It doesn’t just start and end with media buying. Social
media marketing like any other marketing effort has to be planned to the very
last detail to enable a brand achieve its predetermined organisational
objective. Planning your SMM strategy helps you put things into perspective and
provide a road map to your final destination with varies according to the
brands involved.
Here are 7 steps you can take in creating a successful SMM
strategy:
- Have clear objectives
- Develop your engagement idea
- Identify the social media channels
- Set up/ optimise your media
- Monitor and interact with audience
- Employ other modes of marketing communications
- Track, evaluate your results.
Clear Objectives
Failing to plan is planning to fail. Launching a campaign
without having goals is a total waste of time, money and man-power. When it
comes to social media marketing, your objectives must be clear, practical and
not too ambiguous. Having clear goals and objectives allows you to monitor and optimise
the campaign when it is not meeting the expectations. With clear practical
objectives, you can demand for the resources that will help your campaign and
prove your Return on Investment.
Your objectives should clearly state:
- Your campaign message
- Your target audience (buyer persona)
- Call to action
- The duration of the campaign
- Other media of collaboration
Engagement Idea
This step might come in your execution plan but I prefer
having it glaring at me when I put together my SMM strategy. Engagement idea
simply means the part of the strategy that keeps your target audience in your
campaign scope. It might be a quiz contest on your Facebook page , a
bi-monthly Tweet chat or cartoon series
on your blog. Whatever it is, make sure it has the capacity to drive engagement
and entertainyour audience. You have to tailor your idea to suit the buyer
persona or target audience.
Identify the social media channels
This is a very important step in creating your SMM strategy
because the channels you choose to employ affects the kind of content you will
share in your campaign. If content is king, the channel should be queen (my
personal opinion though) or as my traditional media counter parts always say, “The
medium is the message.” At this stage, having known your objectives and overall
campaign KPI, you have to choose the social media channels that:
- The target audience are exposed to
- That can be measured
- That can be optimised
Twitter only allows for 140 characters so every letter
should count. Facebook gives you the opportunity to tell a visual story that
your audience can connect with and share. Your TV commercials if any, will make
good YouTube videos which with the help of paid promotion, can grow your
audience reach and bring more people into your campaign scope.
Set up/ optimise your
media
All your social media channels must be active and ready to
provide interaction during and after your campaign. Make sure you’ve linked all
your social media channels to one another to streamline the user journey. If
your campaign objective is to increase the traffic to your website, be sure to
link your page to your Facebook page, Twitter page and of course Google+. Not
only will this help your Search Engine ranking, it will also help you during
the evaluation stage when your analytics tool is providing you with your
traffic sources.
Also don’t forget to add your contact details and a few
important details about your brand.
Monitor and interact
with audience
One of my favourite features about SMM marketing is the
ability to monitor the activities of your audience and interact with them in
real time. With the various social media tools like Tweetdeck, Hootsuite,
Keyhole and so on, monitoring and plugging into the ongoing conversations about
your campaign is pretty easy and free (to some extent though). You can go as
far as monitoring a particular keyword or hashtag and tap into the trend to
engage with your audience. That never ceases to amaze me! It is so “unlike”
billboard and TV commercial where you send the message and sit down and pray
that your audience gives you the right feedback. With social media, the
feedback is in real time and you can use it to optimise your content strategy!
Employ other modes of
marketing communications
Yes SMM is pretty cool but not so cool that it doesn’t need
other media to make it cooler. Experts strongly advise that your SMM should be
part of the overall marketing strategy and not be done in isolation. Isolating
your SMM could lead to difference in messages, tone of voice (relative) and duplication
of efforts. As I mentioned before, your TV commercials should be featured on
your YouTube channel and Facebook, all your billboards should have your
Facebook ID, Twitter and Instagram handle and website link. I have seen a
Facebook handle on a biscuit wrapper…yea seriously!!
A very good way of achieving this is through scan codes. It
might not very popular right now but scan codes are one of the best transitions
from offline to online engagement.
Track, evaluate your
results.
You have your objectives, you have your social media
channels, and you’ve plugged in the necessary analytics tool to track the
performance of the campaign. Now it’s time to evaluate the results of your
campaign. Did you reach the expected click-through-rate, did your increase the
Twitter followership by 35%, how many app downloads did I gain from this
campaign etc? These are questions that you should be able to answer during the
tracking and evaluation stage.
This stage provides you with the option of removing the
unresponsive elements of the campaign and apply the viable elements of the
campaign. There are a lot tools for tracking and evaluating your campaigns. I
will mention some of them in details in subsequent blog posts.
This is how my SMM works for me. I still improve on them with every campaign I execute. Did it help you? Kindly share your comment and questions below. Thanks
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