There are few marketing tools available today that are quite as beneficial as social media. Half the world now uses one platform or another, and no matter who your target audience is, you’ll find them on one.
However, in order to maximize those benefits, you need to develop a strong strategy. Luckily, we can make that easy for you. Let’s talk about why your business needs a social media marketing strategy.
1. Uniformity
Your brand is very important to maintain, and the only way to maintain it is through uniformity. If you have multiple people working on your social media strategy, then it’s important that they are all following the same standards and practices.
Building brand recognition comes with too many benefits to count. You don’t need to see the letter “G” to know a Google-branded product when you see one. Well, don’t count your business out. You could benefit from that same recognition someday, too, and it all starts with uniformity across your products, stores, websites, and social media content.
There are also many standards that will be unique to your business that you will want to maintain. For example, you don’t want your staff linking to a competitor on your social media, do you? That’s another key aspect of uniformity.
Expectations
It’s difficult to have multiple people using the same account and trying to make them sound the same. There are keywords that are important to use based on your company’s market research and goals. You set your own guidelines and expectations on acceptable language, content standards, whose posts to share, and more.
Goals
Another key factor related to your expectations is your goals. If your team isn’t familiar with the goals of your social media marketing campaign, then they are essentially running with a blindfold on.
Once you have a clear strategy, communicate it with your team and discuss exactly what the goals are so they can create content around it.
Are your goals to promote your products? Well, sharing positive feedback and creating more promotional content should be highlighted in your strategy. Are you trying to direct people to your blog? Sharing blog content is easy to do. Maybe you want to generate revenue from social media, get petitions signed, build awareness, or anything else.
Have your objectives listed out clearly and being specific with the desired metrics is the best way to make sure your team stays on the right track.
Types of Content
Do you intend to share content from your followers or affiliates? Are you okay with commenting on people’s posts? Do you want to share video content? Stories? Are you sticking to traditional posts?
Well, whatever guidelines you intend to set, if everybody isn’t on board, then you won’t have the same outcome. Developing a strategy and communicating it to your team is the only way to ensure uniformity in the standards and types of content your brand is producing.
2. Develop a Tone of Voice
This can be considered an extension of uniformity, but it’s an important one, especially for social media. You will need to determine what tone of voice you want your brand to convey. This is an important decision to make, as it will have lasting effects.
You may want to try a casual, direct tone where you speak to the audience. This would be using words like “you, your, yours”. You could try to be informative and indirect by using 3rd person plural (they, them, their).
Pronouns are only part of it. Do you want to be perceived as informative, witty, professional, casual, or anything else? Do you want to use humor in your content? These are important questions to ask, and once you have a tone established, your followers will become more familiarized with your brand as time passes.
Many brands work to develop a tone of voice over time to increase their recognition, and there is no better place to showcase this than social media.
3. Timing Boosts Your Reach
This is a very important aspect of social media marketing and the benefits are enormous. Posting at the right times barely adds any hassle to your strategy but it can expand your reach by quite a large margin.
This is a major reason to develop a strategy because once you know the right times to post, you can create content ahead of time and just drop it when the window is open, maximizing the potential reach of each post.
People are far more active on social media at certain times during the day, so reaching them at the right times is an easy way to build followers, increase shares, and make more sales.
4. Integration with Other Marketing Efforts
Social media plays a role in your SEO, ad campaigns, email campaigns, and more. Having a clear strategy in place will have ripple effects across your entire digital marketing strategy, and it will allow you to integrate your social media strategy with others.
For example, the SEO value of your site will improve if more and more people are finding your content through social media and sharing your content with others. You may even generate backlinks from fellow bloggers on your LinkedIn or Facebook pages.
Your social media strategy should also involve adding buttons into your email campaigns and web pages to allow people to easily share your content and follow you. You can even direct people to sign up for your email newsletters through social media. Each piece of your digital marketing strategy can affect the others, so don’t neglect any of them.
5. Easier Market Research
Part of your social media strategy will include additional market research, but it will also make future market research easier. Across every platform, you will be able to conduct polls or ask questions directly to your target audience.
This will help you receive easy feedback and make adjustments to your company as you see fit. However, there is some initial market research you will need to do to maximize your reach. Luckily, it isn’t too difficult.
Platforms
One of the biggest benefits of social media is that there is such a wide array of platforms to choose from, and you can use them to meet your intended audience with closer precision.
Part of your market research should include which platforms people in your target audience use the most. This will give you a good understanding of how to maximize your reach.
You’ll want to factor in both your target audience and the nature of your business. For example, you may be targeting Millennials and Gen X who mostly use Facebook, but your company primarily does wedding photography, so you choose to use Instagram instead.
Trends
The biggest benefit of social media is that each platform brings this necessary market research directly to you. At any time of the day or week, you can simply click on the “Trending” tab on any platform and see what users are talking about at that moment.
If you happen to find something that is relevant to your business or that you can create an engaging post about, then you’ve gained a free way to expand your reach simply by adding a hashtag to your post.
You don’t want to overdo this of course, so having guidelines in your strategy to aim for a couple of trending posts a week is a great idea, and it could easily help your company go viral. One viral post is all it takes to grow your following significantly.
6. Visual Content is the Most Effective
Across just about every platform, you can upload images and videos to reinforce your messages, as they are the best for both drawing attention and information retention, especially with videos.
TikTok and YouTube were made specifically for videos, and every platform has an option to add video content. When users have the reinforcement of visual imagery, audio, and text, it helps to reinforce the messages that you are trying to convey, and there’s no better place to draw attention to this content than on social media.
Not only is it more beneficial for your brand, but users want more of it. In fact, 85% of consumers say that they want to see more engaging video content from brands.
It makes sense. We can scroll past search and display ads all day, and we see plenty of them. However, when an engaging video is put before us, we’ll be more likely to actually focus on it.
7. Build Relationships With Your Audience
Customers love to see a human presence behind a brand, and they love to feel like they are a part of a brand. Social media gives you the opportunity to provide them with that feeling.
If you share your audience’s content, respond to their questions, and listen to feedback, people will feel as if they have a vested interest in your company, which ultimately helps with brand loyalty.
Remember, you can market for new customers until the end of time, but you’ll eventually run out. Customer retention is just as important as acquisition, and this is a great way to begin fostering that.
8. Promotions
Do you have huge Black Friday sales? Do you host annual 5K races? Do you offer massive discounts or giveaways?
Well, any type of promotional content is more than welcome on social media, and it’s a great way to expand your reach. People love to see posts that start with “Like, share, and follow for a chance to win”, especially if it’s for something that they want. They have nothing to lose and something to gain.
This type of promotional content is excellent for growing your following and promoting brand awareness. Consider the math. If 10 followers share your post to 500 followers each, and 50 of them share it to the same amount, that’s 30,000 people exposed to your brand who wouldn’t have otherwise known about it.
9. Bring Free Traffic To Your Site
Your PPC efforts cost you money every time that somebody clicks on it and lands on your ad. Well, if you’ve run a PPC ad campaign before, you know that that’s as far as it usually goes.
However, with social media, you can drive traffic to your site for free and give users a better idea of what to expect when they visit your site. If you’ve exhausted all of the online directories and review pages, then you’re running out of free ways to direct people to your site.
That’s where social media comes in. Make sure that your landing pages are optimized and that you have a proper web design in order to hold onto that traffic, but it’s still a great way to increase your site’s visibility.
10. Social Media Marketing is Easy
Once you have a strategy in place, the best part about social media marketing is that it’s very simple. You just have to create content regularly, interact with your audience, and promote your content. If you’re consistent enough with that, there’s not a lot more to it.
While creating content and following through on your strategy may be simple, it is often very time-consuming. This is why many businesses choose to seek out social media services for their strategy, in order to continue focusing on other aspects of their business.
Start Building Today
Now that you know the importance of a proper social media marketing strategy, there’s no time like the present to get started. Social media is easy to use, beginner-friendly, and it has the largest reach of any tool out there. Stay up to date with our latest marketing news and feel free to check out our services for more information!
