The Keys to the Social Media Kingdom: Leveraging Strategy to Drive ROI

In the deadline-oriented world of AEC marketing, it's easy to let social media become an afterthought. However, a recent, engaging session with a British monarchy twist by marketing experts Melanie Meeks, CPSM, and Allie Horne, CPSM, has brought to light the importance of harnessing social media effectively. Here’s just some of the social media tea we spilled on this topic:

Identifying and Weighing Your Social Media Goals

To make the most of your social media strategy, it's essential to identify and adequately weigh your firm's social media goals. The session emphasized five types of social media content that directly align with these objectives:

• Increasing Brand Awareness and Staying Top of Mind: These posts connect with clients, create positive associations, and build brand equity.

• Establishing Your Brand as a Thought Leader: Sharing your firm's knowledge and expertise positions you as an authority in your field.

• Sharing Your Firm's Experience: Let your audience in on your journey, showcasing your projects, accomplishments, and the people behind your firm.

• Recruiting and Retention: Job seekers use social media to learn about company culture. Share your firm's culture to attract and retain top talent.

• Staying Top of Mind: Using current events, holidays and playful content to stay in front of clients and potential clients.

While you may want your social media strategy to touch on all these objectives, we suggest leveraging your firm's strategic or annual marketing plan to assign percentages to each category. This will help you build a social media content calendar that aligns with your specific goals.

Perform a Social Media Audit

A social media audit is a crucial step in understanding your current performance and making informed decisions going forward. Here are the steps in an audit:

• Create a List of Your Firm's Social Media Accounts: Start by identifying all the platforms your firm uses.

• Check Branding Consistency: Ensure that your branding is consistent across all platforms to create a unified brand identity.

• Identify Top Performing Content: Evaluate which posts have the most engagement. A good engagement rate is typically 3-5%.

• Evaluate and Compare Channel Performance: Tools like Pulsar can provide valuable insights into engagement metrics, helping you understand audience behaviors and anticipate trends.

• Gather and Analyze Demographics: Knowing your audience demographics will enable you to tailor your content effectively.

• Update Your Social Media Strategy: Based on the audit findings, make necessary adjustments to your social media strategy.

• Set KPI Goals: Establish clear Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to measure your success. Some KPI examples that often reinforce social media goals could be grow your following on a particular site, improve engagement 2% across platforms, increase posting frequency 50%. Choose a KPI or two that make sense for your firm based on all of the audit work you have just completed.

Time-Saving AI Tools

The role of AI in streamlining social media management can’t be overlooked. Several AI tools were recommended to make your social media journey more efficient:

• Written Content Generation: Tools like HubSpot, Copy.Ai, and ChatGPT can assist in generating written content.

• Visual Content Generation: Platforms like Midjourney can help you create engaging visual content.

• Photoshop AI Tools: Adobe offers several AI-powered features like Neural Filters, Intelligent Refine Edge, Sky replacement, Select Subject, and Content-Aware Fill.

• Adobe Sensei AI: Adobe Sensei provides an overall AI solution for Adobe products.

• Dall-E-2: This AI tool specializes in image generation.

• Bard: Bard is perfect for conversational brainstorming AI.

• Genmo: Genmo can assist in creating images, videos, and 3D models.

Social media is a powerful tool in AEC marketing. By identifying your goals, performing regular audits, and leveraging AI tools, you can create a robust and effective social media strategy for your firm. Do you need some back-up to set the groundwork for some of these objectives or to simply hone in on your firm’s social media goals? We do that! Get in touch and we can help you formulate a plan - cheerio!