As we move towards the Digital Age, SMM services have taken over traditional marketing tactics to improve a company’s numbers. Generate more customers in Cheshire by employing a strategic social media marketing services campaign.
Creating a social media presence is not enough anymore. You must create an effective social media strategy to get your brand out there.
Social media is used by almost every business, irrespective of its size and volume, to interact with customers and grow their brand. With many companies inhabiting numerous sites, distinguishing can be a massive hurdle.
Indeed, a successful social media strategy requires much more following than a simple posting schedule in today’s hectic digital environment. Reaching your target audience requires thorough strategic planning and in-depth knowledge of different platforms’ operations.
Professional social media strategy helps companies increase web traffic, raise brand awareness, endorse company authenticity, and help convert inquiries into sales. When strategizing a social media campaign, it’s essential to accentuate brand philosophy.
By reiterating the ethos of your brand, you help customers differentiate your company from the competition. Communicating your brand’s philosophy builds consumer trust, adding a personal dimension to the buyer-seller relationship.
Britechx creates bespoke social media campaigns for local businesses in Cheshire. We care for all facets of your social media needs, designing stunning templates, posting targeted social media posts across all channels, and interacting with relevant customer bases.
What is Social Media Marketing?
However, social media marketing is concerned with Instagram, X (formerly known as Twitter), and Facebook to build a brand identity that allows a person or company to sell what they produce.
For instance, social media marketing refers to sharing information about your business’s new products on various social media platforms so people know about them.
You can boost traffic through social media. If you interact with your customers via comments, that’s social media marketing. And if you create engaging content that showcases your brand’s values and story, that’s social media marketing, too.
This form of marketing requires you to use social media management skills and tools. As you lay out other elements of your strategy, you should also have a plan for social media marketing.
Today, for any brand or business to be on social media is no longer an option; it’s necessary. With a massive worldwide audience involved in different social platforms, it is the destination to connect with your target market and fuel conversions.
The number of active users on social media is astonishing—4.6 billion individuals representing almost 60 percent of the world’s population. The average time spent on social media per day is 2.7 hours.
- 2022 saw a rise in TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram users
- People use an average number of 7.5 platforms each month
Just think about the success of Apple’s enduring #ShotOniPhone campaign across social media channels or the #GettyMuseum challenge to get inspiration from Getty’s collection during the coronavirus pandemic.
What is a Social Media Strategy?
Simply put, a social media strategy is an action plan that outlines what you want to achieve through these platforms and how best it can be performed while using metrics to measure performance.
Your strategy doesn’t need to be complicated. What you want is a simple and specific plan with meaningful measurables. This will help you identify the successful channels and tactics versus those that fall flat.
Check out this webinar to find out how to give your social media strategy a little love!
Ultimately, your social media marketing strategy should focus on creating enhanced brand awareness and customer engagement concerning target customers across various social channels.
What Are the Benefits of Having a Social Media Strategy?
You may have run a successful social media campaign or great engagement on your posted content. That one-off success is achievable. However, the difficult part of social media marketing is consistency. Do you understand why that campaign or post succeeded? Can you replicate it easily?
It may be daunting to think about creating a social media strategy, but it will provide your business with many tangible benefits, like
- A direction for all your social media activities.
- Improve brand awareness.
- Offer social customer service and support.
- Enhance targeting across audiences.
- Direct and increase website traffic.
- Personalize content.
- Generate better quality leads.
- Create social media influencer opportunities.
- Promote your unique content that could go viral (remember the ALS ice bucket challenge?)
- Offer social commerce and shoppable posts.
- Data you can analyze and measure.
- As you can see, social media has considerable benefits, so creating a strategy will achieve your business goals and drive customer engagement.
Decoding the Variances: Social Media Marketing Strategy vs. Social Media Content Strategy
While content marketing and social media marketing are closely linked, there’s a difference between them.
If you want to direct and enhance your social media activities, a marketing strategy is the place to start. It involves critical elements such as audience research, persona building, choosing the social media platform, etc.
A content strategy focuses on the content formats and outputs. It should look at content creation, messaging and tone, content scheduling, etc.
What is a Social Media Engagement Strategy?
Your social media engagement strategy is essential as it creates connections with your audience across networks. It helps you to manage your community through social media channels and build your brand.
The two core purposes of an engagement strategy are to:
Manage your Community
This can be done by offering advice through a blog, responding to comments in posts, replying to queries on channels, and reaching out with polls or surveys to learn more about your customer base.
Grow your Following
Interaction is essential here, so offer valuable content such as engaging video content, engage prospects with free content or competition offers, or simply demonstrate your brand as active and useful by being responsive on your networks to draw people in
User-generated content (UGC) can play a crucial role here as it’s evidence of the people who support your brand talking about it rather than coming from your business or marketing team. Here are four great UGC examples you can take inspiration from.
What is a Good Example of a Social Media Strategy?
If you’re in the marketing sector, there will be a brand or business you admire. It could be a global brand like Airbnb Amazon, or a company like TOM focusing on corporate social responsibility.
Whichever brand you admire, finding out more about how they do what they do is a great place to get inspiration. It’s the same for social media. Learning from examples can give you great ideas to replicate in your business. Let’s look at some B2B and B2C examples.
B2B Social Media Strategy Examples
B2B marketing can be seen as less exciting than its counterpart, but there are some great examples to get some ideas.
Marketing automation may not be sexy, but Mailchimp does well at giving it personality. As an all-in-one email marketing service, they use bold colors and exciting illustrations across their website and social media channels to engage the eye, and their tone and language are playful.
They also use every opportunity to engage with their social media communities with a humorous tone that goes down well with users and customers.
Content creation software giant Adobe is another B2B company that sees social media success. Strong and impactful imagery is its strength, which the brand uses to its advantage. It also highlights the talent of encouraging them to share user-generated content using the long-running Instagram campaign #adobe_perspective. It then reshares the best on its brand account and tags the creator to promote its suite of products.
B2C Social Media Strategy Examples
There are some great examples of B2C social media campaigns. One brand that’s nailed ‘fun’ is Pringles. Using TikTok, Pringles launched a #PlayWithPringles campaign that encouraged creators to use their can in videos to do something creative. The campaign went viral and amassed nearly five billion views.
Dove is one of the brands that advocate for natural beauty using campaigns. Citing studies that indicated race-based hair discrimination begins at five years of age, Dove initiated a #PassTheCrown campaign.
This campaign highlighted the cause across their social media channels to urge people to sign a petition to pass the Crown Act.
Nonprofit Social Media Strategy Examples
Nonprofits use social media to boost brand awareness and donations. In a world where people care about social issues, they look for causes to support—wondering how to stand out among many organizations. Get inspiration from these examples.
The World Wildlife Foundation is a well-established brand in this sector, and there’s a good reason for that. Their campaigns are impactful and rely on visuals to get attention. Their #LastSelfie campaign was developed to highlight the risk to endangered animals.
Social Media Strategy for Small Businesses
All businesses, tiny businesses, can benefit from a social media strategy. It will help increase reach and engage a broad range of customers you would never have had access to.
Plus, it can be affordable if you plan correctly and use external help. Cut costs by hiring freelancers—there’s a wealth of talent. Explore platforms like Upwork or Fiverr, or leverage social media to find local talent. It’s a budget-friendly approach with access to highly skilled professionals.
What are the Steps in Building a Successful Social Media Strategy?
Set Business Goals
- Define specific social media goals aligned with your business objectives.
- Identify Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for each social media channel.
Research Your Audience
- Conduct market research through surveys, interviews, or social listening.
- Develop buyer personas to understand your ideal customer’s insights and demographics.
Competitor Analysis
- Study competitors’ social media strategies, platforms used, and content frequency.
- Emulate successful engagement strategies or explore alternative approaches.
Select Social Platforms
- Choose platforms based on your business type and content suitability.
- Tailor content for specific platforms like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, TikTok, YouTube, and Pinterest.
Plan Content
- Establish a consistent tone for your brand on each platform.
- Identify content themes or buckets aligned with your Unique Selling Proposition (USP).
- Create a content calendar to maintain regular posting schedules.
Content Creation
- Develop a social media style guide to ensure brand consistency.
- Utilize tools for content creation and ensure alignment with platform personalities.
- Consider different tones and approaches for each platform, if appropriate.
Content Calendar
- Schedule content publication to maintain a consistent presence.
- Consider optimal posting times for each social network.
- Use a calendar to organize and plan content for multiple channels.
Consistent Posting Schedule
- Acknowledge the importance of regular and consistent posting on social networks.
- Schedule content to maintain a steady and engaging social media presence.
How Britechx Can Help?
Britechx is a family-run web design firm based in Cheshire. We can take care of anything from a simple brochure website to your company’s online presence. There are no upfront web design fees, set-up costs, or additional extras, just one simple monthly fee that covers the entirety of your digital presence. We devise personalized social media campaigns specific to your brand and requirements to meet all the agreed-upon goals.
At Britechx, your time is better spent doing what you are great at: running your business, turning leads into sales, and taking your company to new heights. Why spend your valuable time trawling through Facebook for content ideas? Why squander your precious efforts contemplating which hashtags to use? Why waste your expertise attempting to create the perfect social media template? At Britechx, we care for all your social media needs, freeing you to run your business. We offer a complete end-to-end service encompassing graphic design, content creation, customer engagement, and day-to-day running. We keep all our clients updated regarding their social media progress, creating bespoke content based on their demands.
Takeaway
The central message of this blog highlights that a successful social media strategy involves setting clear business goals, understanding your audience, analyzing competitors, choosing the right social platforms, creating relevant content, maintaining a consistent posting schedule, and employing an engagement strategy.
Consider Britechx, a top social media marketing agency in the UK, for comprehensive social media solutions. Their personalized campaigns cover graphic design, content creation, customer engagement, and ongoing support. In the digital age, where social media is essential, a strategic approach enhances brand awareness, encourages customer engagement, and supports achieving business objectives.