The 1-Page Sustainable Social Media Growth Plan for Startup Brands

In the world of online marketing, managing social media accounts as a startup brand can sometimes be as challenging, as navigating an unfamiliar city. But what if we could simplify this journey and find a clue along the way?  

Let’s think about the concept of GPS: it can easily track speed, distance, and time. In this article, we will redefine the "GPS" concept. Explore how it can serve as a guiding force for your social media strategy to achieve growth.  

Social Growth Dilemma for Startups: The endless cycle between no growth and no budget    

Is this your brand on social media platforms?  

You keep posting, but you are still stuck with engagement. 

Your follower count has remained stagnant for a couple of months. 

When you link to your business, the bounce rate is high.

Even if there is some growth, it often doesn't last long. 

What's even worse? Less budget for our social media marketers.

What's the worst? A cycle of stagnation for your business. 

There are now plenty of viral posts out there, especially on TikTok. However, what's really lacking is growth and being the brand that customers always choose. That's why achieving sustainable social media growth is so crucial.

I mean, where can you find an advertising tool, like social media, that is budget-friendly, easily monitored, and accurately reaches your target audience? 

How to breakthrough? A new ‘GPS’ of Sustainable Growth  

Sustainable growth on social media isn't just possible; it's achievable with a clear plan. What’s the takeaway? Measure your account by a new "GPS" Goal, Pace, and Strategy 

Goal: if grow, grow smarter  

Setting clear goals is vital. Your followers count, brand awareness, engagement, ROI, and business goals should all align with measurable KPIs, enhancing your brand assets and fostering word of mouth. Each goal serves a unique purpose:  

• Follower:  

This part isn't about rehashing the conventional wisdom of setting monthly follower growth targets based on historical data. That's a story you've probably read elsewhere. Here, I want to spotlight a more dynamic strategy for boosting your follower count—timing your growth efforts around your brand's big moments. This approach not only sets a solid ground for your objectives but also puts them firmly within your grasp. 

Imagine, for a moment, a celebrity marketing campaign I once led. We didn't sit back and wait for the celebrity endorsement to be announced. Instead, three months out, we launched into a social media campaign with our sights set on broadening our brand's recognition. This included everything from weekly brand co-brandings to influencer engagements that kept our brand in the constant buzz. And though we kept the celebrity endorsement under wraps, due to confidentiality, our content subtly echoed the campaign's theme, like "Go beyond one side" Our posts regularly showcased a variety of bartending menus based on our products, aligning with a lively and multifaceted brand image.  

For startups aiming to convert celebrity followers to brand enthusiasts, it's crucial to amplify your presence and enhance brand recognition before the campaign's big day. Your social media content must reflect a harmonious blend of the celebrity's persona and your brand's identity, setting the stage for a surge in followers upon the endorsement announcement.  

It's akin to laying the groundwork before the big day, ensuring you're ready to reel in the catch when it arrives.  

Once you've captured the attention of followers during the endorsement period, the challenge shifts to keeping them engaged. This is where diverse social media content, strategic advertising, timely promotions, and vibrant community activities come into play. Make celebrity followers the cornerstone of your next growth phase, aiming for sustained momentum.  

In essence, growing your follower base is not the endgame but the starting point of a strategic and sustainable journey in social media management.  

• Engagement 

Mathew Sweezey said in his new book Context Marketing Revolution “The message couldn’t be more obvious: consumers simply aren’t listening anymore. They don’t have to.” In the new media age, customers are surrounded by tons of information, everything on social media platforms could attract their attention and leave an impression in their minds easily, even if a 5-second viral adorkable cat video.  

Now, give them a reason that are willing to engage with your post.

Maybe they like, comment or share your post to show up, or makes them resonate emotionally (your post suddenly makes them laugh) ; sometimes you cause anxiety, other times offer them favorable prices.  

All about the insights of consumers psychology. 

Taking an example from a low-alcohol beverage brand I served, we co-created content with our users for our everyday social media posts. We invited them to share their drinking stories by launching a call for submissions on social media platforms. We asked for tales of their first drink and stories from various scenarios where drinks played a role. With their permission, we then reshaped these stories into brand-aligned narratives for our posts, wrapping up each with a call for themes for the next series of stories. The most-liked commenter in the current post was rewarded with a free sample of a new product.  

After kicking off this column, we garnered a group of loyal social media followers who regularly shared their genuine stories in comments exceeding 200 words. They narrated how our products were part of, influenced, or changed their lives. In an era where brands strive to capture the young generation's attention on social media with unique, viral marketing ads, we weave a tapestry of real stories. This nurtured a habit of social media interaction among our brand users, achieving organic and sustainable social media engagement results. 

For the brand, leveraging a giveaway and a drinking story as a hook yielded a collection of vivid, real-life customer stories and consumption scenarios. These moments of genuine emotional connection with our users are invaluable. What's important is that, such precious emotional insights could very well inspire the big idea for our next campaign. 

• Conversion

We're now at a crossroads that can't be avoided and is a common challenge for many startups: conversion on social media platforms. Social media advertising shoulders the heavy responsibility of driving these conversions. It might seem harsh in the context of brand building, but it's undeniably a business necessity. The factors influencing ad conversions are complex, including creative design, ad formats, imagery or video thumbnails, copywriting, background music, timing, call-to-action, target audience, and more. I won't dwell on conversion tactics that rely on big promotional events to grab attention. After all, terms like "50% discount" and "free" on social media are too glaring for anyone to ignore—it's simply a matter of spending money for brands. However, this is not a sustainable strategy. Continuous, healthy, and positive social media ad conversion must be achieved through testing. Whether it's A/B testing for ad materials or exploring the effectiveness of influencer-sponsored ads in different fields, it's crucial to monitor data and adjust content strategies promptly before finding a sustainable, positive conversion cycle. Sometimes, the conversion data may reveal consumer purchase motivations that have little to do with the message you've painstakingly crafted. That's okay. The key is to recognise the reality brought by data, conduct multiple rounds of tests within your budget, and identify those crucial, unstable factors. 

Let's revisit the example of the low-alcohol beverage brand I worked for, which was the first of its kind in the domestic market at that time. In the early stages of media placements, our content direction for influencers was product-focused, highlighting the taste, flavour, texture, and aroma of our products to convey their deliciousness and uniqueness through visuals and text. However, as more competitors entered the market and began using similar "hit product" post templates, we hit a conversion bottleneck. After a comprehensive brand upgrade project lasting over six months, we shifted our content direction from product-focused to emotion-focused, based on our core audience of young women aged 25–35. We emphasised the brand's emotional companionship, with more influencers sharing how our product was there for them during life's ups and downs, encouraging them to face and showcase their true selves. This approach to influencer's sponsored ads helped the brand achieve new heights in e-commerce channel sales conversions. 

Pace: Keeping Content Alive for Your Target Audience  

If you ask me where startup brands invest most of their time in social media account management, I can confidently say it's in conducting user research and understanding the traffic rules of different platforms. User research is a labor-intensive task for marketers. It involves diving into the backend of social media platforms to grasp user media habits or analyse user behaviour on business websites or e-commerce platforms. Marketers tag users based on their journey, organising vast amounts of data into a coherent classification and summarising a precise brand user persona. This groundwork is all about finding the "right person" for your brand. 

Once you've identified the "right person," you delve deeper into understanding the traffic rules of the platforms where they are most active. For instance, when I was creating content strategies for Douyin (TikTok), much of my time was spent scripting for feed ads, live shopping ads, and planning landing pages. In contrast, managing Weibo and Xiaohongshu (social media platforms focusing on influencer endorsements, similar to Instagram) involved studying backend user data, trending post content, and regularly updating the media promotion briefs for influencers. 

Knowing how to tailor content according to the platform's content tone and traffic rules and strategically distributing content types can quickly endear your brand's content to the platform's algorithm. 

As the brand evolves—through brand image upgrades, expanded brand presence, and, most importantly, increased media spending—retaining brand users in alignment with the brand and platform's tone becomes crucial. Even if users land on your account page from an ad or a live broadcast, they should be able to understand the value your brand offers through videos that showcase your brand's tone. Simply put, it's about conveying the benefits to the consumer. 

When consulting for a DTC nutrition brand, I initially helped them build a social media matrix. At that time, social media platforms were the sole channel driving traffic to their e-commerce store for conversions. After analysing their e-commerce transaction data, I discovered that repeat purchasers were mostly mothers over 30. Our products were perfectly suited for providing efficient, convenient nutritional breakfasts for children over five years old. Consequently, we scheduled posts for every Sunday night at 10 p.m.—after younger moms had put their children to bed—to offer quick and nutritious breakfast recipes for Mondays. Not only did we receive numerous photos from mothers who tried our recipes, but these posts also consistently garnered "saves." Even though our products were not directly related to mother and baby goods, our brand content provided this demographic with fresh, relevant, and valuable content every week. 

Despite the ever-changing landscape of social media hot topics, the content and ad formats preferred by different platforms follow discernible patterns. Brands need to convey their unique value while embracing fluctuating trends and discussions. They should strive to maintain an updated and vibrant social media presence—not just for consumer goods but also for durable goods and B2B services. It's about "speaking human" to your audience, balancing professionalism with a touch of humanity.

Strategy: Mapping Beyond Digital

In 2022, when I was conducting the brand upgrade project for that low-alcohol beverage company, I'll be honest: updating our social media strategy was the last thing on my mind. Whether it was conducting focus groups after work for a week during the initial consumer research phase, enduring brainstorms in week-long brand meetings, iterating through five versions of the project plan, enduring a four-month tug-of-war with the branding and video shoot agencies, or exploring the application of brand visual styles with our in-house designers for half a month, social media strategy formulation took just two workdays once those issues were addressed. 

If we zoom out to view brand development on an annual scale, the digital strategy for a startup in need of rapid growth should be grounded in the overall strategy for the brand's yearly development. From an annual brand strategy perspective, the digital strategy can serve as a manifestation of decomposable, quantifiable goals rather than random posting, disorganised content forms, or the brand's self-indulgent entertainment. Whether it's official content posted on social media accounts, advertisements, or sponsored ads, the communicated brand story and values must be unified. 

Thus, the brand's annual marketing strategy precedes its social media strategy.

With this macro perspective, when crafting the social media calendar, we first mark out the major campaigns planned for the year, assigning them priorities based on their objectives and budgets. Official content and ads are then planned according to the campaign's importance (S/A/B/C level), organised around the pre-, mid-, and post-campaign phases. The remaining gaps in the calendar can be filled by tapping into social media content topics related to the annual marketing calendar and brand products or by deeply exploring emotional value points that strongly resonate with consumers and co-creating content with them to enhance interaction and brand loyalty. 

As mentioned earlier, before setting the annual social media strategy, I was deeply involved in formulating the brand's annual marketing plan—collaborating with the brand marketing director and product director to outline the market expansion, sales, product development, and media plans. After these meetings, we unified the brand keywords, big moments, and big ideas for brand advertising for the coming year. These strategies directly guided our social media content and ads—determining the style of images, copy, videos, campaigns, and product communication with consumers, the brand image we wanted to leave with consumers, and how to build their trust in the brand and products.  

In summary, when addressing issues, tackle the main conflicts first. With the bigger picture in hand, there's no need to panic. 

Summary

To sum it up, increasing lasting social media growth for startups is like travelling through a thick forest. Each step should be careful and informed. With this new 'GPS'—Goal, Pace, Strategy—we can confidently navigate and plan a path, leading to real engagement, more followers, and higher sales rates. 

Keep in mind, the real journey lies not in quickly gaining likes or followers. It's about creating a strong base for long-lasting loyalty and customer interaction. This means knowing your audience, hooking them with content that clicks with them, and always adjusting your strategy using feedback and data. 

Use this as your manual as you start your journey towards continuous advancement in the ever-changing world of social media. With a clear goal, a planned tactic, and a pledge to realness and interaction, your company can not just survive but prosper in the digital field!