71. Social Media Strategy and Planning Guide

Decision-making framework of the PRAISE Marketing Process.

Figure 71.1 Decision-making framework

Social Media Strategy

The same process that helps businesses develop an operational marketing plan can be applied to create a social media plan. The P•R•A•I•S•E Marketing Process is a decision-making framework that will guide you through social media planning, execution, and measuring results.

Just like any other marketing strategy you implement, your plan for social media must start with your objectives and strategy. What do you want to accomplish and why? If you are going to invest in social media or allocate resources from another tactic, then you should have a sound business strategy for doing so. The investment in social media is small compared to other types of marketing, but it requires an investment of time. It also requires a commitment to experiment, measure results, and adjust as you learn. It takes time to build a social media presence and a community. It’s not simply a commitment to “blog twice a week and tweet five times a week.” The true investment is time spent listening, engaging in conversations, monitoring feedback, researching competitors and trends, developing content, building customer relationships, and measuring results.

The following guidelines will assist you in defining what you want to accomplish with your social media presence, what research and analysis is needed to develop effective strategies, the types of social media programs that will be the most effective for your business, and how to measure results so they continuously improve.

Purpose: What Do You Want to Accomplish?

What is your purpose for engaging in social media? What are your objectives?

How will you define success? Is your goal to generate leads, brand awareness, drive sales, or establish expertise? Is your objective to increase customer engagement with your brand or to build a large community of subscribers and followers (see Figure 71.2)?

Figure 71.2 Social media objectives

Research: Who Is Your Target Audience and Where Will You Find Them?

Social media is all about connecting with prospects, customers, and like-minded people. How would you define them? Are they using social media? Where will you find them and what social media networks do they use? Do they engage in blogs? After you answer these questions, consider what the audience currently knows about you and how you can leverage this to expand your presence. Once you have identified who you want to reach, then you can discover how to communicate with them on different types of social media.

Research to Listen, Understand, and Respond Effectively

Social media requires research to discover what is being said about you, your company, your brand, customers, competitors, and trends. Equally important is learning. The social media ecosystem changes and evolves daily, so listening and learning are an ongoing part of the social media process. Research will help you understand what types of social media are the most effective for your business. It will also shorten your learning curve as you discover what works and respond more quickly to adjust strategy and tactics.

Analyze: Statistics, Media Tools, Metrics, and Trends

Although social media is relatively new, there are a vast number of analytics tools that will assist you in research and analysis. An extensive list of social media tools can be found in the “Social Media Tools and Tactics” section of this guide to determine what search engine and management tools will streamline your understanding of the market. (Note: Download the “Social Media Tools and Tactics” section of this guide. It is revised often, and you can find it in the resource section at www.MarketSmarter.com.)

Analysis will help you determine what strategies will yield the best results, as well as select the metrics for monitoring performance. Will it be number of subscribers, comments, views, actions, retweets, followers, links, leads, media mentions, or something else? Will you compare your presence to competitors, industries, or best practices? How will you know if you are attracting the people who matter?

Strategize: Create Your Game Plan

Social media strategies cascade from your business goals and marketing objectives. Like any other marketing strategy, social media strategy is developed to affect the actions of the target audience you wish to reach. It also reflects a consistent brand position and messaging.

Positioning: Articulate Your Brand Promise

In social media, it’s more important than ever to have a succinct value proposition (think 140 characters on Twitter). Your brand promise must be simple and it should be parallel across media channels. Regardless of whether you have a blog, Facebook page, or Twitter profile, you should make it easy for customers and prospects to understand what you are passionate about and quickly surmise if you are important to their community.

Presence: Select the Types of Social Media to Use

Now that you have answered some important questions, it will be much easier to develop social media strategies and select tools to reach your target audience and establish your brand presence.

For example, if your strategy is to position you or your company as thought leaders, demonstrating this on a blog would be a good strategy. To reach your key influencers, you will link, comment, post, report, and affiliate your brand in a reputable and respectful way with them. To reach a large number of people in your target audience, you can participate in social networking sites they use. To get maximum exposure for your blog and create a community of followers, you can actively participate to develop community, which means listening, engaging, and responding. You may want to create videos and podcasts that will share your knowledge of particular subjects and demonstrate your expertise. Then you can add social media tools that will help you amplify your content (see the “Social Media Tools and Tactics” section).

Figure 71.3 Social media strategy and tactics

Summarize your social media strategies and check to make sure they are integrated and aligned with your other marketing programs.

Implement: Develop a Tactical Plan

Now that you have developed strategies based on the objectives you want to achieve, you will develop social media tactics to achieve your strategy. Later in this chapter, you will create a tactical plan that describes how you will operationalize and execute it.

The attributes and benefits of each type of social media can be described in a similar way as other types of advertising and marketing. For example, a magazine would have a specific profile describing its content, style, audience, circulation, readership, shelf life, geographic coverage, advertisers, and so on. Social media tactics can be described using similar criteria.

Your research and analysis should lead you to the best type of social media to use in order to reach your target audience and achieve you objectives. The list of social media tools in the “Social Media Tools and Tactics” section, as well as the information presented throughout Section V, will help you select and create the social media tactics to achieve your objectives.

The plan should describe what tactics you will use, the resource needs, how tactics will be measured, and projected ROI. Also include budget, time frame, and who is responsible for execution.

One of the key benefits of social media is that much is available for free or is low cost. Your budget may include videos, podcasts, and Webinars that you want to post in social media and distribute through links. The sales promotion budget may include discounts and offers made to friends and followers on Facebook and Twitter. Other items may include analytics and reporting tools, third-party software and services for rating customer satisfaction, consulting or agency fees, and internal staff resources to manage social media.

Although social media is relatively new, it has advanced to the point where it deserves a share of budget and resources to execute the strategy. Headcount is required. At a minimum, a budget for staff (internal or external) is needed to execute the strategy. If it’s done in the margins, then who is responsible when the strategy is not executed?

Execute: Link Strategy and Execution

Now it’s time to operationalize your plan so it can be executed more efficiently. Your social media strategy should outline clear roles and responsibilities. Who creates blog content? How much time will it take to develop it? What ramp time is needed to create a library of content for posting? How often should posts be made? How many hours a day or week are required to participate and build a community? Who monitors customer engagement and satisfaction? Who responds to customer requests? These are just a few of the questions you need to answer.

Company Culture: Social Media Roles and Policy

If you are just beginning to formalize your social media strategy, one of the first things you will need to decide is who in your company will participate and what type of guidelines should be developed for content and messaging. What topics can people comment on and what topics are taboos? How much time can people spend with social media?

Engage the legal department early to understand their opinion and risk tolerance. It’s a good idea to clearly define this upfront as well as establish some guidelines to avoid a train wreck later.

Evaluate: Metrics

Ongoing review is critically important. Your social media strategy should outline ROI metrics and the research and analytics that are needed to make decisions. Who is responsible for doing this important activity? How often will strategy and metrics be reported and adjustments made? Social media and other marketing program results should be evaluated in the quarterly operations review.

Define your criteria for success. Some of your goals may be overarching, others much more granular and tied to specific metrics. Review the following list of social media metrics and select those most relevant to your success criteria. Assign specific goals that you can track and measure through analytics and reporting.

Social media metrics generally fall into the three areas of Awareness, Loyalty, and Sales (see Figure 71.4). Social media is also used to achieve other company goals like employee recruiting. Metrics such as number of referrals and number recruited can be tied back to social media.

Figure 71.4 Social media metrics

Reporting and Adjustments: Experimentation Criteria

Evaluate programs often to ask questions such as: Where are we getting our greatest response? Do we know why? What messages resonate with our customers and prospective customers the most? Are messages on Twitter more effective when retweeting, using a hashtag (#), or creating pass-along value?

As social media evolves, it requires a healthy appetite for experimentation. Different strategies and tactics work for different types of businesses. If you don’t experiment how do you know how much more effective your strategy can be?