Bad advice makes it more difficult for small brands to get the content and social media strategy that they really need.

Bad advice can sound like: 

• You have to be on Reels
• Your strategy has to be pay-to-play
• Your feed needs to look consistent
• Here’s the only way to write your Insta bio

My intention is NOT to sound snarky here! But I know firsthand that every hour, dollar, and decision counts in a small business, and over-simplified, one-size-fits-all advice like this threatens a small business’ success on social media before they’ve gotten started. 

What you definitely want, no matter your business: 

• A holistic digital ecosystem made up of great owned, earned, and paid content, and the right media mix for your market.

But beware:

• Your order of operations (and what role social media plays in your overall marketing and business strategy) will be significantly different depending on your product or service, market, target customer, business objectives, and available resources (time, money, and talent).

For example: 

• If you have a low consideration physical or digital product, you’ll want to set your profiles up and establish a customer acquisition benchmark with social media advertising as quickly as possible. This will help you plan, model, and predict what you can expect from selling on social media. Once you have that in place, you can start to build out your organic channels to nurture your community (until your next product launch). 
• High consideration physical or digital products can take longer to sell, especially online to cold audiences (aka people that have never heard of you). Without an established customer base, retail, or PR strategy that helps to build your warm audience of folks that are familiar with you, it might be a slower burn on social. That doesn’t mean it’s not worth being here, it just means that you may need social to play more of a supporting role in your overall strategy and should align your resources accordingly.
• If you’re a consumer goods product, you need to have a really strong brand strategy, first, in order to stand out. Then content strategy. Then social.  
• If you have a product that’s sold wholesale with a small online business, you have the chance to work on your channels more organically over time. Unless you have aggressive ecomm targets, then you’ll want horsepower more quickly.  
• If you’re a bootstrapping service-based business, you are going to need to focus on a lean content strategy that matches the creative talent on the team and gets the most out of every piece of content produced tailored to each platform. LinkedIn, Insta, TikTok, and Facebook all need different content and if you want engagement, plug-and-play ain’t gonna cut it.
• The list goes on but this email is getting long…

For all of us, regardless of specific business, we want our strategy to start small—focused on the areas we need it most—and grow out to be more substantial overtime as we accumulate resources. The trick is always making sure that we are solving problems in the right order for our unique situation. Does that make sense? 

If you’re interested in working more closely with me to dial in your custom content and social media strategy, here’s a list of how we can work together. For most folks, the Content Strategy Accelerator is where we should meet next, which offers us a special opportunity to actually talk to each other and work together through your strategic content strategy development. It’s awesome!!

Let me know if you have any questions!

Katie