Last year, social media marketing increased by 35% over 2012, mostly due to the growth of mobile, and its share of marketing budgets is expected to go up from an average of 7.4% to 18.1% in the next five years. But while many businesses have a social media presence, most of them are not actually engaging on those platforms and truly leveraging their huge potential as cost-effective marketing tools. Effective social media marketing goes beyond creating a Facebook, Google +, Twitter or LinkedIn profile and sporadically reposting company news or promotions. It’s not something you do just because everyone else is, and just like websites, they are not assets that can be managed with a “if you build it they will come” mentality. Social media presents a great opportunity to promote your brand, products and services, attract new customers or strengthen relationships with existing ones, and to gather market intelligence, but it requires resources, dedication and a solid plan to guide all the activities on each channel.
So here are 8 steps to develop a social media strategy for your business:
1. Start by listening: the first thing you have to do is to observe and research. People are already out there talking about your brand, goods, competitors, etc., so you have to gather this initial insight to guide your strategies. You have to be where your customers are and address the topics they are interested in.
2. Determine your objectives: you need to be very clear on what you want to achieve, so set concrete, measurable, realistic, time-bound and business-aligned goals. Typical objectives can be related to building brand awareness, driving traffic, increasing customer support, gathering audience insights, etc. Each goal should have an associated KPI to measure the level of success of your efforts, such as number of visitors, conversions, response rate or satisfaction level, and each KPI should have a monetary value to allow calculating ROI.
3. Define your audience: create marketing personas for each type of customer you want to reach, including demographics, lifestyle, goals, challenges, values, fears, interests, drivers, etc., and based on internal or third-party data and actual interactions. These representations of your core audience will help you identify with your prospects and relate to them as human beings, shaping your communication process in a way that solves existing problems and addresses real needs and desires.
4. Select channels: it is until this point and not before that you should get into tactics, starting by deciding which social media channels are more suitable for achieving your goals, considering where your audience is most likely to be and the fact that each channel is different and require specific tactics. In any case, don’t forget to consistently brand every profile. Consider the specific characteristics of each site, look for what unique message or segment is in each space, and then define the tone and type of messages that make most sense for that particular medium and audience. For example, Facebook is generally good for casually engaging with your current customer base and friends, while Twitter can be used to communicate on a more technical level with industry peers.
5. Choose topics: based on all the previous definitions, along with keyword research, you must define the themes you will be focusing on. Then you must plan your content generation around those main keywords by creating an editorial calendar, that is, a content creation framework that shows when and what you’ll need to write. The starting point should always be your customers’ most frequent questions, focusing on what your audience wants to know and not on what you want to promote. The only way to organically build a healthy following and create business opportunities is by posting engaging, entertaining and relevant content.
6. Allocate resources: you need to plan resource utilization by deciding who will handle your communications, setting beforehand the guidelines and decision processes that will rule your company’s social media engagements. Social media provides unique real-time perspectives through direct customer and prospect contact, but constant monitoring and immediate response are critical for success.
7. Roll out: promote your channels using your existing communications (i.e. email) and digital assets (i.e. corporate website), and start publishing content consistently, based on the editorial calendar you built for each channel. Use different formats, like images and videos, not just text, taking into account what’s more suitable and works best at each channel, and don’t forget to include compelling and measurable calls to action.
8. Measure and optimize: track objective accomplishment and measure the ROI of your social media efforts by using the previously defined KPI’s. Tools like Google Analytics and each channel’s own dashboards (like Facebook Insights) can be enough, but you may also consider more powerful third-party applications. All these metrics will allow you to optimize your strategy as the market changes and grows. One way to ensure that you will be able to track results is by using promotion codes, URL tracking codes or targeted landing pages.
The web is an ever-changing ecosystem, so social media strategies should be built in a flexible way that can evolve along with your business and market segment. If you are not seeing results it may be time to change course, so consider altering your approach or asking for expert help on social media optimization.
