Why Having a Social Media Strategy Is More Important Than You Might Think

What it Takes to Succeed in this Digital Age

Producing a social media campaign without a strategy to support it would be similar to applying for a business loan at Wells Fargo bank without having a substantial plan to optimize your business and be able to pay it back. This choice would surely result in everlasting debt and perhaps bankruptcy. Creating digital content in this carefree manner, would probably never lead a company to digital success.

Without a strategy the brand would have no sense of direction and therefore no goal. A social media specialist’s job, which could no longer be considered specialized, would be to simply post and pray that people will like their company and buy their products. With this trial and error approach, the campaign would not present a cohesive image of your brand and the digital world would shrug and move on with their lives. That is only if they see your campaign content. While the execution of digital tactics is what most companies need help with, creating the strategy is the essential first step toward success digitally. Without it, there is no guiding light.

Using a strategy provides a depth of reason behind digital creation so without it, there would be no point in using social media as a business tool. The digital transformation of a company is a journey and a journey needs a map in this case, a clear roadmap driven by a digital strategy. I am sure no successful company would want to invest time and money into a digital campaign without a plan of action to receive a return on their investment. Gerald Kane and coauthors published a 2015 report of a study sponsored by MIT Sloan Management Review and Deloitte that found that 80 percent of “digitally maturing” companies had clear, coherent digital strategies. Although when creating content, it behooves marketing teams to separate the profit margin from brand focus, profitability in social media marketing is of utmost importance.

This is why strategies are utilized to create brand awareness, pique the interest of customers, and spark a sense of desire for the products. From there the conversion to a sale is actually only the starting point to the company’s desire to develop the bond of life-long loyalty between their brand and their customers. Only strategic marketing involves the need to determine what type of content the target audience would like in order to find a way to provide it. Just determining who the target audience is and what their interests and needs are increases the chance that the brand content will be enjoyed and shared instead of ignored. By taking these measured approaches, marketing specialists can avoid wasting resources on initiatives that don’t align with the business’s needs and priorities.

In digital marketing, there is really no choice but to explore and utilize certain tactics to market a brand. Being able to iterate your brand messages based on performance metrics is another pathway to success that would be sorely missed without a strategic mission. It is what informs your marketing tactics and outlines how you reach your goals online. Otherwise, how would you measure or track the results of all your hard work?

Let’s say you are the digital brand manager for Chipotle, and you notice during your weekly analytics review that your Twitter account receives more shares, comments, and Grub Hub orders via the link provided when you post pictures of a cook preparing food for the lunchtime rush. On the other hand, you notice you don’t get the same engagement when you post clap-backs about your competitor Qdoba. Strategy is the guide that helps you reign in the sass and choose to post the content that leads to more profitable results.

Marketing teams should also use strategies such as discovering new social media trends and customizing them in a way that works for their brand. Whether it be a silly new face filter or short video snippets to share your brand story, all of this is a necessary part of developing a social media campaign. If all of this still sounds like a social experiment, then you have missed the defined purpose of digital strategy. It is time-tested knowledge that can tip the scales in your favor within an ever-changing digital market. There is no one-size-fits-all approach when it comes to your digital efforts. Rather, the strategy should be a compilation of different tactics served at the right time to the right audience.

Without strategy, most if not all of the attempts from companies to break into the social media world and market themselves would fail. Social media strategists would give up after frantically trying to improve metrics that they aren’t analyzing to use to their advantage. Their only option would be to return to traditional marketing methods with fervent faith that a hoard of Millennials will put down their phones and electronic devices and watch television for the undeterminable length of time it would take to see their commercial. Without digital strategy, social media campaigning would be left up to guesswork and chance, something no company should stake their business on.