Hello! My name is Isa and you’ve stumbled upon the landing page for my social media marketing strategy project. Keep on reading to learn what it takes to build a social media marketing strategy and all the lessons I’ve learned along the way. Enjoy!

My Goal 

I’ve been building Making It Up for the past five years and I’ve never actually created a social media strategy for it. I started Making It Up as a beauty blog for the everyday human and I quickly expanded to other platforms like Instagram and YouTube. 

Recently, I noticed a dip in my Instagram engagement, and my YouTube channel hasn’t been growing as quickly as I hoped. It’s because of these struggles that I decided to learn how to build a social media strategy and create one for my struggling platforms. 

My long-term goal is to grow both platforms by increasing my Instagram engagement rate from 4.2% to 4.5% and my Youtube conversion rate to 50 new subscribers per month. But my main goal for this project specifically, was building a killer social media strategy that would help me reach my long-term goals. Let’s see how I did!

My Weekly Project Updates 

Week 1: Setting S.M.A.R.T. Goals & Conducting a Social Media Audit

Week 2: Creating a Buyer Persona & Reading My Analytics 

Week 3: Creating my Posting Plan and Social Media Content Calendars

Week 4: Designing and Putting Together my Social Media Strategy + Mini-Test

What I Learned this Month 

• How to create a project management system using Notion 
• The best resources to learn about social media strategy 
• How to create a buyer persona for your social media followers
• The importance of a social media content calendar 
• How to read Youtube analytics 
• How to create a social media content calendar for a team
• Dissecting my social media strategy
• Mini strategy test 

Here are my finalized social media strategies:

My Youtube strategy 

My Instagram strategy

What I accomplished

So, did I accomplish my goal? Yes!

I created two killer social media marketing strategies; one for my Instagram and one for my Youtube channel, and I just started implementing them to get closer to my long-term goal. And even though I just started implementing my strategies I can already see the positive effects and growth on my social media platforms! I’ve already gained over 50 subscribers on YouTube and the engagement on my Instagram content has gotten a bit higher.

There were a lot of small steps I had to take throughout the month to bring my strategies to life. So what exactly were those steps?

• I built a project management system using Notion to keep me organized and accountable week by week.
• I researched and gained proficiency in social media marketing strategies by creating two for my social media platforms.
• I learned the importance of analytics in marketing and applied them to my strategies to accelerate growth.
• I wrote eight blog posts documenting my project journey and what I learned. 
• I created three loom videos documenting my project and teaching others how to build certain elements of a social media marketing strategy.

Why I did this project 

To help my Instagram and Youtube Channel grow 

After years of not growing at the pace I wanted to grow in regards to my social media, I decided I wanted to do something about it. I’ve spent years blaming external factors like the algorithm and my current location, instead of taking action and creating content people wanted to see. 

I knew what a social media marketing strategy was, but I always thought it was something for businesses that sold products or services. I never really thought it could help me ‘sell’ my content and grow my platforms. Until now.

To learn how to understand and best communicate with my audience 

The biggest mistake most content creators make is not understanding their audience. My thing has always been posting content that I enjoy making and that I think has value, but it never occurred to me to think about my audience. Do they think my content is valuable? Do they enjoy engaging with the kind of content I like to make?

I realized I needed a healthy balance of creating content that added value to my viewers and that I enjoyed creating. The whole process of creating my social media strategies gave me insight into tools like buyer personas and social media analytics. Those tools helped me understand who my viewers are and where they come from. But most importantly they helped me understand why they watch my videos and what they need from my content. 

After completing this project, I have a clearer view of who I’m creating content for and the problems they need me to solve through it. I know the kind of content that will help me grow and the kind of content I need to stop creating.

To learn the importance of analytics in marketing 

I used to think that marketing and analytics were two separate things. But one can’t exist without the other. They go hand in hand. 

Analytics give you insight on things like where your viewers and followers come from, how they find you, the kind of content they most enjoy. Knowing how to read analytics is the secret to a successful social media presence.

If you know how to read analytics you know the kind of content that will get more engagement, the kind of platforms that work best for what you’re trying to do, and the kind of people you’re trying to reach. 

Knowing all of that will make the content creation process much easier because you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. You just have to make it suitable for your audience.

To learn how to manage a project

This is the most valuable thing I learned this month. Because no matter what I want to do in life or the size of my projects, efficient project management will get me through it. 

I’ve always considered myself an organized person and it physically pains me to miss a deadline. In past projects, I’ve made to-do lists to keep me accountable but nothing works quite as well as a digital project manager. At least for me. This month my project management system got me through every single week without missing a deadline.  

I’ve never done a project this long by myself so at the beginning, I was overwhelmed with the number of things I had to do. As it turns out, having a detailed management system with a calendar, to-do lists, and deadlines made it easy for me to divide the work up weekly and tackle things one at a time without getting too overwhelmed.

Whenever things got tough or I needed to switch content around, having my manager as a visual timeline made it easy to rearrange parts of my project without messing up the order or getting stressed. 

Running and completing a month-long project also gave me so much confidence in my ability to manage challenging things for long periods of time. I learned a lot of skills that’ll help me succeed in future projects and I learned some skills I need to leave behind.

Problems I ran into and how I solved them 

Overwhelming anxiety 

At the beginning stages of the project, I was clouded by overwhelming anxiety. There were a lot of unknowns regarding my project but what I did know was that I had a lot of work to tackle in a month.  

I let my anxiety overcome me to the point where I couldn’t get any work done because I didn’t know where to start. And that caused me to waste a few days where I could have gotten a headstart on my project. I made up for it, of course, but I would have liked to still permit myself to feel the anxiety and work anyways. 

The way I was able to get past my overwhelming anxiety and start working was by building a project management system. By outlining every step of the project and adding weekly deadlines I had a clearer view of what I had to do day by day and when I had to have it done. By breaking down my work, I was able to see that I had enough time and I didn’t have to complete everything right away. 

My project management system calmed my anxiety every week after that by giving me a clear gameplan of my tasks, deliverables and also, of everything I had already completed.

Documentation 

Documenting my project turned out to be a bigger challenge than I initially thought. Documentation is not just about telling people what you’re doing, it’s about showing them what and how you’re doing it. 

When I started planning my project I had a clear idea of what some of my documentation was gonna look like. I had some blog posts in mind and a few video concepts that I could play with. But I didn’t have many ideas at the start. I came up with a lot of ideas that I switched around as I learned more about social media strategies and the direction of my project. And then, there were times when I struggled with coming up with ideas on how to document certain steps of my project and I kept drawing a blank. 

Whenever I started struggling with my documentation I usually turned to examples. I researched other similar projects online to get inspiration from their ideas and understand how to best share and structure my learnings. I also sought out advice and feedback on my ideas to see how I could improve them and make my documentation clearer and more valuable to the reader.

Designing my strategies 

When I started working on my social media strategies weekly, I was focused on the content of them, not the designs. And when I finished my strategies and put them together, I realized that my initial design wasn’t exactly aesthetically pleasing and I needed to switch it up asap. 

I struggled a lot with this because I wanted to come up with a unique concept and work on it without any help. I was using Canva but I didn’t want to use a template. I wanted to create something from scratch. After many ugly iterations of my strategies, I finally admitted to myself I’m not a graphic designer and that I needed help. 

My solution to the problem: find a template within Canva that I liked and tweak it to fit my strategies. Because I already had all the information, all I had to do was copy and paste it to fit my new design. The process took me less than two hours and I got the result I wanted. Two beautifully designed social media strategies that are easy to understand and pretty to look at.

So, what now?

All that’s left to do now is implement my strategies and watch my social media platforms grow. I already started implementing it and, although it’s too early to tell, I think they will be successful. 

Apart from keeping a monthly content calendar for my videos and posts, I’m making it a goal to revise my strategies every three months and tweak them accordingly. As my platforms grow I’m sure my goals will grow with them and my audience may or may not stay the same. So I want to keep my current strategies as a base but make sure they’re updated to fit my needs.

If you want to stay up to date with my project and see if it was a success, you can follow along with my Youtube and Instagram journey and see the growth for yourself! If you’re into easy and real makeup and beauty, I also recommend you follow along, because that’s what Making It Up is all about.

Let’s connect!

If you have any questions or insights on social media marketing strategies, content creation, or beauty and makeup; I’d love to connect!

 Shoot me an email at isabellabonifasic@gmail.com or connect with me via social media on Instagram and/or Youtube. 

Thanks for following along on my social media marketing strategy journey. Till next time!