In this day and age, the question isn’t if your brand is marketing itself on social media. It’s how much is your brand marketing itself on social media. Far beyond the capabilities of traditional marketing, social media marketing is a way to not only reach a massive audience but engage with them in meaningful ways. This engagement drives loyalty, elevates your brand’s visibility and ultimately drives growth.
From Building Followers to Influencing Them
You don’t need to look too far these days to see entire brands that were built on the foundation of social media marketing. By creating a message that resonated with an audience, not only informing and entertaining them but empowering them, these brands cultivated a massive audience almost instantly. The key step was taken next – developing a relationship with that audience, presenting them with authentic content that focused on their needs and desires. That is how these brands were able to emerge as influencers, enjoying an elevated status among their audience.
These brands were able to reach this level of connection because they realized that social media requires a truly all-hands-on-deck approach to be effective. Treating social media as an afterthought to traditional marketing may build an audience to some extent, but reaching that audience requires setting social media marketing at the center of your overall marketing strategy. And if you want to see the results you’re looking for, your social media marketing needs to be carefully planned, thoughtfully curated, and actively monitored.
Three Aspects of a Social Media Marketing Plan
There are three things that every social media marketing plan must be:
Cohesive: The experience your users enjoy interacting with your brand on social media must carry across to every part of the business integrating to every channel, helping you create a more effective story, building on engagement and ultimately setting your brand apart in a cluttered field.
Strategic: The algorithms that prioritize what users are shown on social media know to look out for low-quality or haphazard content. Focusing on quality content, delivering it in ways to designed for maximum engagement with the right audience, and creating a consistent schedule of output will help boost your profile no matter what channel.
Specialized: Your website’s audience is simply not going to be the same as your social media audience, and that should be reflected in your content. If your website is all about conversion, your social media channels need to be all about conversation – building that relationship and engaging with potential customers.
Two Major Brand Strategies
There are two major strategies when it comes to spreading your brand’s message online, both of which work in tandem to create a cohesive strategy.
Organic Social Media Marketing
To get more people to see and engage with your brand on social media you need to create extraordinarily valuable and meaningful social posts. When you share content that your target audience finds interesting, helpful, entertaining, or solves their problems, they’re more likely to interact with your brand or consider your brand a thought leader.
When you consistently produce high-quality content that provides value, you build trust and credibility in your area of expertise. This makes your audience more likely to follow you, share your content, and interact with it. As a result, your content reaches more people naturally. Valuable content catches people’s attention, starts conversations, and encourages others to share it with their own social networks. This is where the vast amount of your target audience lives.
Paid Social Media
The opposite or organic social media is paid social media. Paid social media enables you to invest money to expand your content’s reach and connect with a broader audience. By targeting specific demographics, interests, and behaviors through ads, you can ensure that your content reaches the audience you are seeking. Paid social media offers swift visibility and tangible outcomes by amplifying your reach beyond organic efforts.
Both organic and paid social media have their pros and cons. Fortunately, they can both be used to grow your brand an audience to new heights.
Know Your Audience – Or Don’t
While you can divide up an audience by any number of demographics from age, location, and interests and preferences, you have realized that you don’t truly know your audience. Finding out who they are beyond the database information is key, as is listening to them and understanding their needs. The more you focus on them, the more you realize that your brand can offer far more value to your clients and customers than a sales pitch.
Your audience is influenced by any number of factors beyond your social media message. You have to earn their trust by empowering them, educating them, and sharing in their journey. Only then will you truly engage with your audience in a meaningful way, driving them to greater loyalty toward your brand. It may seem counterintuitive to offer so much to your customers and ask nothing in return, but there are thousands of successful brands who can demonstrate the value of respecting your audience and connecting with them in an authentic way.
What Does Electric Lemonade Do Differently?
By putting your audience first, we’re able to determine which social media platforms they use most, and how best to reach them there. Building this initial strategy means:
- Determining where you audience is, focusing on those platforms that will deliver the best results. We support multiple social media platforms including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube, TikTok, LinkedIn and Pinterest.
- Establishing what kinds of content will work best, whether it’s the written text, photos, or videos.
- Crafting a definitive social media framework and persona in place that your audience will respond to by nailing down a tone and a style for your brand.
- Deciding what posting schedule would yield the best results, as well as whether your brand would benefit from paid posts.
That’s before we get started. Once we’re off and running, we continuously monitor your accounts to engage with your audience. We also monitor the chatter in and around your industry to make sure your brand serves as an authoritative voice in your field. And on the back end of things, we’ll constantly collect data and A/B test content and messaging to adjust strategy as needed and ensure the best results.
To find out how this comprehensive approach can work for your brand, reach out for a 30-minute discovery call. Then let’s build your brand together.
