5 REASONS WHY YOUR BUSINESS NEEDS A STRONG SOCIAL MEDIA STRATEGY & HOW TO GET STARTED

Social media, as we know, is one of the key growth tools for many businesses in 2023. We have so many platforms to utilize, from Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest, TikTok, and more. Keeping up with all your business’s social media accounts can be a daunting task, specifically, without a developed social media strategy.

We like to describe your social media strategy as a map; a map that will provide you with all directions to reach the end goal of building brand affinity. Without the use of a strategy, you probably find yourself aimlessly posting and trying to desperately come up with new content ideas to stay relevant to your followers, without seeing any results or growth in your accounts.

Unfortunately, many brands tend to overlook and underestimate the strategy that goes into creating a successful social media platform and hope to someday go inexplicably viral, which is an unrealistic goal. The best way to expect and notice growth and success within your social media accounts is to develop a strategy.

At Humaira’s Digital Market, we believe that every business needs an effective social media strategy in place, to plan goals, and key performance indicators (KPIs), understand your target audience, find your strengths and weaknesses, track growth, and much more. In this guide, we go over the five reasons why it’s time for your brand to finally invest in a strong, professional social media strategy to drive business growth.

1. ORGANIZATION AND CONSISTENCY

Organization is one of the keys to success in our eyes as marketers; this is one of the reasons we love a well-planned strategy. With no declared strategy, you’re essentially creating content and coming up with ideas as you go, on the spot. There may be a vague direction you’re aiming for but no actual strategy as to how you will get there.

With a social media strategy in place, you’ll get the direction you need from understanding your target audience, to your brand voice, to the type of content you want to create, how you are creating it, where you are posting it, and how to schedule it. Depending on the type of content, we like to use scheduling tools including Hootsuite, Later and Sprout Social, which are the three tools that we recommend to clients.

Consistency in your content will not only be achieved in terms of consistent posting but also a consistent brand voice. With an established social media strategy, you’ll have decided on your brand’s voice and by planning your content ahead of time you’ll have the extra time to ensure your captions and content are both consistent with your brand’s voice and image.

Branding is a key pillar to growth, and we always take pride in creating social media strategies and executing them, to fully resonate with the brand.

2. SAVE TIME AND BE PREPARED FOR THE UNEXPECTED

With your content planned out ahead of time, you’ll never need to worry about coming up with last-minute content ideas to post (unless there is a hot TikTok trend that you need to get on asap, of course)!

Let’s discuss why it’s important to be prepared for the unexpected. Let’s Say you have someone on your team in charge of social media, but they have unexpectedly fallen ill and are incapable of working, leaving you to have to pick up their work.

With your content already created ahead of time, all you will be responsible for is ensuring the post and stories, and any additional assets are all released on time, as well as understanding the daily engagement strategy. It’s always important to be prepared!

3. ACHIEVE YOUR GOALS & FOCUS

While creating your strategy, you’ll need to identify what your business’s goals are for social media. As an experienced agency in this space, our recommendation is to set SMART Social Media Goals.

What makes a smart goal? Let’s break it down.

Specific – the more specific you are with writing down a goal, the easier it will be to see what you’re attempting to achieve clearly.

Measurable – you must know how to measure success. For example, you want to double the number of existing TikTok followers.

Attainable – it is key to have a realistic, attainable goal. For example, can you realistically double the number of your TikTok followers?

Relevant – a relevant goal must closely align with your business objectives (which you should have already established before moving on to your marketing or social media strategy). Ask yourself – does this goal support my business’s objectives, vision, or values?

Time Specific – Last but not least, give your goal a deadline! For example, I want to double my TikTok followers within one month.

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

Tracking performance and seeing how your social media accounts are growing is key to success. We believe that performance tracking is of the utmost importance in the digital world. With your goals in place, you’ll be able to better track the performance of your social media and truly understand if your strategy is working to achieve them.

Tracking also helps you find the missing pieces; perhaps you are growing, but you aren’t quite reaching your exact goal. With tracking properly, you can take a step back, observe, and find a new tactic to reach that goal.

Here’s an example – if your goal is to drive website visitors, but you’re only seeing engagement increase on Instagram, something may be missing. Perhaps you can establish an incentive to drive more website visitors, such as a discount on their first order, or a spin to win. Or even a social media teaser to get users to see “the latest collection” where they can visit the link in the bio to see the full collection.

Now, another valuable tactic I like to share with my users is the fact that numbers tell all. It is super important to understand the importance of data, which is why as your trusted partner, we put a lot of time and energy into observing and understanding analytics.

Many social media tools have built-in analytical tools, and we also use Google Analytics for all our clients. Tracking numbers can show you your growth rate and can help you determine whether you’ve had an increase or decrease in certain metrics.

5. PROVIDE VALUE TO YOUR FOLLOWERS

At the end of the day, with any social media channel you have as a business, it’s very important to provide value to your followers. This is where the content creation strategy comes into play, as a part of your social media strategy. You must understand what it is that your audience is looking for, and how you can give it to them by providing them with value.