The Benefits of a Strong Social Media Presence
A strong social presence is an essential component of the online strategy of your fashion brand.
Among the benefits of a persuasive social presence we can list the following:
- Validate your products. A strong social presence can help you display the value, social relevance, as well as the degree of “emotional attachment” that your customers have towards your brand.
- Shows the size of your audience. Even if at times social media uses “vanity metrics” (such as likes and shares), which may have a very limited impact on your profits and revenue, social media can provide a ballpark figure of the size of your audience and customer following.
- Supports the Customer Journey. Moreover, as customers move through their purchase decision, they will be very likely to check on social media to read reviews and comments from other customers before committing to a purchase.
Fashion brands are fully aware of the relevance of social media, but can sometimes have challenges in implementing the right approach. One that builds the brand but does not lead to “churn-and-burn” content publishing.
Churn-and-burn is the expression we use to indicate those situations whereby brands, in order to show an active profile and a high degree of platform engagement, end up creating content that does not lead to any tangible results, while still requiring a high investment in content creation and spreading.
To help you understand how to approach the development of your social media presence, we’re going to discuss the two most common social strategies, while listing some tips to help you better attune your brand to its customers.
With no further ado, let’s dive right into it.
#1 Engagement Strategy
Before we look into our tips, let’s define what we mean by an engagement strategy.
What is an engagement strategy?
An engagement strategy is a social media strategy focused on attracting a high volume of users to our social media platforms.
These users are not necessarily profiled as “ideal customers”, they are generic and unprofiled. At the same time, however, the broader the audience, the higher the chance of connecting to potential buyers.
This approach is probably the most common on social media as it revolves around creating emotional and compelling content which gets likes and shares organically.
On the other hand, the limitation of this approach is that likes and shares are not a business metric, and even a successful viral video can risk having little if any impact on revenue and profits.
Tips to Optimise an Engagement Strategy
If you’re using an engagement strategy to connect to your audience, these are some of our tips:
- Don’t Focus on the Product, Focus on the Job. Most brands focus on advertising their products but fail to take into account that products are simply tools that customers use to get a job done. Try to understand how your customers use your products and what value your products bring to the market to develop more effective communication strategies.
- Create Compelling, Emotional Content. As we mentioned in the introduction, make sure you’re using the right social media language. By developing content that creates an emotional reaction, or that people connect to, it will be easier to spread content more organically.
- Plan Your Posts to Diversify Content. Given the high-speed pace of social media feed, make sure you’re diversifying your content so that customers may be better able to engage with your brand. After a little bit, even the most amazing content can become “background noise” unless you’re changing formats.
- Use a Consistent Brand Voice. Even if you are changing content formats, make sure that you are using a consistent brand voice, one that makes users feel as if they are actually reading something written by the brand itself.
- Develop A Cause. On social media, it’s important to discuss the values, mission, and purposes of your business, don’t be afraid to share your company culture and the causes you’re supporting.
Great! Let’s now move on to nurture strategies.
#2 Nurture Strategy
Before we look into our tips, let’s define what we mean by a nurture strategy.
What is a nurture strategy?
A nurture strategy is a strategy whereby a brand knows that in order to convert a customer it will have to interact with him\her multiple times.
In a “nurture” approach, the high organic reach of social media is paired with a marketing funnel that is optimized for conversion.
The benefit of this approach is that it is focused on making sure that a social strategy is measured against quantitative data, to show the impact that the strategy has made on the bottom line of the business.
Tips to Optimise a Nurture Strategy
If you’re using a nurture strategy, these are some of our top tips for optimizing it.
- It’s all about metrics. As discussed a nurture strategy is about measuring results. The first thing to do is to make sure that your social media pages, call to action and landing pages are well tracked so that as you drive traffic through the funnel you’re able to actually see what is working and what is not.
- Create synergies with your SEO content. Make sure that your social media is not simply doubling your SEO content. Make sure that your blog posts and website content is in synergy with your social media posts, and is not cannibalizing your traffic.
- Create consistent calls to action. As customers move through paid, earned, and owned media and across multiple platforms in your funnel, make sure your communication is consistent, from your color palettes to your layouts and designs to your CTAs.
- Connect social media posts to specific landing pages. To get the best of your funnel, remember that landing pages need to mirror exactly what is advertised on the top-of-the-funnel posts. This is why you need a variety of landing pages to connect to a variety of post typologies. If a customer gets an offer on a landing page that is not perfectly aligned with what was advertised on the top-of-the-funnel post, you risk losing purchase intent.
- Optimize, optimize, optimize. In nurture strategies, the way to improve is to trust data. Put your own ego and taste aside and collect information that helps you increase conversions.
Great! Now that we’ve covered both approaches, we can ask ourselves one final question. Do I need to choose between these two strategies, or can I use them both?
We’ll address this question in the next section of our post.
#3 Using Both Approaches at Once
After having discussed our top tips for both nurture and engagement strategies, it’s important to remember that these two approaches to developing your social media following are not mutually exclusive.
In many cases, brands, by understanding their specific characteristics and needs, are able to identify the right combination of content to achieve the best of both worlds.
On the one hand, a high organic reach with emotional and compelling content that broadens the volume of “top-of-the-funnel” interactions, on the other, brands can create a high-conversion funnel.
In this sense, make sure you’re picking and choosing the optimization advice that better fits with your current social presence to leverage the reach you have already developed.
Great! Now that we’ve touched upon all relevant topics, it’s time to draw some conclusive remarks.
A Great Online Class: Instagram Strategy for Business Growth
If you are interested in learning more about how you can leverage the power of social media to grow your brand, we recommend taking a look at the online class “Instagram Strategy for Business Growth”.
The course is currently under promotion, but you can use the discount code: T_BROWNLEES-PROMO to get an additional 10% discount on your purchase.
This online class offered by Domestika, at a very inexpensive price covers all you need to know to create an effective Instagram strategy that delivers value to your audience and helps you gain reach to your business. If you apply to the course through the link below you’ll be supporting 440 Industries, and we thank you for it!
Conclusions
There you have it! In this post, we’ve discussed engagement and nurture strategies as the two most popular social strategies for fashion brands.
There are many aspects to consider to make sure that your strategy is well-aligned with your customers and in this post, we’ve listed some of our best tips to help you succeed.
By the way, if you’re looking for some academic literature on the matter, there’s an excellent book we recommend when it comes to developing your strategy: Social IMC: Social Strategies with Bottom-Line ROI
We’ve used this book as one of the sources for this article and we highly recommend it if you’d like to learn more about community building on social media.
<iframe style=”width:120px;height:240px;” marginwidth=”0″ marginheight=”0″ scrolling=”no” frameborder=”0″ src=”//ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?ServiceVersion=20070822&OneJS=1&Operation=GetAdHtml&MarketPlace=US&source=ac&ref=qf_sp_asin_til&ad_type=product_link&tracking_id=tommy711-20&marketplace=amazon&region=US&placement=1495203662&asins=1495203662&linkId=fd2e53fad3a466d1bddeba73937660d0&show_border=false&link_opens_in_new_window=false&price_color=333333&title_color=0066c0&bg_color=ffffff”>
</iframe>
Also, in our blog, you’ll be able to find a wealth of helpful and informative articles on how to build a strong media presence for your brand, and build an audience by spreading your message.
If you’re interested in learning more about Content Marketing, don’t hesitate to take a look at our course “Content Marketing for Creative Rockstars“. Our short and to-the-point, online class covers a wide range of topics spanning from developing blog posts capable of driving profitable traffic to strategies for getting strong conversion rates on your landing pages. Here’s a link to the course, if you use the discount code BLOG20 you can access a 20% discount. Enjoy!
