7 Steps To Create A Startup Social Media Strategy and Roadmap That Wins

If you’re a disruptor or bringing something systematically new to the market, you might be seriously contemplating whether engaging in social media marketing is worth it.

You’re reinventing the wheel; trying to convince the market that there’s a new and improved way to do things. Or you’re pulling up a new market out of “thin air”. 

It’s hard to drown out the noise of fifty other companies pushing out similar content just because everyone’s on social media and they must be too.

And they are not even exactly your competitors because you are out to redefine the market. You want to build an engaged community that will discover the true value of your disruptive solution and stay loyal to your brand — bringing the good news to whoever cares to listen. 

I’ve been there because I am an early adopter of several disruptive products. ChatGPT, Fireflies Notetaker, InVideo, HeyGen… I’m always willing to try them out and bring the good news to friends without even being prompted to do so. 

You will strike gold and unlock how to scale your disruptive startup when you attract and acquire users like this (early adopters).

I know generic tips won't cut it. You’ve perhaps read other blog posts barely scraping the top of what needs to be done and hard-selling you their agency services in the conclusion.

Well, you’ve struck gold! This guide is your secret weapon to building a startup social media strategy and roadmap that attracts early adopters and explodes your audience, even if your category is brand new.

Creating Your Startup’s Social Media Strategy and Roadmap

For all the hurdles you’ve spent hours poring over due to the unique case of your startup. For all the questions you have about increasing brand awareness as a new startup trying to reinvent the wheel and disrupt category kings. There’s a good answer: you need a social media strategy.

Think of it this way: when a country or an entity is preparing for war, they rack up maps to visualize their territory and that of their enemies.

They also take stock to understand their strengths and the weapons available to them. Finally, they send spies to gauge their enemy’s strengths and weapon stack.

They do all these for two reasons: one is to understand if they are as strong as or stronger than their enemy. If this is the case, they would then create their winning strategy. 

Two is to understand if they are not as strong as their enemy.

If this is the case, they would not necessarily back down. They would often think of a lean strategy that would leverage their strengths and minimize their losses.

As an early-stage startup — regardless of how disruptive your solution is — you are the city in the second example.

The only way you can win is if you craft a tailored social media strategy that recognizes your strengths, maps out the market, details the key players and their weaknesses, proves how your solution is differentiated, and proposes an approach to winning early adopters that will minimize your expenses and maximize your acquisition rate.

Running social media marketing for early-stage startups is not a walk in the park. But how do you create that winning social media marketing strategy for your startup?

For this piece, we'll use Orion Healthcare Technology as a use case. So, how do we create a social marketing strategy for this healthcare data tech startup?

Step 1: Understand Your Market and How Your Disruptive Startup Fits In

The first step in mapping out your winning social media strategy is to understand the current situation of the market you’re trying to penetrate and the likely trajectory it will follow.

Here’s the reason: Understanding what’s currently at play in the market and what is likely to happen will give you insights into how you can fit into the market and achieve your goals of attracting early adopters and scaling your business.

Many companies have a rushed timeline. They want to launch by Q4 2024, so, they rush through the foundational steps.

Sometimes, it works if you have enough resources to experiment and tinker on the go.

However, suppose you’re working on a lean budget and have invested a lot of time and resources into building your disruptive solution.

In that case, you need to also invest time into strategically crafting your social media entry. This preliminary market research needs to be all-encompassing.

First, you need a market overview that will cover your Total Addressable Market. This market overview will see you analyze non-direct competitors and sometimes target users that do not fully fit into your solution structure.

An example is Twitch starting out by analyzing the social media market, before niching down to the gaming social media market.

To carry out this market overview, you can leverage tools like Semrush’s Market Explorer, Statista, Mordor Intelligence, and SparkToro.

Using Mordor Intelligence for Market Research

We start with gaining a general knowledge of the industry. This often includes finding out what the market value is, and what the compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) is.

Understanding these data will help us find out:

• How big of a market the startup is in

• Whether the market is a growing one
  

We can find this type of information on data intelligence platforms (sometimes with little differences). For the piece, we’ll use Mordor Intelligence.

A Google search for the world Healthcare IT stat (including the Mordor Intelligence in the search term) will lead to the page displayed below:

A snapshot of the global Healthcare IT Market

The page includes a comprehensive analysis of the global Healthcare IT market, including key details such as the market size, the compounded annual growth rate (CAGR), the major players in the market, and the key market trends.

To get more granular with the market landscape analysis, we will then use the Semrush Market Explorer platform.

Using Semrush Market Explorer for Market Research

First, log in to the Market Explorer tool. You need a Semrush account to access it. If you don’t have one, you can create a free account.

Since our use case positions as a behavioral health EHR solution, we can find between 20 to 80 similar brands on Google for the Semrush Market Explorer analysis.

At this stage, you want to ensure your analysis covers as much of the market as possible. So, don’t limit your search to the biggest brands in the industry alone.

Target your immediate competitors too. For Orion Health, we will be targeting 42 competitors. The Semrush Market Explorer Tool gives access to valuable data on both competitors and the industry in general.

The first widget houses the Market Summary. Through this widget, you can get a bird’s eye view of the state of the market.

In Orion Healthcare’s (Behavioral EHR Market) case, we can quickly conclude that while the Serviceable Addressable Market is a sizeable percentage (33.05%) of the Total Addressable Market, the consolidation level within the market and the market traffic cost present high barriers to entry.

Market Summary forBehavioral EHR

We can also validate the data obtained from Mordor Intelligence or similar platforms on the market’s biggest players using the Growth Quadrant widget. This widget allows you to assess the value of your market and your chances. But it gets more interesting.

It also allows you to go granular in your market landscape analysis under four categories: Industry Leaders, Game Changers, Niche Players, and Established Players.

The definition of these four categories depends on the evaluation criterion, which include Behavior, Percentage Behavior Growth, Traffic, and Percentage Traffic Growth.

For Total Traffic, which will be our criterion for the Behavioral EHR market, Industry Leaders are the fastest-growing websites attracting the largest audiences.

Game Changers are new websites showing promise and high growth potential.

Niche Players are new or small companies with a low growth rate.

Established Players are companies with established popularity and brands.

Behavioral Health Growth Quadrant by Total Traffic

A look at the representation across the four categories further cements the earlier claim that the market is moderately consolidated, as there are more established players and niche players.

When using insights from the quadrant, dwell on what could be beneficial for your company.

In Orion Healthcare’s case, they would want to look at game changers and industry leaders (who are new brands doing well in the industry), and give less attention to the established players (who have way more resources to sustain their position in the market).

Orion Healthcare would need to dig further into Valiant and The Ranest, among others, to understand their content strategy and what is working for them best.

The Market Explorer can also shed light on the most common concerns and topics in your industry, which would be invaluable for your content strategy.

You can choose to include branded keywords to see how much of a brand moat your competitors and market leaders have established.

Here, we can see Athena’s undeniable industry dominance and brand moat. This could inform a new brand to consider keywords like “cheaper athena alternatives” to gain initial traction and attract mid-high-intent traffic.

The Semrush Market Explorer tool’s capabilities will provide you with a solid understanding of your market landscape and form the basis for your content strategy and plans for how to position your brand on social media.

Using SparkToro for Audience Research

As powerful as the Semrush Market Explorer tool is, you would unlock god-level insights if you combined its insights with Spaktoro’s. SparkToro is a freemium audience research tool.

See it this way: market research plus audience research equals insights on how to position your company to stand out from your competitors and to your target clients.

Sparkotoro allows you a lot of capabilities. It’s better to search with broad terms within your industry to get better results.

In Orion Healthcare’s case, we will be using “behavioral EHR” as our search term.

Here, we can immediately see the websites Orion Health’s likely clients often visit, the keywords they often use, and their gender demographics.

You can also dig deeper into audience data by aggregating data insights from sub-dimensions of the SparkToro result.

For example, aside from the Overview for your search, you can explore High Affinity Sites, Hidden Gems, Press and Media under Websites, explore Search Keywords, Trending Keywords, and Related Keywords under Keywords, and dig deep into Gender and Age, Bio and Profile, and Skills and Interests under Demographics.

The beauty of SparkToro is that it can help you uncover hidden gem sites (websites that have good traffic and some percentage of your target audience visits).

These websites may not be your primary marketing channels, but targeting them for promotional or educational campaigns could prove beneficial for your company.

All these data will inform the creation of an Ideal Customer Profile and the content strategy.

Step 2: Define Your Early-Stage Startup’s Social Media Marketing Strategy

Once you’ve established an understanding of your market and how your early-stage startup fits in, you’ll need to define a social media marketing strategy that suits your current position and your expected outcomes from social media marketing.

Your social media marketing strategy as an early-stage startup has to interlock three important segments: current position, market gaps and opportunities, and expected outcomes.

This is important because you do not have the time and resources to play a guessing game or throw shit on the wall to see what fits.

Sadly, that is what many early-stage startups do. For example, if your immediate business focus is sales (which I wouldn’t advise), your social media marketing strategy should rather focus on advertising as a tactic to quickly gain traction.

Step 3: Analyze Your Industry’s Social Media Landscape

Once you have aligned and synergized your brand, it’s time to analyze your industry’s social media landscape.

At this stage, we would need to consult our initial audience research to answer the following question, “What are the primary social media platforms our target audience is on?”

In Orion Healthcare’s case, the most-used platforms by their target audience are YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Reddit, Twitter, and Quora.

The most popular social media platforms among the Behavioral EHR market target audience

The next questions to answer are, “What are the primary content types within our industry landscape on these platforms?”, “What are the content trends within our industry on each platform?”, “What are the best-performing content formats for our industry on each platform?”, “What are the content gaps (what our competitors are not talking about)?”

To answer these questions, you’ll select 5 - 15  competitor accounts per platform you want to analyze. This selection should be a mix of established, emerging, and niche industry players (to capture the industry’s voice fully).

These competitor accounts will be your data points for the landscape analysis. Social media analytics tools such as Keyhole, Meta Business Suite, and HypeAuditor are great for analyzing your competitors’ accounts, trends (hashtags), content gaps, and the best-performing content formats. 

Answering these questions will create a clear path for what platforms your brand will choose to be on, the content you’ll publish, and how you’ll publish it.

Step 4: Assess Your Company’s Assets for Social Media

You have no business launching on social media until you have assessed your early-stage startup’s assets relative to social media marketing.

This needs to be an introspective exercise where you examine if you have enough team members, the right social media marketing tech stack, and the right tools to create, manage, and track social media content at an optimal level.

You can then use the info you have on your early-stage startup’s estimated social media marketing investment and current assets to determine how well you should scale your social media marketing operations.

For instance, a startup with one or two members on its marketing team and a tight marketing budget has no business marking its presence on five social media platforms.

It’s not really about how many platforms you’re on at the same time, but about how well you can position to capture demand.

Plus, you don’t have as big a marketing budget as the heavily funded scale-ups or unicorns — that a $500 million company is on five social media platforms doesn’t mean you have to be too.

Step 5: Define Your Goals and Set Your Metrics

Your next stop is to set your social media marketing goals and define your metrics.

Aside from setting SMART goals (yes, I mean Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound SMART), you also need to align your social media marketing goals with:

• Your marketing goals

• Your overall business goals

For most early-stage startups, your marketing goals will include your social media marketing goals, but in perhaps a top-level manner. This is the point where you elaborate on each goal, with the right metrics to go with it.

Let’s get back to Orion Healthcare. If the company’s overall goals include increasing its market share and creating brand awareness is one of their marketing goals, the startup’s social media marketing goals will revolve around increasing reach and impressions.

In the same vein, metrics will be set at total impressions, total reach, and CPM (if an ad is run).

If Orion Healthcare's social media marketing team focuses on conversion rate, CPC, or CPA as their metrics, that would mean they're chasing vanity metrics that are not aligned with the overall business goals.

When you define your social media marketing goals and set your metrics in the context of your overall startup and marketing goals, you’ll be better positioned to channel your efforts in the right direction, and for the right results.

Step 6: Pick Your Platforms

You’ve aligned and synergized your brand. You’ve analyzed the industry’s social media landscape to identify gaps. You’ve set your goals. 

You did all of that to get to this point: picking the social media platforms you’ll launch on. It was important to follow through those steps first to ensure you would be launching your startup’s social media marketing efforts on the right platform(s). 

So, how do you know the right platforms to launch on? Answer the following questions:

• Is this one of the platforms our target audience spends their time on?

• Do we have enough assets and resources to create consistent content for this platform?

• How well do we understand how this platform works?

• Is this platform complementary to any other ones?

• What type of platform is this (content discovery, social commentary and trends, connection and networking, gaming)?

After answering these questions, you can create a Venn diagram to visualize your answers and pick the social media platforms you will belong on.

Remember, all the other answers will have to be anchored on your answer to the second question, since you will need to prioritize platforms.

What this means is that if five social media platforms are great for your brand but you have the bandwidth to manage three for now, you’d rank the five to determine the three most important platforms for your brand.

Step 7: Synergize and Align Your Brand for Social Media

Once you have picked your platforms, you will then need to synergize your brand. At this stage, you need to dig deep into the data you have collected and uncover insights from them.

These insights should inform how you define your startup’s brand on social media.

The marketing SaaS industry is saturated, and LinkedIn is naturally a formal platform.

So, Semrush crafted a funny and personable character for its social media brand to differentiate its brand and strengthen its affinity among followers and users. This has helped them stand out from competitors.

Sometimes, you might need to create different brands to align with different social media platforms, depending on the landscape for the platform in question.

For instance, Semrush on Twitter is a starkly different brand from Semrush on LinkedIn.

This is a classic case of aligning the brand with the platform to maximize performance and achieve the best results.

Here’s the truth: Doing due diligence and following all the steps here will most likely take months, especially if you run a lean team.

By default, startups love to ship things fast and many won’t do this due diligence.

Well, it works for some. They launch on just about any social media platform and keep tweaking and figuring things out.

But many are there wallowing in the abyss of brand invisibility.

Perhaps you’re one of them. Maybe you’ve told social media off as one of your channels and are putting focus elsewhere…

Give this step-by-step strategy a trial today and watch your social media efforts start to bring tangible results.