Whether you like it or not, Social Media is driving business like never before. From your neighbour’s side hustle, to main-stream brands, everyone is interacting with businesses on social media. Earned Media might be one of the best advertising platforms but creating an appealing and on brand message is more about creating a social strategy that drives the interest of your consumers & takes careful planning, implementation, and thorough and continuous evaluation. Complying with these fundamentals will help build a solid base for your strategy that will drive consumers to fall in love with your brand.
Why Social Media Marketing
Earned Media provides consumers the opportunity to discover new brands, engage with brands, and ultimately buy a product or service. With over 2 billion users, Facebook is one of the biggest platforms & is best to reach a larger consumer base. Facebook statistics states that approximately 2.23 billion users log onto the platform per month. This provides tremendous opportunities for brands who would like to increase their visibility. Approximately 93% of marketers use Facebook for advertising purposes, which means that your competitor is most likely a step ahead of you!
Other eared media platforms provide other benefits, like the display of a brand’s aesthetics on Instagram, or establish a brand as a thought leader through LinkedIn. It encompasses major benefits to a brand, like the opportunities to partner with other pages, encourage consumer engagement, as well as provide a visual & a feel good platform for loyal consumers.
Choose your Brand Goals
A Social Media Marketing Strategy needs to be in line with your ultimate business goals. Each content piece that’s placed on your social platform should relate and form part of your drive to ultimately achieve your business goal. This includes first and third-party content. Aligning your social strategy with your business objectives drives the connection between your social platforms and your consumers, as well as your business towards potential customers. Choose three goals that drive your social strategy- this will help keep the strategy focused, clear and more effective.
Choose your Perfect Audience
Choosing your perfect audience is vital for the correct diction of your social posts. There is no benefit at tailoring your content to the wrong audience, as it will mean low engagement, wasted advertisement expenditure and make any effort useless. When creating your content, have two different type of consumers in mind: your ideal consumer and your current consumer.
Defining the perfect consumer is important for your content strategy. First, it will help define which social platform you should use to communicate with your consumers. This needs to be integrated with your brand identity as well as product or service range. Instagram is perfect for a clothing brand like Cotton On, which carries consumer goods aimed at a younger, trend-based market, while Facebook is perfect for Queenspark’s consumer base who fall within a higher age group. It’s critical to know who your audience is as they will ultimately determine whether your Social Strategy is successful. This will help you define the tone, character, copy and visuals for your Social strategy.
Ready to get started on your social strategy? Visit our resource center and download our free digital marketing plan template.