Over 4.2 billion people actively engage with social media daily, a number that’s doubled in less than five years. Each of those users spends over 2 hours a day on social media channels. There’s never been a better opportunity to build meaningful customer relationships, get your brand in the spotlight, and drive sales.

No Plan, No Can Do

Social media seems like an easy arena to conquer. However, as with everything else in business, leaping in without a plan is the easiest way to doom your business to failure. Remember, even free social media options require you to invest time and energy, so it’s critical you have a focused plan to make the most of it.

You should be focusing on arenas that will deliver a clear return on that investment. You don’t want to aim for a platform because it’s ‘cool’, but rather because your target market hangs out there and you can meaningfully engage with them through it. Start out with some clear goals built around what will have a real impact on your brand, and construct them using the SMART system. If you already have a social media presence, now’s the time to check in with what they’re achieving for you and what is yielding the best results.

It’s always a good idea to keep on top of what the competition is doing, too. While directly copying them would be a no-no, knowing how they’re reaching customers, where it’s delivering, and learning from their mistakes is a fantastic way to hit the ground running.

Use the Right Channels

One of the worst social media marketing mistakes a small business can do is chasing trendy over what’s relevant to your consumers. Where are your audience spending their time? It doesn’t matter if Gen Z is all about TikTok if you’re selling to retirees!

Don’t just assume based on what you feel or the media says, either. Instead, turn to meaningful metrics that give real demographic information on who’s using networks, how they engage with them, and what’s working for marketing there. Don’t forget to add your own market research to this, either! It’s good to have a range of social media channels for your brand, but you also don’t want to split your efforts too far and end up wasting them. If your analytics tell you your customers are focusing on specific channels, use that to your advantage.

Know Who Buys Your Brand

Talking about which, without meaningful data under your belt, you lose the greatest feature of social marketing- the ability to micro-target those who are most interested in what you offer. Start by meaningfully compiling both your target market, and the niche target audiences within it.

Make sure you’re using the on-platform metrics and analysis to bring in further data, and dig deep. What does your audience like? What do they look like? Do they come from specific demographics and locations? This will help you keep your budget lean and your focus tight. Don’t neglect the power of buyer personas for this, either.

Build Relationships Where It Counts

Modern marketing has veered away from the older ‘hard sell’ model. You shouldn’t be beating customers over the head with products alone. You want to build meaningful relationships that establish your brand as a key part of their lifestyle, too.

Who are you as a brand? What do you stand for? Are you regularly engaging with the people who engage with you? Fans sharing and liking content, or commenting on it, is one of the best ways to rise in social algorithms, get organic traction, and gain exposure.

Don’t forget to onboard relevant authorities within your brand niche, either. Whether you’re building meaningful relationships on specialist social media sites (Vampr, for example, connects musicians globally) or seeking out influencers in your genre. Micro-influencers and nano-influencers have become an increasingly important part of the social media marketing landscape, and are often well within the budget of even the smallest companies.

Likewise, when followers generate content you can use, be it through brand hashtags or contests, you can give them a shout-out and generate goodwill.

Trend Smartly

First up, don’t take this one as an invitation to jump on every viral meme. This can backfire as easily as it can work for you. But you should be paying attention to what is trending, especially within your business niche, and making it work smartly for you. This can help you create content that’s on the ball, relevant, and interesting to your followers.

In the same vein, but thinking broadly, make sure you’re addressing customer’s needs realistically. Insurance products, for example, should be encouraging their market to update as major life stages come- having a baby, say, or retirement. Always look to create content that’s compelling for the interests of your audience.

Create Content Over Genres

Once you’ve found the right social platforms to use, don’t get hung up on one content format. Video is booming, but there’s still a ton of space for written word, infographics, and still imagery. Again, make sure you have analytics and metrics in place to track what’s resonating well with your followers, too.

A/B testing is a technique where you run two pieces of content, or two ads with different copy, against each other and measure their overall performance. When you have a clear winner, refine, test, and tweak against another piece until you find your winning formats.

Overall, social media marketing is an incredibly worthwhile route, even for the smallest of businesses. The keys lie in knowing your market, tracking your efforts through metrics and data analytics, and building meaningful relationships that help boost your brand’s bottom line.

How do you know it’s time for a social media makeover?

• Your social media has no rhyme or reason. It’s kind of … random. You’re spending loads of time posting but it looks bland and gets no engagement. All that effort isn’t translating into much growth or profit.
• You know your brand could look better. Do you ever catch yourself scrolling and daydreaming? Imagining how your brand could look a little bit cooler? You know your brand could look more unified, professional and relevant, but you simply don’t know how to do it, or you can’t afford to hire a designer.
• You’re not on social media. You have a business already established and a website up and running, but you need to get your brand on social media.
• You’re just starting out. Maybe you’re a small business or side hustle, and you want to do it properly on social media, from the get-go.

Whether it’s taking someone’s wardrobe from drab to fab, or transforming dull living spaces into a dream home, everybody loves a good makeover — probably because we like to see people living their best lives.

Your social media channels as an everyday entrepreneur are no different. But giving your brand a social media makeover goes further than just looking good.

Having a powerful presence on social media can help you maintain a competitive edge, setting you up to sell more, and keep your business thriving.

Maintaining a social media account might feel like a productive use of your time, but pottering around aimlessly in the digital space can end up wasting more energy than it generates for your brand.

Social media is supposed to work for you, gaining you leads, fans, subscribers, customers and recognition. The juice has to be worth the squeeze.

We’ve got some ideas to help create the best brand presence you possibly can, to increase your odds out there in the social media jungle.

Armed with this knowledge, we’ll show you a little shortcut to creating professional-looking designs too, in the form of Layout Collections in GoDaddy Studio.

What does a great social media feed look like?

You know those social media accounts that you just love to see popping up on your phone? That’s not by accident. Looking effortlessly attractive as a brand takes some upfront work to build solid foundations.

Brands with great social media feeds typically get at least some of these things right:

• They publish excellent content. It’s inspirational, informative, or entertaining – providing some value to their target audience.

• They have a distinct identity. When it’s done well, you can recognize a brand at a glance before you even read the first word. Their coherent brand identity also differentiates their business space from the personal accounts that are intermingled on your feed.

• They touch on a defined pool of topics. You can’t talk about everything to everyone – so they narrow it down to some recurring themes, centered on their audience, their product, and their values. Where these intersect, is their sweet spot; the conversation they can own.
• There’s a defined cadence. Whether it’s three times a day or three times a week, a brand is more likely to show up in our feeds (and become memorable to its audience) if they have a regular publishing routine. Diligence is rewarded on most algorithms, too!

• They value aesthetics. Brands doing well on social media have quality, well-considered content that makes your eyes happy: think beautiful photos, playful design, popping colors, gorgeous fonts, and eye-catching graphics that elevate a post from a random photo to a work of art. Some of the best brands regard their feed as an ever-evolving work of art.

• Their content is actionable. There’s a clear message telling the reader what they want them to do – whether it’s entering a competition, commenting on a particular post, or signing up for a product or service.
• They create content with mutual benefit in mind. This means either delivering a moment of insight or delight, or creating a chance for the reader to reap some benefit – a discount, a sale, a competition, a lesson, or the chance to gain more information about a topic.

• They engage with customers and other brands (they don’t just post and duck). Popular brands are responding to comments, thanking customers for compliments, or solving simple problems, rather than publishing a piece of content and never interacting with it again. They’re part of like-minded online communities and business networks, engaging with these conversations.
• They engage with current events, trends and memes. Inasmuch as we’re encouraging planning, the brands who are strong on social don’t lock things in months ahead without making space for some spontaneous reactions. Bernie on a chair, anyone?
• They sync with special days, seasons and holidays. In doing this, they’re responding to a world that’s constantly in flux.    

Most of all, brands doing well on social media are the ones who are using their social media channels to help them achieve their business goals.

How do you get started on a social media makeover?

It may seem overwhelming to try and get to the same level as bigger, more established brands, but this is absolutely an attainable goal — and you can do it yourself, without spending money on hiring a designer.

Even if you’re a single person side hustle, looking premium will create that perception of professionalism (nobody needs to know it’s just you and your phone).

Remember that it’s more than a once-off brand revamp: reinventing yourself is actually an essential habit to develop as an entrepreneur. Luckily, it’s something you can get better and better at over time, and the proof of the pudding is in the tasting: growth.

We’re going to show you how to up your game on social media, with some best practice tips combined with stacks of practical know-how. But before we dive into the creative stuff, it’s important to address the reasons behind why you’re doing this. Getting this down before you start redesigning will help you reap both immediate and long-term benefits.

What does a social media makeover involve?

There are five fundamental steps you need to walk through when it comes to pulling off a successful social media makeover, with questions to ask yourself at each stage. Let’s take a closer look:

1. Consider your purpose

• Why are you on social media in the first place? What are you trying to achieve?
• Which platforms are right for you, in terms of your big goals? Remember that you don’t have to be everywhere at once.
• What’s worked/not worked for you in the past? Be honest, and learn from your mistakes — as well as your successes of course.
• What’s your brand really about, beyond profit? How do you want to show up and engage on social media, and how do you want your audience to view you?

2. Set measurable goals

Whether it’s more sales, more leads, more engagement or building a community, set yourself a target and a timeline. This doesn’t have to be too complicated if you’re starting out. Use your best guess as a baseline (100 new subscribers a month, 15% more traffic to the blog via Instagram), and adjust your targets once the data starts rolling in week after week.

Hopefully, your feed will start looking more stylish and coherent, creating an impression of improvement, but make sure your goals are something you can measure directly, to keep you on course and motivated.

The good news is that most social platforms have easy access to basic analytics, for free. You don’t need to get neck-deep in the data, but you do want some objective measure to know if your numbers are moving up or down. This basic data will guide your strategy on an ongoing basis.

3. Find your brand’s unique style (your presence)

Nobody knows your brand better than you. So, what is its personality: bold or classic? Playful or street? The design will ultimately create this impression to new customers.

Luckily, there are 13 different styles to guide you here, so you can choose the one that’s absolutely right for you. Naturally, you can customize your unique brand identity, but it’s useful to start with some guardrails.

Remember, your style is inextricably linked to your audience. It reflects a worldview, and not just a “look.”

Once you have your unique style in mind, take some time to explore all the graphics, logos, images, color palettes, and fonts we have in GoDaddy Stuido. Save your favorites — these will form part of your brand identity kit.

4. Customize templates and layout collections

This is the fun part! Find templates for the formats you’ll be using the most, whether it’s a competition poster or a YouTube thumbnail. We have thousands of designs, grouped by platforms, occasions, and styles.

Layout collections make the process even easier, by offering you a full pack of consistently designed templates across a range of formats and platforms.

Customize templates by applying your brand’s unique graphics, fonts, colors, logo, and images to a professional design.

Find the layout collection that suits your brand best and customize it with your brand’s colors, fonts, logo, graphics, and images.

5. Plan ahead with a content calendar

• Content for a week: Pick a few types of social content that you produce on a regular basis. These could include discussion topics, product features, user showcases, links to your blog, motivational quotes… the options are endless, but narrow it down to keep your brand’s messaging consistent.
• Content for a month: Look at the upcoming month(s) to identify special days, holidays, or cultural moments that might create opportunities to produce relevant content.
• Content for a year: Identify a few key holidays/seasons/events that hold maximum marketing potential for your brand well in advance. Use the time to plan campaigns — a sale, a competition, an event — for maximum impact.

Once you have the basic principles in place by working through this framework, the design process should be more logical, much easier, and — most importantly — more fun than complicated. As an everyday entrepreneur, you’ve got a ton of things on your to-do list.

Creating content shouldn’t be sucking hours out of your day, or hundreds of dollars out of your business account.

Make your brand beautiful

Templates and layout collections make it super easy to create a full social media kit with your unique brand identity: simply add your brand’s fonts, colors, graphics, and images to professionally designed templates.

Our layout collections were created with this exact function in mind, to allow you to develop a consistent library of ready-to-go content, instead of designing from templates one at a time, as the need arises. Remember: the secret to success is to have your brand vision and goals clearly identified before you start.

Now that we’ve broken it down for you, giving your brand a social media makeover doesn’t sound that overwhelming, does it? You’ve got this.

GoDaddy Studio is the perfect tool to help you show up beautifully, and make an impact on social media — every time.

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