When it comes to the digital shop window, your social media profiles do so much of the heavy lifting these days. The thing is, you don’t actually have to spend a large amount on your social media content to make it both effective and cohesive. However, you can’t afford to lose a potential customer when they land on your Facebook page or Instagram profile, and you haven’t made a post in over six months. An organic social media strategy will solve this problem quickly.
Having a strong and consistent social media presence helps build trust in your brand, giving one unified tone of voice or brand imagery across all digital touchpoints. We’ll delve into both of these topics in this article, as well as myth-busting the idea that organic social strategy isn’t as complicated or expensive as it seems, whilst also outlining exactly what a good organic social media strategy actually looks like.
What is brand authority, and why does it matter?
Brand authority is the level of trust, credibility, and expertise that your audience associates with your business. It is what makes someone choose you over any competitors they found at a similar time, and also the reason people recommend you to friends without hesitation in the future. Having a strong brand authority can be a contributing reason in the decision-making process for new customers who have never heard of you before, as an engaging, informative brand is more likely to generate interest and intrigue that can inspire a purchase.
Research consistently shows that consumers are more likely to buy from brands they recognise and trust. Trust isn’t something you can generate overnight, nor is it built by one good advert. Instead, you build trust and brand authority, gradually, through repeated, consistent contact with your business: social media being one of the primary places to reach a new customer and contact them softly with engaging content.
Consider the last time you Googled a brand you’d never heard of before. Where did you immediately click into to discover them? The chances are that your first port of call was their social media profile on your favourite platform.
Having a cohesive, knowledgeable, and genuinely useful presence on social media leads people eventually to see you as an authority in your niche, and building this particular perception directly influences purchasing decisions down the line.
How organic social media strategy builds brand authority
The most impressive brands on social media share a few things in common: they sound like themselves every single time they post, with a consistent tone of voice; that consistent tone of voice carries across product launches, customer support enquiries and even in behind-the-scenes video content; consistency means reliability, and reliability generates trust.
Beyond having a clear and consistent tone of voice across all touchpoints, the very best brands actually add value through their organic social media content. By sharing knowledge that their audience actually finds useful and answering the questions that people already would be asking, they create this simple trust in the brand. It is about showing up regularly to entertain and inform the audience, not just endlessly sell to them. By positioning your business as a go-to resource, rather than just operating to drive clicks, you generate more brand authority and, in turn, create loyalty with your customers.
Engaging your audience turns them into believers, and it is in the specific value of your organic content that you actually earn their loyalty and their buying power. All of this can be done without an extensive, long-term cost. Having a digital marketing specialist, like me, create a strategy tailored to your business, it can give you the framework for an in-house copywriter to follow without incurring any further added costs.
Organic social isn’t as complicated or expensive as it seems
A lot of small business owners assume that doing social media properly means ongoing, expensive agency fees or hiring someone full-time. The reality is much more flexible than that. A small investment in an initial strategy can develop your organic social media platforms into a genuine channel for your business to drum up more sales and appeal to new customers.
Having a strong organic social media strategy built by a digital marketing expert can be handed to any of your in-house copywriters to roll out on a month-to-month basis, within the guidelines and the remit that the specialised identified would be key for your business to grow on your chosen platforms.
This means that if you already have someone who handles your marketing, they can improve your social media presence just by following a prebuilt strategy that was created in line with your business goals. As they don’t need to start from scratch every month, you can both improve the consistency in your organic content and decrease the amount of time it takes to brainstorm a whole host of new posts every time.
Following the content pillars, tone of voice guidelines, and the posting cadence, a good organic social media strategy can be followed without the need to outsource every single piece of content on a weekly or monthly basis. Alternatively, if you really do not think you have the time to dedicate to creating organic social media posts, you can still hand the writing off to a copywriting expert like me, who can follow the previously agreed strategy for a relatively low cost. Five social media posts can cost as little as £10 to have an expert create perfect, engaging content unique to your business.
What does a good organic social strategy actually look like?
At its core, a good organic social strategy gives your content a clear direction and a reliable structure. The foundation of this is something we call content pillars – three identified and agreed-upon strands of post types that your content will funnel into. These are different for each business and can also vary depending on the goals that you aim to achieve with your organic social media content.
Content pillars can include things like your brand values, educational content based on your niche and expertise, and your key product lines. Having these foundational pillars allows you to write social media posts that do something purposeful for your brand with each post you publish.
The next key to success is the cadence with which you post on your social media profiles. You have to find the balance between showing up consistently and valuably. The algorithm of each platform rewards regularity in posting, but your audience also begins to learn when to expect to hear from you next and what types of messages to expect. Spreading yourself too thinly and trying to post more times than is sustainable will only produce disappointing results. A strategy identifies which platforms to post on in order to best find your audience, and your pillars dictate the types of messages that will add value to their newsfeeds.
Running through all of this is your brand tone of voice. Every post, caption and comment should come together in harmony to make your business feel like a coherent and recognisable entity rather than a random collection of content, where your audience doesn’t know what to expect from you next.
Let me help you with your organic social media strategy
Whilst this can all sound a little intimidating at first, working with a social media strategist can help give you a clearly defined structure for your organic content. Working with me, I can develop a clear strategy that gives you defined ways to post on social media regularly without it feeling like yet another marketing burden. From as little as £150, you can receive a one-month social media strategy that will get your profiles off the ground and start to feel a little more cohesive, no matter which channel your customers discover you on.
I know that flexibility matters for small businesses, so my digital marketing services can give you a one-month, three-month or six-month organic social media strategy. You can even ask me to write your next week of social media content, following your existing strategy, to start to get an idea as to how best you should write post captions to engage your audience.
Building brand authority through organic social is not about going viral or posting every hour. It is about posting consistently, saying the right things in all the right places, and giving your audience a reason to trust you over time. That is entirely achievable for a small business: it just needs a clear plan and someone who knows how to build an organic social media strategy.
Contact me today with your query, and I’ll get back to you within 48 hours to arrange next steps and a plan for us to work together to reach your goals.