are tone deaf to the space. Rest assured that we take this very seriously and have a team of subject matter experts we collaborate with to ensure our messaging is on point always.

Anything we craft for you has to fit your specific brand tone, reinforce your brand messaging, and talk specifically to your unique audience. That means every email, social media post, blog post, or press release we write has to be 100% customized to your unique brand. Given we do this a lot, we also add in some industry best practices and benchmarks.

The toolkit we give you is delivered electronically and includes everything you need like copy and graphics to quickly post the blog to your website, send the emails, and schedule the social media posts.

Of course! You know your brand better than anyone else. It's vital that you are entirely satisfied with what we create for you. You will have an opportunity to provide feedback before we send you our final versions of the Pitch Kit and Promo Kit. The resources we provide are editable as well, so you'll be able to adapt it further.

A couple of ways. First, our team is riduculously talented in scouring the Web and all of the documents we request from you to borrow, adapt, and build upon approved language. Secondly, everything we create will be closely aligned with your brand messaging, tone, and style guides you give us. Lastly, we will incorporate any feedback you give us before we send you our final versions of the Pitch and Promo Kits.

Completely fine. We do ask that we reserve a month for setup of everything and after that we can execute the campaign for as long as you'd like. It is worth noting that promoting your product or resource for at least two months positions you to get the insights and traction you need.

You get a dedicated account manager who is awesome; we're not just saying that. You can send us an email whenever you have a question, but we will also clearly outline a timeline of all of the deliverables and the process as we get started.

Our expert team listens to your initial goals and pairs that with your specific brand assets (brand recognition, email etc.) along with your budget and schedule. We rely on our deep expertise working with education brands and use benchmarks, averages, and overall results to inform where to invest. As a client, you will have the chance to alter the plan to fit your needs.

Agreed! And we're glad that you recognize that. Generally small teams can only do a few things very well, and some stretch themselves too thinly by jumping into things that they may not do all of the time. We don't do that. We can tell you that everything we do, we have people who do it every day. In the proposal we send you, we also provide you with in-depth bios of our team, and you are always welcome to stalk us on social media. :)

Unfortunately not. Our passion is within education. In fact, it's what drives us. Our team believes that with every client we work with, we are improving the US education system one project at a time. We can certainly recommend some great firms if you reach out.

Don't worry, we generally have a lot of questions for you, too. Before we get started, we'll walk through our plan and you'll get to ask the founder, along with your account manager any questions you have.

Let's talk. We're happy to be flexible if PR doesn't make sense for you at this time. We also offer additional services such as SEO, online community, and procurement.

 

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