Social media is a unique consideration for businesses in the educational marketing space and across the modern economy. It’s not just a marketing tool and shouldn’t only be used as such, but it also must be viewed as a fundamental method of boosting outreach and conversion efforts. How can your company align its social media use with its broader marketing strategy?
A strong social media plan that aligns with larger marketing strategy helps your business realize more positive results.
Understanding the special role of social media
As long as your business has a good grasp of its audience and knows how to speak to them, social networks can fill a variety of roles. From answering questions posed by current and potential customers to creating a sense of community and more traditional marketing efforts, social media provides the platform for one-to-one and one-to-many conversations and outreach.
HootSuite pointed out the value of social media in displaying brand values and generally humanizing your organization. As a direct conduit to your customer base, social media is a great place to offer proof that your products or services work as intended, whether it’s making the jobs of education professionals easier or boosting their performance. Social media makes it possible to both offer statistics and success stories generated internally or through client contact, and encourage genuine testimonials from customers on posts about the topic.
This same dynamic can be seen in many other contexts, from more general raising of brand awareness to sourcing and creating content that supports your offerings. Social media’s versatility, ability to foster conversation and solicit feedback in a conversational setting can’t easily be replicated.
Incorporating social media into high-level marketing strategy
Strategy means acting with purpose, following a plan that’s vetted and agreed upon by leaders and experts within your company. Social media posts should generally have this same type of defined intent, geared to align with any current campaigns tied around a specific product, outreach to a specific audience segment or other approach. That doesn’t mean that every single post has to slot into a campaign – soliciting feedback or announcing major company news are important, but may not always have a specific tie-in, for example – but exceptions shouldn’t be very common.
This type of alignment allows staff, from leaders who coordinate overall marketing strategy to social media specialists, to work together behind the scenes and create individual elements for campaigns that intelligently support each other. Using existing overall marketing strategies to define specifics for social media outreach, like understanding target audiences and which types of posts or content to focus on, can help start things off on the right foot. But you should also be careful to account for the unique aspects of social media, like the ability for instantaneous feedback in a public setting and the always changing, regularly updating nature of the social feeds your customers see.
Aligning social media with your larger marketing strategy can lead to some significant benefits. To learn more about AgileSocial, get in touch with Agile’s social media experts today!
