Why a Creative Strategy is Critical to Brand Awareness on Social Media - MKT-455

Would an NFL team ever go into a Super Bowl without a game plan? Didn’t think so. This same concept goes for creating a successful brand online. It’s just not going to happen without a “game plan” or a creative strategy to lead the way.

When thinking about creating social media accounts for your start-up or growing brand, it is important to not rush into anything at first. Although it sounds easy, a good social media strategy to create a successful brand takes a lot of time and work. The last thing you would want to do to your brand is create an inconsistent image by creating the page, posting a few things at first, then totally changing up the whole theme of the account since something wasn’t working.

Before even posting the first form of content, developing a creative strategy is a must. This creative strategy is basically your guide to all of your social media accounts. Within the strategy holds the theme, customized messages, sample posts, target audience, keywords, content strategy, color schemes, brand names, logos, tag lines, mission statement…should I go on? Anyway, this creative strategy is your playbook for your brand. It should hold all of the research and details about how you want your brand to look and work going forward. In the past, I’ve worked on a few different company’s social media strategies and all of them were at least 10 pages of information for them to follow.

Having a set plan in place is the absolute best way to achieve the ultimate goal of brand awareness on social media. Brand awareness is basically how well people know your brand. The better you are in your social media game, the more recognizable you become as a brand.

Keeping a consistent image across all social media platforms is one way to boost brand awareness. This consistent image can be achieved by following the guidelines in your social media creative strategy. For example, keeping consistent with how much you post, the type of content you post, even down to a consistent color scheme will help create a more recognizable and solid brand across all platforms. If you continue to follow your guide and work towards consistency, hopefully one day someone will be able to see a photo on their feed and know for sure it’s’ your brand without even having to check the account name.

Another way to create brand awareness and advocacy on social media is to interact with your community of followers. Again, this should all be laid out in the social media strategy but creating an engaging environment will only keep people coming back for more. For example, if you’re selling workout gear, interacting with your customers on social media will create a more personal and emotional customer experience for them. Re-post some content your brand was tagged in to your story, reply to your followers comments, try to answer direct messages if you can, just do something so your community feels more connected to your brand. This personalized and unique customer experience will hopefully make them interact with your brand more, want to continue to invest in your brand, and eventually make them loyal advocates.

The main goal of having social media accounts as a brand is to create an engaging online community that will keep people wanting to come back for more. The whole process takes time and is not always easy. This is why it is so important to have a detailed creative social media strategy that you can follow at all times. The strategic plan should be the key to your success by laying out exactly what you want your brand to contain, what you want to post, and how you want to do it. Based on my experience, not rushing into social media and really taking the time to develop a great plan is the best way to be successful and reach that goal of brand awareness and loyalty. After all, Rome wasn’t built in a day, right?

Image Received from https://www.singlegrain.com/social-media/the-beginners-guide-to-crafting-a-highly-effective-social-media-strategy-in-2019/