Social Media Strategy

Just how crucial is it to have a social media strategy?

Marketing communication through social media sites is today a common tool in most organizations’ promotional plans. With over 3 billion users active on social media platforms today, including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc., having a proper social media marketing plan is paramount.

In this blog post, I will be looking at the most common arguments given, which underscores why it is of essence to companies to determine their social media strategy.

Increase Brand Awareness

Social media marketing is one of the many trends that hold the aim of popularizing particular brands. The personal profile enables the posting of new content that provides your brand with a nearly infinite touchpoint through the large network of followers, whose timelines you post on, with the objective of reaching as many potential customers as possible. If properly implemented and persisted over time, it can eventually enhance your brand awareness rather greatly.

For instance, when you are posting content from your business on IG Stories or posting office and fun industry stats on LinkedIn, you remind the audience who you are and what you do.

Drive website traffic

What good is a social media plan if it does not gain you plenty of followers and likes? It directs traffic back to your website. This can include providing information about your products or services, taking people to newsletters or video subscriptions, enabling them to make purchases, and much more.

Seeding your posts with CTAs (calls-to-action), employing the traffic campaigns throughout the paid social ads, and getting influencers to share your material helps drive more visitors through the social platforms into your site. The more quality traffic you drive, the more leads and customers you are likely to produce.

Improve customer engagement

Social media also acts as an easily accessible place where customers can get a feel for your company. These users may also engage with your offerings, for instance, by inquiring, sharing opinions, conversing in a quiz, and building an understanding of a more intimate relationship when observing ‘’ordinary’’ contents of your brand’s everyday operations.

Reactive comments and DMs are good to make the customer feel valued, while reactive comments help in addressing customers’ complaints more quickly and hence improving the impressions of the brand. The arguments presented in this part state that more effective customer retention and loyalty are the outcomes of conversations and new connections developed on social media.

Gather data and insights.

It is this very real-time, immediate potency that provides immense value in these venues, as well as the information unrecoverable about your wider marketing efforts. Almost all the social media provide analytics for the followers, engagement rate, clicks, audiences, best time to post, and so on.

They make it easier to give your viewers a clearer picture, adjust your approach, create more appropriate content, target paid ads methodically, and enhance other marketing methods. It serves as an articulated and rich source of information in decision-making for business and marketing strategies.

Other marketing communication activities can be complemented by ad messages as follows: Strategic social media marketing does not only serve to improve the outcomes of those media platforms. It has offshoots that increase the effectiveness of your other marketing communication elements.

This content on social drives traffic to your site that may then potentially convert through email nurturing sequences. Customer experiences create a disposition towards brands on which conversion is predicated. Paid social web visitors can be retargeted across devices through the pixels placed on the website.

In other words, social media is used as a booster to enhance the efficiency of other strategies ranging from email, SEO, content marketing, and paid advertising. Like, all the channels are perfect if used in cooperation with each other.

Elements of Social Media Marketing

Although I have explained some of the important advantages, what comprises a perfect social media plan, as we shall see? Here are some of the foundational components every business should consider:

• goals & KPIs
• Ideal posting schedules
• Engaging content formats
• Account maintenance and storage
• Interaction protocols
• Visual branding guidelines
• Paid vs. organic approaches
• Audience targeting parameters
• Competitor benchmarking
• Analytics & reporting

First, it is critical when setting goals and KPIs to identify who will be responsible for delivering social media objectives on the organization’s behalf—this specific target must be aligned with broader organizational goals.

You need to find the right posting frequencies over every platform and content type that would strategically reach out to your intended audience. There should be specific guidelines as to who in the core accounts team owns the particular customer and how to answer that customer or track when they’re communicating.

Color palettes, typefaces, , both stationary and nonstationary, graphic display, and layout keep on being uniform. Depending on the budgets and performance numbers, define your ratio of organic content vs. paid advertisements. Who are your prospects? Their buying characteristics, which include buyer personas, demographics, interest profiles, behaviors, and a lot of other things, should be specified in as much detail as we can so that our targeting can be as specific as possible.

It is recommended to benchmark activity regularly against the identified competitors. And they should clearly define the analytics and reporting that are required to gather information and prove the ROI.

This is done with a specific intention of helping you to undertake social media marketing in a much more grounded, goal-oriented way.

Over to You

Thus, although social media appears to be relaxed in terms of marketing strategies, proper planning for your business-oriented accounts is critical for playing in these highly competitive fields. They allow you to communicate with customers in a uniquely human fashion while at the same time responding directly to organizational growth goals.