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Have you ever wondered what businesses and organizations use strategic planning for? The gist of these awesome plans is that they can lead to the success and growth of your brand. Who wouldn’t want that? Read on to learn more about the fundamentals and importance of strategic planning and why they may benefit your organization.  

What is Strategic Planning?

Strategic planning is the process that enables organizations to identify and remain focused on their goals, which have been set by an organization’s leaders and key stakeholders.

Six General Steps for Creating Your Strategic Plan:

1. Determining the current state of your organization.
2. Deciding on your target deadline.
3. Understanding what needs to happen to get you there.
4. Pinpoint your resources.
5. Assign responsibility.
6. Consistently review your plan. 

Additional components to focus on during the strategic planning process that can improve the above six steps include: 

• Creative Brief
• SWOT analysis
• Formulating your mission, vision, and values
• Establishing a timeline

Marketing consultant Ci Ci Cooper suggests assembling your strategic plan will play a major factor in the successful rollout, monitoring, and ongoing success of your campaign.

The Importance of Strategic Planning 

As we have learned thus far, strategic planning essentially keeps your organization’s eyes on the prize. 

What are other ways strategic planning can help your organization, you may ask? Forbes tells us how strategic planning can create a forward-focused vision, address any biases in decision-making, and track goal-oriented progress. 

• Creating a Forward-Focused Vision – Strategic planning can lead an organization to a consensus regarding common goals, specify roles and responsibilities, ensure that employees are aware of the organization’s goals, justify their selection, and recognize their distinct roles in achieving their goals.  
• Addressing Biases in Decision-Making – Strategic planning requires that the decision-making is backed by data, as well as diverse team perspectives so that biases are minimal. 
• Tracking Goal-Oriented Progress – With an established strategic plan, and with the assistance of KPIs, it simplifies tracking progress toward an organization’s specific goal. 

Other great benefits of strategic planning that should not be overlooked also include:  

• Improved Decision Making
• Better Resource Management
• Increased Operational Efficiency
• Enhanced Market Responsiveness

Strategic Planning in Social Media Strategy

Strategic planning is paramount for social media strategy and aligns social media initiatives with other business operations. For instance, if we take our strategic planning framework, we can simply create a strategic plan around, let’s say, the specific goal of obtaining 1,000 followers on Instagram over 3 months. 

Using these six general steps, we can create our strategic plan for this goal like so: 

1. Determining the current state of your organization – What is our organization’s current engagement rate on Instagram? Are we creating compelling graphics, videos, and posts? What might our competitors be posting that is gaining them traction in the competition? 
2. Deciding on your target deadline – as mentioned above, our deadline for obtaining 1,000 followers on Instagram can be at the end of three months. 
3. Understanding what needs to happen to get you there – We will need to implement KPIs to track our overall performance during the campaign. One KPI may include tracking how well our overall performance is with respect to photo, video, and story content. 
4. Pinpoint your resources – What tools will we be using for scheduling, designing, and analyzing the performance of our Instagram posts? 
5. Assign responsibility – Assign tasks to your organization’s team members who can appropriately aid in the goal. For instance, assign content creation duties to your graphic designer. 
6. Consistently review your plan – Always be ready to adjust your current strategy as needed for optimal results. 

 

 

Thank you for reading and I would love to connect with you on LinkedIn.

Author: Sam Cuellar

Digital Marketing graduate from DePaul University, Social Media Strategist Intern at the National Institute for Social Media, and professional bass player with a passion for traveling, weightlifting, and music.