You NEED a Strategy

For some business owners, social media represents a necessary—but unpleasant—requirement for their business. Some business owners love social. Whether you love it or hate it though, one thing is certain: you need to have a strategy to make it work for you and your business. A robust content strategy and social media strategy builds your Brand, engages your ideal audience, and helps your business grow.

Social is Part of Content Strategy

Like copy and content, these phrases touch on similar concepts, but they possess distinct characteristics.

Content strategy includes social media strategy, and social media strategy is a part of content strategy. Your content strategy is the umbrella term to define your online, offline, print, digital, promotional, and educational collateral. Newsletters, email campaigns, Facebook posts, flyers, website copy, and Instagram are all examples of content strategy routes.

Of those examples, Facebook and Instagram fall under the sub-category of social media strategy.

marketingsolved.com says it best: “SOCIAL IS A CHANNEL; CONTENT IS A TACTIC”

A social media strategy can be productive and valuable all on its own, but it gets super-charged when it’s designed with content strategy in mind. If you’re saying something completely different on your social channels from what’s on your website, or what you’re saying in-person, it’s confusing for the audience. Creating a unified content strategy streamlines and clarifies your social strategy.

Get Started on Content Strategy

According to terakeet.com, these are major considerations to address before you start:

1. What are you trying to accomplish?
2. Who are you trying to reach?
3. What types of content will you share?
4. How will content support Brand?
5. How will you measure success?

Let’s break them down further.

Content Strategy Goals

What is your goal with your content strategy? Is it sales, building trust, readability, showing authority, or something else? Defining goals focuses your content strategy. You can uncover goals by defining your audience.

Who is Your Audience?

Have you developed a target audience? Do you know what their interests are, what matters to them, and how your services or products offers a solution? Understanding your target audience shapes your strategies.

How Will You Reach Them?

Knowing your target audience enables you to craft a social media strategy tailored to them by using real-world data and statistics like this research study from Pew Research Center. The study outlines who are using which platforms, and breaks them down based on demographics like age, ethnicity, gender, and income. Understanding the habits and goals of your ideal audience clarifies the answers to the rest of the questions like...

How to Portray Your Brand?

Branding and creating a Brand Identity is crucial for a seamless and organized content strategy. How your Brand is perceived will be influenced by your content and social media strategies. How you want your Brand to be perceived influences how you structure your strategy.

A lot of the answers to these questions lead to more questions. Answering how you want your Brand to be perceived also tells you more about...

What Types of Content will You Share?

Do you want your Brand to be seen as authoritative and professional, playful and youthful, serious and rigorous, or artful and grassroots? Solidifying your Brand will define your strategy moving forward, so you know exactly what kinds of content you need to be creating.

Once you decide on the audience, types of content, how it supports the Brand, and how to reach them… it’s all about measuring results.

Measuring Results with Social

Social media offers built-in ways to measure the viability and success of your content strategy. You can use metrics such as engagement, reactions, site visits from links, and impressions to see what’s performing well and what’s not doing so great. Using measurable data will help you hone your content strategy over time to maximize Brand awareness, audience engagement, and relationships.