Why do you need a social media marketing strategy?

In 2021, this is a question that is vaguely answered. The reality is, the digital marketing landscape has changed and is shifting towards social media. There are several benefits to having a social media marketing strategy, but first, let’s look at some statistics that reflect the true power of social media marketing:

•  Currently, over 3 billion people are on social media as users.
•  Facebook is the most widely used platform with over 2 billion active monthly users.
•  The average user spends 2 hours a day on social media.

These numbers on the surface seem big, however; they only paint part of a picture as to the true power of social media marketing and why it’s important to have a social media marketing strategy.
Oftentimes, however, we find a lot of business owners are using social media with no goal or plan. Two reasons why we see business owners using social media with no goal or plan are:

•   Short term ROI
•   Saving money

Here’s what we mean

     1. Short Term ROI:

A lot of small to medium-sized businesses live in the world of short-term ROI. This is not by choice, it’s by being forced to. Small to medium-sized businesses are constantly focused on making the most amount of money in the least amount of time possible.

     2. Saving Money:

Small to medium-sized businesses are constantly met with the idea of saving money wherever possible. This could mean spending less on equipment, paying employees less, doing a lot of work themselves, and even cutting back on social media efforts.
With short-term ROI and saving money being the focus for small to medium-sized businesses, it becomes clear as to why social media takes a backseat, and the small to medium-sized businesses that do try don’t have a plan.
It doesn’t have to be that way for small to medium-sized businesses though. There are so many great ways to use social media to really accomplish whatever goal you want to achieve for your business, but you must develop a social media marketing strategy.
But why do you need a social media marketing strategy? To really understand the scope of social media marketing and why having a strategy is so important, we first need to explore what goals you have for your business.
Some common goals we see small to medium-sized business owners use social media marketing for are:

• Lead generation
•   Increasing sales
•   Hiring
•   Public relations

Now that we understand some common goals businesses seek to achieve with social media marketing, we can begin to paint a clearer picture of why a social media marketing plan is important.
With some of these goals in mind, let’s go through each one and develop a strategy so we can paint a clearer picture as to why it’s important to develop a social media marketing strategy.
Social Media has become an important marketing tool for businesses to use in their lead generation efforts in 2021 as it comes with several benefits.
For starters, social media lead generation is very cost-effective. With social media lead generation, you’ll pay a fraction of the cost that traditional marketing has to offer with the added benefit of reaching more people and reaching a more targeted audience (people interested in your product or service.)

There are two ways you can operate social media advertising: Organic branding and sponsored branding.

• Organic branding: With organic branding, you can build an audience and generate leads through consistent content creation without the use of paid ads. This works exceptionally well for companies in the service space. Following this strategy allows you to build an audience organically and because you are posting content that is attractive to your audience, the clients from your page will be highly interested in what you sell..
• Sponsored branding: With sponsored branding, you take great pieces of content on social media and sponsor that piece of content to target an audience that you want to sell to. This can cost anywhere from $100 – $500 a week and can result in a targeted reach of 1,000 – 50,000. With a sponsored piece of content, you can reach more people with less money than you can through other platforms like Google.
  Additionally, you can utilize a social media marketing strategy to build trust with a new audience as well as maintain the current trust you have built. For example, let’s say you own a restaurant, and you want to improve your social media management. Every time someone goes to your restaurant to eat, they leave a review, post a picture of your food, and talk about how great their experience was. Then you take everything they post and share it on your social media pages. Now, every time someone searches for your restaurant, and they are met with your social media, they are going to have more trust in your restaurant.The third piece to social media marketing as a form of lead generation results in higher conversion rates. Touching back on building trust, with a social media marketing strategy, you can increase your conversion rates by becoming more customer-centric in your approach which leads to higher sales and even more referrals!
• Social media marketing strategy: Now that we have covered lead generation as a goal, let’s create a strategy so we can better understand the importance of having a social media marketing strategy.To generate leads using organic branding, sponsored branding, and trust-building, we first need to develop a pool of content to be posted. That is, we need to develop content that can be posted consistently. Pieces of content like pictures, videos, testimonials, and reviews.Once you begin posting consistently, then you take a piece of content you have posted (our team recommends using your highest performing one) and put marketing dollars behind that piece of content to get it in front of the right people.Now that you have sponsored content and supporting content to showcase your page, culture, etc. It’s time to do some brand management to continue building trust and maintain the trust that has been and is being built.All three of these in a social media marketing strategy, when followed consistently, ultimately lead to higher conversion rates and lead generation!