Why you need a Social Media Strategy
A social media strategy defines how your business will use social media to drive awareness, consideration and conversion.
At a very basic level setting out a clear strategy will help outline your business goals and define clear objectives and outcomes that you want to achieve – at a deeper level, it will ensure that your strategy is working in tandem with other parts of the business and help you prioritise how to meet your goals.
How will a social media strategy help me?
Through creating a strategic framework, you will become empowered to plan, prioritise execute, measure and optimise. All with a clear direction. This will enable you to:
Build Strong Brand Recognition & Organic Presence
Through building a comprehensive strategy you will be able to outline key brand pillars and define a well thought out narrative to help build out your organic presence.
Social media has a benefit over traditional media because it can get your brand in front of people much more efficiently, quickly and often more cost effectively. Furthermore, it gets your audience looking at your brand even when they aren’t thinking about your brand or product.
Using social media is a great way to share your brand’s mission and build a relationship with your consumer. Through effective storytelling across social media, you can really impact how you brand is perceived and drive authentic relationships.
Drive Conversion
A strong social media marketing strategy will generate conversation about your brand, products, and partners.
Social media marketing can assist in sending customers directly to your site and can also re-target them with specific products that they have shown interest in.
Meet Goals & Objectives
Having a social media strategy in place will ensure that your social media efforts are rewarded, and are working to support your broader business goals.
Putting a strategy together includes outlining your business goals, so that you can work to create posts which reinforce them. By implementing key goals, objectives and setting KPI’s you will be able to benchmark your success, have something to work towards and be able to validate the work you are doing.
Target Your Audience More Effectively
An effective social media strategy will enable you to target your audience more effectively, you will be able to identify key audiences and segments which are driving significant value for you brand.
Part of your strategy can include plugging in audience engagement elements (like polls or open-ended questions) into your updates so you can get a better handle on your audience’s pain points, and how you can provide value to solve them.
Build Customer Loyalty
What could possibly be better than building brand loyalty for free? Customers follow and interact with the brands they enjoy. 53% of customers who follow your business are likely to be loyal to your business specifically.
If customers follow you, they are more likely to choose you versus your competition. Furthermore, if they’re loyal customers, they’ll increase your traffic and engagement.
Stay Ahead of the Competition
Tying everything together, with a frequency of posts planned, you can concentrate on those fine details which help you stand out from your competition. You’ll be able to analyse what’s working, start developing your brand story and voice, establish a distinctive look and feel for your accounts, and all while remaining consistent and providing value to your audience.
Create Better Content
A social media strategy brings to light the elements, methods and networks which are working for your business - as well as the ones which are not.
A strategy, in line with your business goals, will facilitate creating content that resonates with your audience, gives you the opportunity to refine the quality of your material, and enables you to think about how you can get creative with social posts.
This can include using the more dynamic tools available on the social media networks - such as Live videos on Facebook, or a series of interactive Stories on Instagram.
Plan & Save Time
A simple reason but a very important one. By outlining a strategy, you will be able to create a content calendar, content bank and help understand what is working for you.
More time, means more opportunity to analyse what is working.
In doing this you can then start to understand what content works for you, when the best time to post is – all enabling you to start planning ahead. Through doing this you will be able to post consistently, something which is incredibly important in growing your audience and awareness.