Some companies seem to think that being successful with social media marketing is as simple as setting up a Twitter account and tweeting out their latest discount coupon.
Still others think that sharing every hour on Facebook urging you to share your thoughts about their latest product demo is all it takes.
While both of these are certainly potentially successful strategies, we would argue that in the absence of a well-thought out plan with details specifying a wide variety of interaction types, relevant content, messages and calls to action and landing pages -- chances are good that these companies' social media efforts will flop.
We also find that a major reason most social media marketing plans fail is because a company takes on more outlets faster than their resources can support. Throw in some foggy notions about social media marketing benefits, stir with unrealistic expectations and you've got a starting recipe for disaster.
Creating A Social Media Marketing Plan
To get the most from your social media efforts, here are 13 step-by-step suggestions to help your company succeed using social media. And please. Remember to include your stakeholders throughout the process!
- Understand what you want to achieve using social media and why that's important. What other, cost-effective strategies could be used to achieve what you want? (You'd be amazed at how many people get into social media for the wrong reasons.) Social media is a marathon, it is not a sprint. Get into it knowing it's a long haul and be prepared to invest for a long time before seeing results. If not, you're better off not getting into it at all.
- Quantify these into SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, timely and realistic) goals.
- Clarify what resources there are and to what degree they constrain the goals.
- Have at least one ideal lead persona description. Who they are, their internal/external motivations, what they care about, etc. You want a clear picture of who you're planning to engage with in social media so communication is more effective.
- Adjust goals to match resources. Core resources are: money, labor, time. Time is the only non-renewable resource. You can only "buy" time with more man hours or by doing less work.
- Identify and prioritize the social outlets that are the best fit for achieving the goals.
- Pilot ONE social media outlet to start.
- Set SMART goals for that outlet. Set up analytics to measure only those things that help improve actions / content to achieve the desired results.
- Define some sensible guidelines for engagement. In other words: What will you do with an antagonistic person? What will you do should someone start spamming your feed? etc.
- Set up content / editorial calendar and clarify who will handle what interactions on the outlet. Who will field customer service questions / product questions / payment questions, etc.? Who will create and post which content, when and where? What's the offer and the call-to-action? What's the landing page? Who's creating the landing page?
- Test those things that impact lead generation (or whatever your goal is), e.g. messages, calls to action, types of interactions, types of content, times of day, frequency, landing pages, etc.
- Measure and analyze those results.
- Tweak until the outlet is showing you a steady stream of desired results.
Now that you've got one social media outlet success under your belt and a model to follow, go on to as many social outlets as your resources can handle.
For those of you social media mavens out there, what have you found to be the best way to approach social media marketing successfully?
