Your Instagram strategy is not your marketing strategy. Why your business needs both.

Ever feel like you're creating amazing Instagram content, but the website design leads just aren't coming in?

You might be missing a key ingredient: a cohesive, overarching marketing strategy. Your Instagram strategy (truthfully, this could be any specific platform strategy that you have running) is not your marketing strategy! Whether you’re on Instagram, or not using social media at all, you will need a marketing strategy, that may or may not include socials. But you still need that plan!

The Big Picture: Your Marketing Strategy

Think of it this way: your marketing strategy is your website development project's master plan. Your road map!

It outlines your business goals (like increased brand awareness or attracting high-value clients), target audience, and overall approach to achieving them. This plan could involve various social media channels, including paid, owned, earned, and rented media, content marketing, PR, and email marketing.

Far more than just the tactics used on one single platform.

Your marketing strategy is like a specific blueprint for how you'll use social media, plus all that other media and PR to reach your target audience. Taking into account the latest trends, engagement tactics, and the ever-evolving algorithms, you'll craft a plan that gets your brand in front of more of your ideal client.

Adapting to the Frustratingly Pace of Social Media

The algorithm's job is to get the right content to the right people and to keep them on the platform as long as possible. But it does feel like an impossible task sometimes!

I love a good analogy… so let’s go down the food route! Think of your marketing strategy as the entire recipe – from the actual list of ingredients (identifying your target audience and goals) to the finished meal (actually achieving your business objectives). Your Instagram strategy, for example, is just one specific ingredient – a crucial one, for sure, but it's less likely to work in isolation.

It’s no surprise to hear that the social media world is constantly evolving. New features pop up, and the algorithms get tweaked to serve the end user better. But often, we find that what worked three months ago has changed. Not to mention, social media platforms are changing (Hello X!), and some are falling out of favour (Goodbye Clubhouse).

While these changes might not affect your overarching marketing strategy, they'll definitely impact how you use Instagram (your Instagram strategy)- your tactics. Staying updated on these changes and adapting your approach is key to staying ahead of the curve, and that is so much easier to do when you have separated out your approach to each avenue you are using.

What next? Apply a Strategic Approach to Your Website Design Business by Choosing the Right Tactics

By understanding the distinction between a marketing strategy and individual platform tactics, you’ll be able to build a more robust and effective approach to attracting website design clients. I’m not suggesting it has to be uber-complex either, but it does need to have clear funnels that allow you to create a content ecosystem that cycles your prospects in and guides them from not knowing your brand to wanting to hire you.