The New Year brings with it a fresh start, and for Social Media managers and the like, that means a whole new round of adjustments and tweaks as they’ll have to once again refine their processes to ensure that they stay on top of the latest trends and are maximizing their online marketing efforts. You can expect things to gradually unfold over the next few weeks, so while there’s time, we suggest stocking up on fresh guides such as this to be in the best starting condition possible.

What Is?

Before you even go to the nitty gritty, you have to start at the bare bones – what is your brand about? What do you want to communicate with your brand’s Social Media presence? The primary step is establishing clear and defined goals, which leads us to our first major element:

Defining Your Brand ‘Why’

It’s important that you understand why your brand exists and what it aims to accomplish, or at the very least – facilitate. Once you identify this, you can begin building your brand strategy around this core goal, ensuring that each upload is critical and purposeful. 

In some ways, that could work, but building a hyper-focused strategy would also mean that each of your updates becomes another brick in the foundation of your brand, allowing you to continuously connect with people who align with your mission. If you can get it right, the people you want to target will be the same ones who’ll keep coming back. 

In 1996, Harvard University researchers James Collins and Jeremy Porras authored a series of papers about ‘Building Your Company’s Vision’, which were based on various interviews with marketing leaders, as well as from their own experiences working with major brands. According to Collins and Porras: 

“Companies that enjoy enduring success have core values and a core purpose that remains fixed while their business strategies and practices endlessly adapt to a changing world.”

From their anthological report, here are the core purpose statements of some of the world’s most renowned brands: 

  • Nike – To experience the emotion of competition, winning, and crushing competitors.

  • 3M – To solve unsolved problems innovatively.

  • Wal-Mart – To give ordinary folk the chance to buy the same things as rich people.

  • Walt Disney – To make people happy.

It might be worth further checking out Collins and Porras’ ‘The Five Whys’ for even more insight about identifying and establishing company or brand purpose. 

In the end, it’s not really about what you’re selling, but why you’re selling it. Knowing your whys plays a key role in guiding your overall approach and ensures that you and your staff are all on the same page. This is where your Mission statement comes into play; various studies have shown that Gen Z employees seek more purpose in their careers, as well as more alignment with their own goals and interests. 

The Wrap

It might take a bit of extra effort and discussion debating your brand’s true purpose and mission statement, but it is through processes like these that you move closer to establishing a clear goal that you’re aiming for. In the long run, having well-defined and established objectives also helps guide your Social Media marketing process at each step, which aligns all of your individual actions, down to the very last status post. This is how you build brand identity online.

Sources 

https://bit.ly/3GAKWDx