There's no denying that social media marketing is hot, very hot.
It's also very easy to see why, just take a look at the above
numbers.
In order to engage with your customer you have to go to where
they are and, as the above stats show, they are on the social
platforms. Great, with this information in mind let's set up
a Facebook page and proceed to post the odd bit of news and a few
pictures of kittens….erm no. Instead, let's have a talk through
getting real value from social media - by developing a social media
strategy.
Stage 1 | Set A Goal
This is an incredibly important step if you wish to run a
successful campaign. Many businesses end up doing social media with
no real reason, often seeming extremely busy whilst not actually
making any progress toward their business goals.
The business objective will form the path for your social media
marketing campaign. This is important as there are some very
important things to remember when setting your goals; you need to
be realistic, you will not have one million likes on Facebook
unless you are a multinational company or have the hottest product
on the market since records began; you need to make it measurable,
use numbers as it's much easier to mark against a goal of six
hundred Twitter followers than increase Twitter followers; and you
need to make it medium to long term, social media takes time to
implement and it is extremely rare for it to become an overnight
success for most companies.
Stage 2 | Get To Know Your Audience
Everything you do should be built on what you know and learn
about your audience. Start by painting a picture of your audience,
creating personas is a great way to do this. You then want to dig
into the facts about your target customers to reveal the insights.
These facts and insights will give your social media marketing a
clear tone of voice and direction, whilst understanding how your
clients feel about your services and the way they wish to be
treated.
Stage 3 | Develop Your Story
A strong brand and a cohesive story will set you apart from your
competitors. Develop a story that provokes your audience into
having an emotive reaction. What is the history of your brand? What
does your brand aspire to be? What makes your brand unique? -
Answering these kind of questions will help to develop your
story.
Stage 4 | Analyse The Landscape
You will learn a lot by simply reviewing the activity of the
competition and others in your industry. Discovering and
understanding what your competition is already doing will help you
identify and leverage ideas that are working and find gaps that you
can take advantage of.
Pick three competitors and conduct an audit. Don't just look at
their social media accounts, check out their website and their
performance in search as well. Look to see if they tell a cohesive
story across all of their digital channels. Learning as much as you
can about your competitors is an essential step to developing a
social media strategy.
Once you have done this take a look at what the main barriers
are that you will need to overcome to be successful. For example
you may be selling flux capacitors, but due to the complex nature
of them your potential clients may be put off. Use your social
media platforms to provide information and knowledge to help your
clients' understanding. The more they understand the higher the
chance of them buying your flux capacitors!
Stage 5 | Market Base Objectives
This stage is all about expanding your client base and you have
three different options to do so. You don't have to stick to just
one option though; you can treat it like a good salad and mix it
up!
The first option is bringing in new clients who have previously
not had any need or use of your product or service. This will
increase your market size without gaining any existing customers
from your competition.
Your second choice is to win clients over from your competition.
What a better way to make money than by taking it out of the
pockets of your competitors? This can have a knock on effect; if
potential clients as outlined in option one see you winning more
and more market share then they will be more likely to use you as a
service provider rather than your competitors.
And behind door number three we have the option to upsell to
your clients, which is if they buy bananas from you get them to buy
oranges as well. Getting more out of existing clients is a two way
street though as they will expect more from you too! Amazon's
"Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought" bar is a great example
of this.
At this point look back at your key barriers in Stage 4 and
decide on your marketing objective(s). This should be in direct
relation to those barriers i.e. if your issue is low awareness,
then an objective should be increase awareness. What role will
social media play in helping you reach your marketing
objective?
Stage 6 | The Context of your Content
Now that you have gone through your processes and understand the
goals you are aiming to achieve it is time to turn our attention to
undoubtedly one of the most important aspects of social media
marketing, the three headed giant that is content creation. For
ease of reference I'll break it down into its three key
components.
Brand Awareness & Trust: "I'm aware of your brand and I
trust and respect it." These are great words to hear a customer say
and the goal here is to at the very least have them thinking this
in their subconscious.
Engagement, Connection & Consideration: "I'm aware of and
understand the different services and products you offer." A key
driver here towards successful conversions, clients are a lot less
likely to part with their hard earned salaries if they do not
understand what exactly it is you are trying to sell them.
Conversions & Sales: "I'm going to purchase your
product/service." Great news! This is the end goal for the majority
of businesses; however note that a conversion does not necessarily
need to mean a cash transaction. If I host a website offering free
games then I would count it as a conversion each time someone
visited the site and played a game of pool etc. Similarly for your
business your conversion goal may purely be to enhance your brand
reputation through social media rather than have five thousand
orders for your new potato powered ceiling fan.
Deciding which of the three you are aiming for at a given time
is key to considering what content you are going to create and
share with the world. Again, as it normally is, it is most common
for there to be a mixture of the three.
Stage 7 | Media Usage
Don't jump the gun just yet, whilst seemingly straight forward
there are always campaigns that do not carefully consider what
media they are going to use and it just ends up as a spaghetti
junction-esque mess. We've put together a little matrix below to
give you an idea of what to consider
Stage 8 | Platform Selection
To end any Harry Potter jokes now, 9 and ¾ is not an option
here, however the vast list of social media platforms now available
on the web can be a little bit daunting if you aren't overly
experienced in using it. From your goliaths like Facebook and
Twitter to hot up-and-coming platforms like Pheed there is a
purpose and correct use of each one. That being said, the basis we
recommend for every campaign is to include a blog page on your
company website. Having your own blog, which you are fully in
control of, is an amazing foundation for creating all of your
content and also helps you gain links to your home domain! Not
wanting to go overboard on details here, the top eight social media
platforms circulating at the moment are, in no particular order:
Your own blog (we've been a bit flexible here as it's not
completely social media); Facebook; Twitter; LinkedIn; YouTube;
Google+; Pinterest; and Instagram.
Stage 9 | Frequency
Right, now we have the understanding to be able to produce
killer content and host it on the most suitable platform there is
still one last point to consider before you swan dive into the
world of social media. This is the concept of frequency. For an
example straight off the bat let's say you have decided the best
way to promote your business is by making a video. Great, videos
are a brilliant and effective way to spread messages virally over
the Internet, however they take a lot of time to put together
correctly and normally cost quite a bit more than most other
content. Frequency wise it would be a bit risky to say let's do a
video campaign for the next 6 months and post a new video every
day. Firstly that's a lot of hours and cost spent putting together
one hundred and eighty two videos. Secondly unless you have a
product, which is the best thing since oxygen, it may be difficult
to post and promote fresh, original and innovative video content
every single day. This is a point where the three C's come into
play. Create: You produce your own content, maybe an article, a
photo or a video. Curate: You share someone else's content, maybe a
retweet or a link to someone's blog. Contribute: You reach out and
comment on others' post or videos etc. Managing the three C's
effectively is a great way to optimise your campaign's
efficiency.
Stage 10 | Metrics
And now, the end is here and so I face the
final curtain my friend. The last stop on the social media express
is metrics. Metrics is the art of measuring and evaluating your
campaign. Note here however that metrics is not a one time only
thing at the end of your campaign. In order to optimise your social
media efforts you need to continuously consult your analytics in
order to squeeze out the best results possible from your campaign.
I won't go into detail on it here as there is a long list of
variables to consider in your metrics so we'll write a blog post on
it in the next week or two.
That's all for now folks, thanks for reading and we hoped you
enjoyed it.
If you would like a consultation or have any questions you want
to fire at us then please feel free to get in touch.