Posting on social media has turned into an art form for brands.
Social media content isn’t relegated to bored interns anymore—it’s a brand marketing powerhouse. It takes research, consistency, creativity, and planning. It’s an integral part of a business’ marketing strategy.
You can’t just throw content at the wall to see what sticks. You need a roadmap that guides your content strategy through the rocky terrain of the social media landscape.
You need social media content mapping.
But what is it? How can it benefit your brand? And how can you implement it to stay consistent, relevant, and engaging?
In this article, we’ll discuss all things social media content mapping and how you can implement this useful tool into your social media marketing strategy.
Free to use image sourced from Pixabay
What is social media content mapping?
Most brands operate multiple social media accounts.
Each platform lends itself to specific types of content, has its own demographics, and uses different methods of engagement. Each customer is at a different stage of the sales funnel, passing through awareness and consideration before converting.
And you have an audience with high expectations—from consistency to high call center service level standards across your brand.
This is where a social media content map comes in handy. It’s a visual tool that plots a course for content across every channel, content type, subject matter, and stage of the customer journey. Every good social media marketing proposal includes a social media content map.
Instead of crafting content by the seat of your pants, you have a set of guidelines that determine every aspect of your brand’s voice—tone, fonts, image usage, video style, picture filters, subject matter, posting schedule, etc.
If you need to whip up a post quickly, you can refer back to your content map to design the style and tone of your content in a way that reflects your brand’s voice. If you need to develop a lengthy social media marketing campaign, you can refer to your content map to stay consistent throughout the project.
Why is social media content mapping so important to a consistent brand voice?
Your brand voice is everything. It’s how people recognize, trust, and relate to you.
Brand consistency is so important because:
- Your style and tone make you instantly recognizable.
- Audiences learn to feel safe with your products, services, support, and messaging.
- This builds deeper relationships with your customers, increasing customer loyalty and advocacy.
Despite this, brands often miss the mark on consistency.
Research conducted in 2021 by brand enablement company Marq found that 77% of those surveyed claimed their business created off-brand content, and 31% of respondents said their brand guidelines were followed “selectively”.
Despite 65% of respondents saying that brand consistency led to a 10–20% increase in revenue, many businesses were falling short on brand guidelines.
Image sourced from info.marq.com
Brand consistency is important, but it can be difficult to achieve without a roadmap.
Think of all the social media accounts your business maintains, the variety of content you produce, and the mountains of information you’re trying to communicate.
It’s easy to rush out off-brand content that doesn’t fit your brand’s voice just so you feel like you’re putting something, anything, out there.
Social media mapping solves this problem by creating:
- A clear guide from the start: you can define your social media marketing goals upfront and design your content map to reach those goals.
- A way to visualize content gaps: this helps you fill those gaps
- Better collaboration: your teams all have a common guide to refer to. Like many workforce optimization solutions, this gets everyone moving in the same direction as a team, increasing productivity and efficiency. It also avoids the problem of rogue team members creating off-brand content in a deadline rush.
- Better forward planning: planning future content becomes much simpler when referring to a long-term roadmap.
- More organization: whether you’re creating content on a time crunch or planning ahead, a content map makes designing consistent content quicker, easier, and more efficient.
- A guide for the customer journey: a content map can help you nudge customers from one stage of the sales funnel to the next.
- A style guide: this keeps the look and feel of your content familiar to your audience. Just make sure you put in place the necessary measures to protect your business social media accounts. If someone hacks into your Facebook account and starts posting their own material, your style guide can only do so much to keep your brand’s set content look and feel on social media.
- Content for every occasion: if you’re stuck for something to post one day, you can easily refer back to your content map for ideas.
7 steps to social media content mapping for brand consistency
Now that we know what social media content mapping is, let’s look at how you can implement it into your social media strategy.
1. Define and monitor your goals
What are your goals for creating a social media content map? Not establishing your goals up front can get you lost before you even start mapping.
Clear goals get everyone on the same page and working towards a common cause.
They can include general targets like increasing revenue or hitting annual sales targets. Or they can include more specific goals like increasing click-through rates from social media accounts to your online store or improving your quality assurance in call center teams.
Once you’ve established your goals, you’ll need metrics to measure them. For example, social media and website analytics tools can give you the data you need if you’re looking to improve click-through rates. If you want to focus purely on sales, you can monitor your revenue.
The important thing is to:
- Establish clear goals.
- Measure the metrics that allow you to analyze whether those goals are being reached.
- Use that data to determine what you’re doing right and what needs to be improved.
- Analyze what you’re doing wrong and correct your course.
2. Understand your audience
Every content strategy requires audience research.
To deliver the right content at the right time, you need to understand who your customers are and where they are in their buying journey. You need well-crafted demand generation strategies to pinpoint your audience and understand what they want.
You can get to know your audience on social media by:
- Researching which social media platforms your demographics are on.
- Reading what your current followers (if you have them) post.
- Using social listening—for instance, keep track of hashtags relevant to your business and industry.
- Looking at your competitors’ social media accounts to see what kind of content gets the most engagement from your shared audience.
- Conducting customer surveys focused on preferred types of content and expectations of brand consistency.
Once you’ve conducted audience research, it’s time to put it to use.
3. Create buyer personas and plot their journey
Buyer personas are fictional representations of your ideal customers—those most likely to purchase something from your brand.
You can use them to establish guidelines for social media content that appeals to your audience wherever they are in their customer journey. This helps you plot a more consistent content map that aligns with audience expectations and business goals.
Let’s look at an example:
Image created by author using Canva
Here, you can add data that paints a more holistic profile of your potential customer. This makes it easier to get to know them—their personalities, their hopes, and their struggles.
Then, you can plot their customer journey and identify touchpoints where you can strategically deliver content to them, guiding them from one stage to the next.
Image created by author using Canva
You can create multiple buyer personas and plot their journeys. Then, you can design content that consistently delivers value and familiarity throughout any scenario.
4. Brainstorm content ideas
Now comes the fun part.
When you start brainstorming content, be sure to frame your ideas around your buyer personas and their journeys. And don’t be afraid to get creative! This is just a brainstorming session, not a final version of your content map.
We’ve used a free Google Sheets template from LocaliQ as an example.
Let’s brainstorm a bit right now.
Let’s say your buyer persona is a young cloud migrations developer obsessed with technology and eager to expand their skills, and you’re a cloud service provider.
At the awareness stage, they’re just coming across your brand. So ask yourself: what kind of content do they want to see? How can I offer them value? How can I position myself as an authority?
Educational content! You could craft a Twitter post that links to your free webinar on YouTube. You might get a follower on both of those channels. You could also create an informative video about technology trends and your company, and promote it through CTV advertising for expanded reach.
The consistency here is that you are an authority on technology and a trustworthy service provider.
Brainstorming ideas gives you a nice list of potential content with which to plot your map.
5. Establish your brand’s style guide
A style guide allows teams to create content that looks and feels consistent across every social media channel and content type. It is a vital part of your social media content map.
To create brand consistency, you’ll need a style guide that everyone follows. This includes your brand’s:
- Color palette
- Fonts
- Post layouts for each different channel
- Background, header, and profile images for your social media accounts
- Logo
- Tone of voice
- Personality
- Social media filters, frames, stickers, etc.
The goal is to make your brand instantly recognizable. Familiarity creates trust, helps build deeper customer relationships, and helps you stand out from your competitors.
6. Create a schedule
Maintaining a consistent social media posting schedule across multiple platforms is vital to staying front-of-mind with your audience.
Many brands try to post daily or multiple times a day, but it really depends on your style and audience expectations. You should aim for at least once a week to remain relevant, though.
If you’re thinking, “That sounds like a lot of content!”, then you’re getting the idea. All the more reason to have a comprehensive social media content map with a schedule.
Let’s look at a free template by Hubspot as an example.
Image sourced from Hubspot.com
With a content calendar, you can plan your content as far ahead as you like. Just make sure you fill your calendar with different types of content so as not to bore your audience. Let’s say you sell consultant scheduling software. You could have an infographic on how to set up a successful consultancy business one time, and a poll on the best strategy for client retention the following week.
You can create campaigns for future events, holidays, and special occasions. You can plan marketing content for upcoming sales, product launches, or collaborations.
With this content variety, you can keep your target audience engaged throughout. This kind of forward planning will also ensure you’re posting consistently and never rushing out off-brand content to fill an unforeseen gap.
7. Embrace flexibility
We don’t want you to think that social media content mapping is set in stone.
After all, you can’t predict everything, especially in a world that feels increasingly turbulent in recent years.
The beauty of a social media content map is that it helps you spot new opportunities to reach audiences. You can look at your content map and find the gaps where you might create something incredible.
Let’s use the COVID-19 pandemic as an example. No brand had this global upheaval pencilled into their 2020 content map.
But many saw an opportunity to use social media for good during this difficult time. They were flexible, rolling with the punches to create community and humor.
One great example is the Getty Museum. Despite social distancing necessitating their closure, they took to X (Twitter) to throw down the gauntlet.
Image sourced from x.com
The museum stuck to its brand voice even during a global catastrophe, staying fun, educational, and community-centric.
Maintain brand consistency with social media content mapping
Social media content mapping is more than just a posting guide—it’s your entire social media strategy laid out in fine detail.
Need to whip up a post quickly? Check the style guide for tone and aesthetic consistency.
Need to craft an in-depth holiday campaign? Check your buyer personas and brainstorm ideas they’ll engage with. Then, add it to your calendar so that everyone knows what they’re working on.
A social media content map:
- Keeps your brand voice consistent across all channels and content types.
- Makes your brand instantly recognizable to customers.
- Helps you understand your audience better, allowing you to craft content that appeals to them.
- Allows you to plan content in advance.
- Helps you to avoid rushed, off-brand content that might hurt your brand.
- Helps teams collaborate through a common goal and shared reference point.
Every business needs a content map as part of its social media marketing strategy, and our 7-step guide should get you mapping like a pro. Start now to reinforce the consistency of your brand voice and reap the benefits of social media content mapping!
