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The irony is, the checklists and the fast pace don’t leave time for you to go after what you actually want—or to even get clear on what that is. Lost in the day-to-day, you may be struggling to strategize, set concrete goals for set time periods, choose KPIs, check in with these goals and KPIs regularly, and achieve results. When you don’t make time for these foundational marketing pillars on a regular basis, you’re much less likely to get where you want to go because you forget where you want to go, and, by the time you’ve checked in with your progress, it’s too late.

I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to stress you out even more. I’m here to help. When time and resources are limited, turn to these tried-and-true strategies to find peace (and success) in the noise. 

1. Plan Better

Take a good day or two to plan out a strong editorial calendar, goal and measurement framework, and events schedule through the end of the year. Simply Measured alum Kevin Shively has a great LinkedIn post about just this:

Measure twice, cut once. Take the time to plan carefully now, save time later. Think through as many details as you can, and put strong measurement schedules in place so that as little as possible blindsides you, and you spend less time scrambling to get things done at the last minute. This includes everything from scheduling meetings with key stakeholders, to content request dates for your graphic design team.

Then you can put your plans into motion, knowing that you’re simply building your house off the blueprint that you’ve created. This doesn’t mean you won’t run into a leaky pipe or two, but it does mean you’ll be better equipped when a leaky pipe comes along—and the house will get built the way you want it to.

2. But First Prioritize

What are the big rocks you need to move this year, from the top down? What is your leadership and marketing team hyper-focused on right now? Bucket your social media tactics into strategic categories, then rank each category in order of importance—based on what your organization has ranked as its main priorities for the year. For instance:

This will help you get focused, and likely force you to end or de-prioritize social activities that aren’t mapping to the priorities of your organization—which is a good thing, since it also forces you to spend more time on activities which are moving the needle for your brand.

3. Put Together a Request Form

Are you facing a ton of ad-hoc requests from different departments on a daily or weekly basis? Does it impact your clarity and confidence…and distract you from your main priorities?

A request form can help. It doesn’t have to be elaborate. Build it in Google Forms. Present it to the rest of your marketing organization, and ask everyone to fill this form out if they have content they’d like to promote on social.

All this will help people get used to planning ahead to get their content prioritized, and understand that social is an intention-based marketing channel just like any other marketing channel. As your coworkers get used to this system, be gentle—and guide them back to your form again and again. This will take more time at first, but give you more time back in the long run.

4. Scheduling for the Win

Schedule everything. This is the easiest and maybe most time-saving hack in this blog post. Schedule your social media reporting, which you can do with Simply Measured Social Analytics. 

Schedule your social media posts, which you can do with Sprout Social, which organizes and delivers all of your social content to one place to save time and drive engagement.

Schedule everything you can.

5. Turn to the Community

A huge barrier for many social marketers, and all human beings, is sustained motivation. If you have sustained motivation, you overcome fears and doubts by continuing to try new things, optimizing your current strategy, and dumping what’s not working without getting bogged down in regret. You have an optimization mindset. You use what has failed to do better next time, not as a self-flagellation mechanism.

You lose motivation because you’ve lost energy. So how do you re-energize? By turning to your like-minded community for advice and expertise, and making time to learn. It may seem like you’re just adding something new to your to-do list, but I promise you that the energy you gain from turning to your community and educating yourself will save you countless hours of staring at your screen like a zombie around 3 PM, when you know you shouldkeep working down that task list but just can’t right now.

• Join LinkedIn Groups and Facebook Groups so that you don’t have to search for the latest industry or social network updates, and so you can get the broader perspective on how to best leverage these updates.
• Get on the Right Email Lists…and actually read those emails.
• Go to Events, Like Data & Drinks. Mingle with others in your industry and re-up on best practices.
• Treat It Like a Real Meeting. Book time to energize on your calendar. As much as possible, don’t let people schedule over it.

There’s no brand like your brand.

While you can look to other brands in your industry and beyond for content inspiration, and even scope out what your biggest competitors are doing, the most reliable way to make sure your social activities are driving results and connecting with your audience is to look at the data specific to your own brand.

Here’s how to be a data-driven social marketer, whether you need a refresher or don’t know where to begin.

1. Get Historical

What have been your most successful campaigns and posts to date as a brand?

A small fraction of all the cross-channel data you get with Simply Measured Social Analytics

What are the commonalities in your most successful content? Do they come in the form of…

• Seasons/events: For example, time of year, conference, promotion
• The content of your content: For instance, if you are a cookware brand, posts including recipes vs. posts that include influencers? Content labeling is a great tool to use for this.
• Content type: Short-form video vs. long-form video vs. photos vs. carousels vs…
• Specific messaging: Which messages have resonated best with your audience in the past, all-up?

And where are your most successful posts/campaigns focused in the funnel?

• Awareness: They are focused on getting likely buyers to know more about your brand and/or product offering(s)
• Consideration: They are focused on getting people who already know/follow/have interacted with your brand to consider buying your product
• Decision: They are focused on driving web visits, form fills, and/or sales.
• Adoption: They are focused on continuing to engage people who already are customers
• Advocacy: They are focused on getting current customers to let their friends know about your brand and its offerings. Which, of course, cycles back to awareness.

The ideal social strategy includes a mix of all these, but knowing in which category you find the most success will show you where to focus the majority of your efforts.

Finally, put together an editorial calendar that incorporates all the content pillars that have been successful for you in the past.

2. Set Clear Goals and Track Progress Regularly

Set clear goals now, with KPIs. If you don’t know how, use this social metrics map.

Make yourself accountable. Schedule a quarterly review meeting for social, where you’ll show your results.

Track your progress regularly. Briefly look at your progress towards your goal first thing in the morning. This will ensure that you don’t lose sight of your goals and the tweaks you need to make to your social strategy to get there. What you prioritize will flourish. Prioritize the data, and you’re prioritizing results.

3. Identify Your Target Audience Today

Your target audience is constantly changing. What they want to see from brands and what they care about is constantly changing.

Easily run keyword and hashtag analysis with Simply Measured Social Listening.

Do you have a clear picture of who your target audience on social is today?

• Age: Which age ranges are most involved in the conversation around your key topics/themes?
• Location: Where does this audience mostly live? When should you be posting content, and should you have a global-local strategy?
• Life stages: Are they getting married? Having kids? Not getting married? Not having kids? Leveling up in their careers? Just entering the workforce? This is all relevant information, whether you are a B2B or B2C brand. You want the fullest possible picture of your audience.
• Where are they at in the funnel? Where in the funnel does most of the conversation seem to be focused?
• Behaviors: What is your audience doing/talking about doing on social?
• Where are they spending their time? Which social channels should you be most focused on?

Use a listening solution to find out.

4. Testing Is Everything

Here’s the bad news: not everything you try on social is going to work, even if you’re a data geek. But, if you’re afraid to fail, you won’t try new things. New features come out all the time. Test them! They may work and may not work. That is okay.

Test the same message on multiple platforms; test varying visual elements; test different product shots; test sound vs. no sound for videos; test different captions; test different CTAs.

If you’d like a primer on social testing, check out this handy guide. 

5. Build a Campaign Performance Template

This is an easily modifiable tool that you can use over and over again to present your results and explain to key stakeholders what you’ll be doing differently next time around. It should include:

• Goals and KPIs: What were your goals and KPIs at the beginning of the time period?
• Here’s what happened: Here are the campaigns we put out, and how they performed individually. Include examples of social audience reaction.
• Here’s how we performed to goal: Include your highest performing pieces of content.
• Here’s what we will change moving forward: This is where you include key learnings and action items.

This doesn’t have to be a long deck, but it should include data in context—not data for data’s sake.