5 Reasons Why Your Business Needs a Strong Social Media Strategy & How to Get Started
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Social media has become an indispensable tool for business growth today. With many platforms available, such as Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest, TikTok, and others, managing multiple social media accounts can be overwhelming without a well-defined strategy.
Think of your social media strategy as a roadmap that guides you toward building brand affinity and achieving your ultimate goals. Without a strategy, you may find yourself posting aimlessly, struggling to generate new content ideas, and failing to engage your followers effectively. Consequently, you may see little to no growth or results in your social media accounts.
Regrettably, many brands overlook or underestimate the importance of a well-crafted strategy. They hope to go viral overnight, which is an unrealistic expectation. Developing a strategy is crucial to foster growth and achieve success on social media.
At Bold x Collective, we firmly believe that every business must implement an effective social media strategy. This strategy will enable you to set goals, establish key performance indicators (KPIs), understand your target audience, identify strengths and weaknesses, track growth, and more. In this guide, we will outline five compelling reasons why it is high time for your brand to invest in a robust and professional social media strategy that drives business growth.
1. Be Organized and Consistent
As marketers, we strongly believe that organization plays a vital role in achieving success. This is why we are passionate about well-planned strategies. Without a clear strategy in place, you find yourself creating content and generating ideas on the spot, with only a vague direction in mind but no concrete plan on how to reach your goals.
By implementing a social media strategy, you gain the necessary direction to understand your target audience, establish your brand voice, determine the type of content you want to create, decide how and where to post it and schedule your posts effectively. When it comes to scheduling content, we recommend using reliable tools like Hootsuite, Later, and Sprout Social.
Having a strategy in place ensures not only consistent posting but also a consistent brand voice throughout your content. With a well-defined social media strategy, you can establish and maintain your brand's voice. By planning your content in advance, you have extra time to ensure that your captions and content align seamlessly with your brand's voice and image.
Branding is a fundamental pillar for growth, and we take great pride in crafting social media strategies that truly resonate with brands and executing them effectively.
2. Be Prepared and Save Time
By planning your content, you can eliminate the need to constantly come up with last-minute ideas for posting (unless there's a trending TikTok challenge that you absolutely must participate in immediately)!
Now, let's delve into the significance of being prepared for unexpected situations. Imagine having someone on your team who is responsible for managing social media, but suddenly falls ill and is unable to work. In such a scenario, you must step in and take over their responsibilities.
Fortunately, if you have already created your content ahead of time, your main task would be to ensure that the scheduled posts, stories, and any additional assets are released on time while also understanding the daily engagement strategy. Being prepared is always crucial in order to handle unforeseen circumstances efficiently!
3. Reach Your Goals & Focus
While creating your social media strategy, it is essential to determine the goals you want to achieve for your business. As an experienced agency in this field, we highly recommend setting SMART Social Media Goals. But what exactly does a SMART goal entail? Let's break it down.
Specific: The more specific your goal is, the easier it becomes to understand your goal. For instance, a specific goal could be to increase the number of TikTok followers.
Measurable: It is crucial to establish a way to measure the success of your goal. For example, you may aim to double the number of TikTok followers.
Attainable: Setting realistic and attainable goals is key. Consider whether it is feasible for you to double the number of your TikTok followers.
Relevant: Your goal should align with your business's overall objectives and priorities. Ensure that increasing TikTok followers is relevant to your broader social media strategy and overall marketing goals.
Time-bound: Setting a specific timeframe or deadline helps to create a sense of urgency and focus. For example, you can double your TikTok followers within three months.
By incorporating these SMART elements into your social media goals, you can create a clear and actionable plan to drive your social media growth effectively.
Relevant: A relevant goal should closely align with the established objectives, vision, or values of your business. Before diving into your marketing or social media strategy, it is crucial to consider whether the goal you set supports your business's overall objectives.
Time-specific: Finally, it's important to assign a specific deadline to your goal. For instance, you might set a target to double your TikTok followers within a one-month timeframe. By setting a clear time constraint, you create a sense of urgency and establish a timeline for achieving your goal.
Some common social media goals include:
Increasing brand awareness
Managing brand reputation
Increasing traffic to your website
Improving community engagement
Boosting conversions or sales
Lead generation
Delivering customer service
Gaining market insights with social listening
4. Understand Your Social Media Performance
Monitoring performance and observing the growth of your social media accounts are critical factors for achieving success. We strongly emphasize the significance of performance tracking in the digital realm. With well-defined goals in place, you can effectively track your social media performance and accurately assess whether your strategy is working towards achieving those goals.
Tracking performance also allows you to identify any missing components in your strategy. For instance, if you notice that your engagement is increasing on Instagram but not generating enough website visitors, it indicates a gap that needs attention. By tracking data diligently, you can take a step back, analyze the situation, and devise new tactics to bridge that gap.
Here's an example: If your goal is to drive website visitors, but you're only witnessing a surge in Instagram engagement, it suggests additional measures are needed. You might consider implementing incentives such as offering discounts on first orders, running a "spin to win" campaign, or teasing exclusive content on social media to encourage users to explore your website and view the entire collection by visiting the link in your bio.
Additionally, understanding the significance of data is crucial. Numbers provide valuable insights. As an agency, we invest considerable time and effort in comprehending and analyzing analytics. Many social media platforms offer built-in analytical tools, and we also utilize Google Analytics for our clients. Tracking key metrics enables you to gauge your growth rate and determine whether specific metrics have experienced an increase or decrease over time.
5. Providing Value to Your Followers
Ultimately, regardless of your social media platform for your business, delivering value to your followers is paramount. This is where your content creation strategy becomes integral to your overall social media strategy. It is essential to comprehend the needs and desires of your audience and determine how you can provide them with valuable content.
For example, some types of valuable content can include:
Sharing motivational content
Discussing what is trending in your industry
Sharing tips and tricks
Educating users on industry trends
Busting myths within your niche
Sharing content that is relatable to your target audience (including entertainment)
Developing a robust social media strategy is crucial in order to cultivate lasting relationships with your followers and build brand affinity, as opposed to transient connections. Long-term customer relationships hold significantly more value.
Having explored the top five reasons why your business requires a robust social media strategy, let's delve into the specific steps that your business should consider to establish such a strategy.
Here are some tips we recommend to our clients when they are making a solid social media strategy for their business:
Research Social Media Platforms That Reach Your Demographics
In today's highly digitized world, businesses have access to many digital marketing resources that can be practical marketing tools. One such resource is the array of social media platforms available, which, when utilized efficiently, can yield significant benefits.
Before determining which social media platform will best benefit your business, it is crucial to analyze your target demographics. By understanding the social media platforms that your audience is most active on and for what purpose, you can make informed decisions when building your social media strategy.
During this step, we recommend thoroughly studying each social media platform to grasp the advantageous features they offer for your specific business and brand awareness. This research process will assist you in selecting the most suitable platform to build a strong social media strategy and reputation. Additionally, it will provide insights into the types of content that work best on each platform.
As you delve deeper into your research, you will realize that certain social media platforms may be more effective for some businesses than others. Analyzing the success or failure of social media platforms and user-generated content within your industry will further inform your decision-making process.
For instance, a fashion company may find that TikTok and Instagram Reels are more suitable for attracting a younger audience compared to Facebook. Consequently, focusing more on these platforms would be beneficial.
During this step, we recommend using the trial-and-error method to narrow down your platform options. By testing out user-generated content on selected social media platforms, you can evaluate its effectiveness with your target demographics.
You will know that your content is performing well when you observe high viewership, engagement, and click-through rates within your targeted demographics. These indicators indicate that your content is resonating with your audience and driving the desired actions.
Use A Catchy Social Handle
A social handle, also known as a unique username, is a crucial element for each of your business's social media accounts. When choosing your social handle, it is essential to ensure consistency across all platforms. Ideally, your handles should either be identical or similar to make it easy for your audience to find and recognize your brand or business across different social platforms.
Keeping your social handle concise, straightforward, and memorable is important for enhancing accessibility to your brand and social media platforms. A short and catchy handle enables your audience and potential consumers to locate your brand effortlessly. Additionally, when creating your social handle, it is advisable to avoid using spaces between words. Instead, consider utilizing periods or underscores to separate words effectively.
Set Realistic Goals and Regulations
When developing a robust social media strategy for a business, it can quickly become overwhelming. That's why it is crucial to establish realistic social media goals and guidelines that contribute to enhancing brand awareness and reputation on social platforms.
Setting realistic goals and guidelines within your social media strategy enables businesses to have clear expectations and specific targets to strive for within a designated timeframe. Examples of realistic goals that you should incorporate into your social media strategy include effectively managing your workload, creating and publishing engaging content, curating unique user-generated content, conducting SEO marketing research, and more.
Assigning deadlines to each goal and guideline allows you to test and evaluate their impact on your brand awareness. This analysis helps you determine whether a particular goal has positively benefited your brand or posed challenges.
Therefore, it is important to document your social media goals and guidelines for each social platform you utilize. This written record serves as a reference point for guidance and ensures consistency and accountability within your social media strategy.
Distinguish Your Social Platforms Tone & Style
In a comprehensive social media strategy, it is crucial to allocate sufficient time to establish the tone and style for each social media platform associated with your business. During this stage, we emphasize to our clients that the chosen tone and style play a pivotal role in differentiating their brand from others, enabling the audience and potential customers to identify and recognize their unique identity.
Consistency in tone and style is highly appreciated by people, as it demonstrates a brand's commitment to maintaining a cohesive visual identity. If the desired tones and styles are effectively resonating with your business, it is important to maintain this consistency to ensure recognition among your audience and potential customers.
When developing your strong social media strategy, it is vital to dedicate ample time to identify the key elements that contribute to a brand's tone and style.
The chosen tone and style will serve as the representation of your brand's voice and identity. Hence, it is essential to maintain consistency in design across all your social media platforms. We recommend keeping certain features consistent throughout all platforms, such as color palettes, fonts, and logos, to reinforce brand recognition and cohesion.
Start To Make High-Quality & Engaging Content
Unleash your creativity! This is your chance to tap into your imagination and enjoy the process of curating content and designing your content strategy for social media platforms.
An excellent example of valuable content is user-generated content, which refers to unique and original content sourced directly from your consumers through reviews, engagement, feedback, and more. When incorporating user-generated content, it's vital to remember that you are representing yourself and your brand through the content shared on your social platforms.
Hence, we recommend ensuring that all user-generated content remains consistent and aligned with your brand. The content you showcase on your social media platforms plays a crucial role in setting your business apart from others. Therefore, remember to include this essential step in your social media strategy.
It is essential to prioritize originality and maintain high-quality standards when sharing content on social platforms. Here are a few key points to consider when crafting your content:
Make sure to use high-grade equipment instead of just a phone when gathering pictures or video content to share on social platforms
Use effective photo editing apps to help enhance the quality of the content by adjusting the lighting
Utilize relevant influencers on social media who can help improve your viewer engagement, sales, and brand awareness across multiple social media platforms.
Create & Schedule Monthly Content Calendars
Social media has become a common platform for many brands. A well-executed social media strategy relies on a comprehensive monthly content calendar. Utilizing a content calendar has proven to be highly effective in enabling businesses to stay organized and up-to-date with their social media activities.
When developing your monthly content calendar, it is crucial to dedicate ample time to its creation. The calendar should be detailed, well-written, and properly organized to ensure its effectiveness.
In your content calendar, include all the dates for posting content on your social platforms. Additionally, incorporate the content you have gathered, relevant captions, and appropriate hashtags for each post.
Once you have organized and finalized your content calendar, it's time to schedule your posts. Before doing so, we strongly recommend using tools like Grammarly to ensure the content is well-written and free of errors.
There are various digital tools available to help you organize and pre-schedule your posts for the entire month. Utilizing these scheduling tools allows businesses to maintain organization and consistency in their social media strategy, achieve marketing goals and comply with regulations, and enhance audience engagement across all social media platforms.
Some examples of scheduling tools that we recommend to our clients for their content calendars are Hootsuite, Later, Sprout Social, and Meta Business Manager Suite for platforms such as Facebook and Instagram.
Analyze Your Social Media Presence
Lastly, it's time to take a moment to evaluate! At our digital agency, we emphasize the importance of reviewing monthly analytical reports with our clients. These reports provide valuable insights into the performance of your social media platforms, allowing you to track metrics such as viewership, engagement, and sales.
Many popular social channels, including Facebook, TikTok, Pinterest, Instagram, and Google Analytics, now offer automated analytical reports. These reports organize and condense the analytical data, providing a convenient reference point for analyzing your monthly performance and enhancing your overall business and brand awareness.
As mentioned in Step 3 of creating a strong social media strategy, analyzing your social media presence enables you to make necessary adjustments to your goals and regulations established at the beginning of your strategy.
We always recommend that businesses create a monthly analytical report to neatly document, organize, and analyze their overall social media performance. Additionally, staying motivated and keeping abreast of your audience's current engagement on social media can greatly benefit your strategy.
Are You Ready to Get Started?
Having explored the advantages and step-by-step process of building a robust social media strategy for your business, we sincerely hope that you are inspired to embark on this new chapter. We encourage you to gather your team and begin crafting your unique strategy.
If you find yourself facing challenges in identifying the strategy that aligns with your goals, the social media marketing team at Bold x Collective is here to assist you. Feel free to contact us for a complimentary consultation, and we'll be delighted to help you kick-start your journey.