6 Reasons Why You Need a Digital Media Strategy

Trying to build a brand on social media without a defined strategy can be totally counterproductive. You’ll find yourself just posting for the sake of it, with little rhyme or reason, and as a result, seeing no return from such efforts.

In this post, we’ll review six big reasons why you need a social media strategy in place for your business, and how it can benefit your brand.

1. To Build a Strong, Organic Presence

The first reason you need a social media strategy is because it will help you build a strong, organic presence online.

You’ll be able to plan out posts in advance, and get them scheduled and set. All of this, in-turn, will help you stick to social media rule number one: posting consistently.

Failure to maintain consistency is one big reason social media accounts stop growing.

2. To Save Time

The second benefit to creating and implementing a social media strategy is that it will help you save time – and who wouldn’t want more time on their hands?

Yes, getting everything together to create a content calendar and content bank is a big task at first, but getting your post needs sorted and scheduled for the next week or month will greatly reduce the time you spend on actually posting each day.

No more staring at a blank screen scrambling to figure out what to post - you’ll now be able to spend a little more time on other tasks, and on analyzing what’s working.

3. Make Sure Your Goals are Covered

Having a social media strategy in place will ensure that your social media efforts are more fruitful, and are working to support your broader business goals.

Putting a strategy together includes outlining your business goals, so that you can work backwards to create posts which reinforce them. You’ll also want to outline some social media goals (and track them) so you have something to work towards, and to validate that the work you are doing is paying off.

4. Target Your Audience More Effectively

How does a social media strategy enable you to target your audience more effectively?

Part of your strategy can include plugging in audience engagement elements (like polls or open-ended questions) into your updates so you can get a better handle on your audience’s pain points, and how you can provide value to solve them.

5. Leave Room for Creativity, and to Create Better Content

A social media strategy brings to light the elements, methods and networks which are working for your business - as well as the ones which are not.

A strategy in line with your business goals will facilitate creating content that resonates with your audience, gives you the opportunity to refine the quality of your material, and enables you to think about how you can get creative with social posts.

This can include using the more dynamic tools available on the social media networks - perhaps you’ll have the bandwidth to develop live videos on Facebook, or Instagram Stories. You might be able to participate in, or even create your own Twitter chats, and more.

Whatever it may be, you’ll be able to dive in and show your audience you know what you’re doing.

6. Stay Ahead of the Competition

The last reason why you need a social media strategy is that it will help you stay ahead of the competition.

Tying everything we went over in this article - with daily posts planned, you can concentrate on those fine details which help you stand out from everyone else in your niche. You’ll be able to analyze what’s working, start developing your brand story and voice, establish a distinctive look and feel for your accounts, and all while remaining consistent and providing value to your audience.

So besides stopping you from going crazy, or leaving your accounts dormant for days on end, there are so many benefits to creating and sticking to a social media strategy. Hopefully this post has helped you feel a little more motivated to get organized.

A version of this post was first published on Dhariana Lozano’s blog.