My Approach:
Key Milestones:
Audit of Existing Social Media
Development of New Social Media Guidelines
Launch of Revamped Social Media Strategy
My role:
Position in the project: Social Media Strategist & Designer
Team Collaboration: Worked closely with the content team and business development team.
Challenges
Problem Statement
Disjointed Social Media Presence: The Company's social media channels were messy, with inconsistent branding and visual designs, irregular posting schedules, and content that lacked a clear message.
Lack of Brand Identity: The posts didn’t reflect a cohesive brand image, leading to confusion among the audience and low engagement rates.
Initial Situation Analysis
Audit Findings: Conducted a comprehensive audit of the company's social media content. Identified issues such as inconsistent color schemes, varied tone of voice, and lack of alignment with brand values.
Audience Feedback: Analysed audience engagement and feedback, noting that followers were not resonating with the content due to its scattered approach and not value-adding them.
Strategy Development
Research & Insights
Audit Findings: Worked with the respective stakeholders to clearly define the company's brand identity, including core values, mission, and visual style. I played a big role in assisting the management by revisions to the logo and getting the buy-in from them before the logo was made public.
Competitor Benchmarking: Studied and referenced competitors’ social media strategies to identify best practices for creating a consistent and appealing brand image.
Strategic Planning
Core Strategy: Developed a social media revamp strategy focused on creating a unified brand voice and visual identity across all social media platforms, landing pages as well as EDMs.
Key Tactics:
Content Pillars: Established content pillars to guide consistent messaging (e.g., product education, customer stories, industry trends).
Visual Guidelines: Created a brand style guide with specific guidelines for colors, fonts, image styles, and post templates. Also, put in place proper processes to facilitate the start to end of each campaign better.
Posting Schedule: Implemented a structured posting calendar to ensure regular and timely content is posted.
Tools & Technologies
Platforms Used: Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Adobe Illustrator, and Figma (For design consistency and collaboration among the team and other stakeholders in the company).
Automation & Scheduling: Utilised scheduling capabilities from LinkedIn and Facebook Ads Manager to plan and automate posts, ensuring consistency. As well as using Hubspot for lead generation campaigns to track the number of leads generated.
Implementation
Execution Timeline
Phases of Implementation
Phase 1: Audit & Strategy Development
Phase 2: Design & Content Creation
Phase 3: Launch & Monitoring
Key Actions Taken:
Redesign of social media templates for posts, stories, and highlights.
Creating a content pillar for the content team to follow and proposing to conduct weekly meetings to share insights and standardising captions with a consistent tone of voice.
Implementation of a regular posting schedule aligned with audience activity.
Creative & Design Process
Brand Elements: Introduced consistent use of the company's new logo, brand colors, and fonts across all posts.
Consistency through simplicity: Breaking down each content pillar to a standardised template yet allowing others to express their creativity regardless of any designer working on it while still maintaining the brand's overall social media presence. For example, having small taggings to indicate the content is mainly for the respective countries and also a clear indication of what the content is about be it a blog post, system update, or case study in one look.
Campaign Management
Content Creation: Developed a series of posts that adhered to the new guidelines, focusing on brand storytelling and visually appealing designs.
Engagement Strategy: Incorporated interactive content such as polls, quizzes, and trend-jacking content to boost engagement.
Results & Impact
Key Metrics
Engagement Rate: Saw a 50% increase in engagement rates and an average CTR of 25% within the 12 months of the revamp on all social media channels.
Follower Growth: Achieved a total of 40% increase in followers on all channels due to the more appealing and consistent content.
Brand Recognition: Noted improved brand recognition and recall in user comments and messages.
Qualitative Impact
Stakeholders' Feedback: Stakeholders (Mainly the Sales and BD Department) reported receiving positive feedback from their audience, who appreciated the new, more polished look, and through the content reposted they were able to resonate with their prospect within their circle better.
Brand Cohesion: The revamped social media channels were now easily recognisable, contributing to a stronger overall brand identity.
Learnings & Takeaways
Challenges Faced
Resistance to Change: Initially faced some resistance from the staff in the company in adopting the new logo and brand guidelines. However, after coming up with a more structured process and translating it into, detailed presentations showing the potential benefits and forecasting the figurative growth. Eventually, I managed to persuade the stakeholders to allow the marketing team to execute the revamp of the social media channels.
Adapting Templates: Had to refine the templates and carefully crafted a detailed manual to ensure they were versatile enough for different types of content while maintaining consistency and sustainability of the company's brand image.
Key Learnings
Consistency is Key: Learned the critical importance of consistency in building a recognizable brand on social media and implementing a content pillar while having 1-2 pillars to include trend jacking and time-sensitive content will improve the versatility.
Audience-Centric Design: Realised that aligning content with audience preferences and behaviors significantly enhances engagement and reach.
Next Steps
Continuous Improvement: Plan to conduct quarterly reviews, half-yearly audits, and competitor analyses before making any form of decision on the social media strategy to ensure it evolves with changing trends and audience expectations.
Expansion: Consider applying similar strategies to other platforms such as YouTube to further enhance the company's digital presence. Also, with the popularity of short-form video content, I suggested incorporating some of our content into short-form video content to further increase our social media presence and ads performance as the platforms favours short-form content.
