Trade associations know that they need a strong brand with strategic messaging behind it. But with the rise of social media and various platforms like TikTok making unprecedented headway, how to execute that brand message across social platforms has gotten increasingly more difficult. You have to balance your brand messages with social content in a way that helps promote brand awareness with your target audience while still creating engaging content that fits with the platform itself.
One way to look at it, is your brand message is the overall story and image behind your association, while your social messages strategy is how you take that brand and make compelling reasons for why your audience should engage with your content, follow your account, or even become a member. Here’s a few ways to help your trade association walk that line strategically:
- Define your brand messages.
- Your brand message encompasses what your brand stands for: mission, values, and the differentiating factor that makes you stand out amidst the competition.
- Develop 4-5 messages that embody your brand so you know how to communicate your brand in words to the audience.
2. Understand your place on social and define your KPIs
- As an association in our social-first world, it’s essential to understand which platforms your target audiences are on, and which make the most sense for you to be engaging with them on.
- Define your KPI’s and what the end goal of connecting with this audience is. This will help further develop your brand messages into social strategies and content by knowing what you want them to do with their understanding of your brand.
3. Build your social media content strategy
- Use your brand messages to develop clear, concise, and action-oriented messages for social. You want to build a relationship with your audience while communicating why your association may be good with them, and that’s where the brand messages help – because they are the clear defining factors of what you offer and the “why” to the differentiating factor amongst competition.
4. Balance the two.
- The balance of brand vs. social content is all about being informative or educational versus leading your audience to a potential conversion (or new member sign up, continued member, etc.). This is important to understand because every post need to help create greater awareness about who your association is and what you offer while still fitting the tone of the social platform.
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