Posts Tagged ‘Media Strategy’
Social Media – Crafting the Perfect Social Marketing Plan
Anyone involved in social media understands that it is a fast, emotional, morphing organism. Hundreds of sites and “social” variations are emerging daily. How do you consume, understand, and actually leverage this apparent anarchy. Let me shed a little light…
Start with an Objective
The key to any confusing problem is to frame the ultimate objective. What am I trying to achieve?
Create, enhance brand Enhance customer service perception Build trust Demonstrate skill and credibility
These are fundamental questions and answers that will shape your social media strategy.
Inventory Your Skills
Play to your strengths. Inventory your skills and enter the media space using your power tools.
If you are a good technical or analytical writer this may mean “heady” blog trimmed with white papers and ebooks. If you are a more conversational writer, full of character and stories, maybe Twitter fits you well. Are you a video or audio personality–maybe YouTube or podcasting serves you best.
There are lots of formats and more emerging each day. The key is finding a format that fits your personality and strengths. Profitable conversations can happen in a lot of ways. Start with the most natural.
Survey and Listen
Once you chose a good format, or two start by listening. Find out what others are doing. Listen in on competitors. Watch the current masters.
Listening always helps you tune your approach to the market. It also allows you to enter first as a consumer before you are a producer–another great edge.
Determine your unique or improved angle on the social media you are going to participate in. Be ready to do a lot of testing and adjusting. Most likely your first plan will fail.
Build a Foundation
No one trust an outsider. In social media this is just as true. Users are always circumspect of new followers of connections–”what do they want from me?” As a part of your listening step make sure you are building a foundation. Follow, promote, and converse with friends first and then people like you or your target market.
The Cluetrain Manifesto first captured the paradigm of social marketing–they characterized markets as conversations. Conversations are polite, respectful, give and take interactions.
No sales, at first. Build value first.
Beer Brewing 101
Social Media Marketing For Small Business
Move to Trash
Where does social media – networking sites, forums, blogs, wikis and the like, fit with your overall marketing strategy? Social media does not replace all of your other marketing – it just changes the mix.
When I look at a company’s marketing I categorise it into two main areas – Online and Offline. I then break these down into further categories.
Online:
o Website & Search engine strategies
o Customer strategies
o List building strategies
o Sales strategies
o Social Media
Offline:
o Hands-off strategies (where you communicate with your customers indirectly) such as advertising, marketing collateral, direct mail, sponsorship, press releases
o Hands-on strategies (where you communicate face to face with customers) such as trade shows, seminars, events, client nurturing
o Shared strategies (where you work with others to jointly grow your businesses) such as networking, alliances, joint ventures, referrals
When a business is looking at marketing, they need to look at the right blend of these strategies to meet their specific goals.
Social media is just one part of the blend – but there are many reasons I love the Social Media for small business.
For starters the big one – it’s almost totally free! The only cost with much of the social media strategies is time if you do it yourself.
You can target your social media strategy so it also achieves the side targets of all of your other online strategies – more loyal customers, bigger list, better sales, and increased search engine presence.
The downside is it can be tricky to learn what to do; many of your peers and colleagues look at you as if you have suddenly grown two heads when you talk about it (so peer support can be quite low); and if not done correctly it can suck up hours of time without much result.
Off-line strategies are more traditional and have been proven to work over the years. The downside is they are often quite costly and in many cases you don’t get the results you were hoping for.
I know of people who have paid $3000+ for a tradeshow booth plus fit-out and printing costs, as well as wages and time and ended up with very little result.
With all marketing strategies – both online and off line, you need to calculate return on investment. You want to see how much the strategy costs to acquire a new customer.
So in the case of the tradeshow – let’s assume they spent all up $5000 on the show and acquired 10 new customers – the cost to acquire each new customer was $500. You need each customer to spend more than $500 with you over the life of their history with you in order to generate a return on investment.
I recommend businesses run the stats ruler over their networking activities in particular. Add in the membership fees, annual fees, meal fees, lost earning time (if appropriate) and then calculate how much new business you have generated from that process.
This is very confronting for many people – they may enjoy their networking but when they run the financial ruler over it they find they are paying out much more than they are getting back in financial return.
Of course not everything is about money – if you are getting your personal needs for connection and being part of something bigger met, then your investment in networking is a worthwhile one for you personally. Just be clear it is not really a business strategy but a personal strategy and you will go into your next session with a slightly different outlook and will gain more from it as a result.
So back to where social media fits with your marketing strategy. Well it all depends on what you want to achieve, the demographics of your market, the amount you have to spend and the time you have available. In my experience it is something worth adding to your marketing blend.
How to Sell Social Media to Your CEO
Social media when used as part of an internet marketing strategy is a very effective tool. But social media does have a branding issue. If you talk to many CEO’s about using Facebook, Twitter and YouTube (among others) as part of your marketing strategy you may come up against some resistance. This is because:
• many CEO’s perceive social media as a business distraction and not a business tool
• many CEO’s find it difficult to see how you can generate sales using social media
• and many CEO’s don’t understand how consumers use these tools as they don’t use them themselves.
In order to sell a social media strategy to your CEO, we have listed three key areas that you must address as part of your pitch.
1. Make the connection between your ideal customer profile and social media usage
The first part of the sales approach is to connect your ideal customer profile to social media usage. It’s quite simple. For an effective social media strategy to work, your ideal customer must be a high user of social media. It’s the same principle you use for any other media. You wouldn’t place TV ads in a program that is not viewed by your ideal customer so you need to prove that connection first. Some other key points are:
• Your ideal customer must use the internet as a primary source of information when making purchase decisions.
• Your business must have a website that is a key marketing channel for product sales, customer inquiries, product information and data capture for direct marketing.
By making this connection first, your CEO should identify that social media can target the right audience.
2. Understand your key website analytics and metrics
Metrics and website analytics are the second piece of sales puzzle. Through web analytics and sales analysis you must show a correlation between website visitors and sales. In simple terms, if your web-based sales increase when there is an increase in website traffic then you have established a correlation. Your goal is now to increase website traffic which should (based on your analysis) result in an increase in product sales. Once you have this established connection then you have a basis of measuring return on investment.
A key point to make here is than numbers of Twitter followers or Facebook fans are not metrics that you should use for this sales pitch. It is near impossible to directly related them to product sales. Having 20,000 Twitter followers is in many cases of no more commercial value than having 1,000 followers. It is follower quality that is important and your ability to engage with them to visit your website.
3. Have a clear strategy to increase website traffic
This really is the “how to” of the strategy. As you have identified website traffic as the key metric, you should now outline how you will meet it through the various social media platforms. Your pitch should consider how consumers use each medium and how you will use them to drive traffic and sales. Below are some examples of how three of the main platforms in Twitter, Facebook and YouTube can be used to increase web traffic.
Twitter is a sharing platform for links, text and pictures. Businesses can use Twitter to promote new blog posts, promotional offers, links to website content and as a customer service platform. All of these promote your website URL as the destination link which drives web traffic.
Facebook is a connecting platform. Users maintain personal relationships and use it to keep in touch with friends. Users can also connect with fan pages and events that are of interest to them. For a business, a fan page can be created to provide links, helpful tips and promote events among many other things that link back to your main site.
YouTube is also a sharing platform for video. Businesses can use YouTube to host TV ads, instructional videos and show conference footage that link back to a main website URL.
With this increased traffic, your website should also receive a boost in it’s Google page ranking which improves your visibility in organic search results.
4. Closing the deal
To close the deal, the key question you need to answer for your CEO is what is the impact on sales from an investment in social media? If you can connect your ideal customer to social media use. Correlate a connection between website visitors and sales with a well defined social media strategy you are well on your way to selling your CEO on the benefits of social media.