Session 6: Building A Social Media Strategy

Your aim is to build a social media strategy that helps your business sell more products and services more cost effectively and profitably over time. Key to achieving this objective is understanding the value you provide to your customers. You must define the specific promise you make them, and you must deliver on that promise across all media. This is how you define a solid, marketable, brand.

Lauren Luke, also known as Panacea81, created a series of web tutorials that teach people how to apply her make up.  These videos have been wildly popular with millions of downloads, and the result has been a spectacular increase in sales of her product.  If you watch the videos you can follow the links mentioned in them back to her website where you can place orders for her products. Her brand is all about helping women look their best, sometimes with training, sometimes with make up.

Achieving success in social media marketing requires setting firm goals.  Without specific goals, tied to immediate business objectives, you lose the focus required to find your customers and build an effective relationship with them. Your goals might be something like:

• To build an active community within 3 months
• To release 3 pieces of engaging content (videos) once a week
• To create an amazing customer service experience from first content through sales conversion.

TweetaLondonCab and Bakertweet are two great examples of companies who understand and effectively communicate their unique sales propositions.

In order to achieve your objectives, you must ensure they are compatible with the resources you have available to you.  A mismatch between resources and objectives in social media usually results in communities that are slow to assemble, difficult to motivate and time consuming to manage.  Take a candid look at the resources you have available to build your social media marketing solutions.

• You
• Money
• Time
• Equipment
• Employees
• Knowledge
• Network

Social Media Marketing Tactics

You will use many tactics to achieve effective social media marketing objectives.  Which sites you choose to work with, what your message is, how you choose to interface with your customers will vary, but general tactics will remain consistent over time.

• Research and Monitoring help you find your customers online.  You learn which #hash tags they search for on Twitter to find tweets of interest, which social media sites they like, what videos they enjoy, etc.
• Designing a Unique Look and Feel ensures your customers know who you are, what you do, where to find you, and how to buy what you sell.  You are creating a coherent infrastructure for them to work within so nothing jars them as them move from initial contact to sale.
• Using Networks to your Advantage will help you understand why people come to the site and what benefit you can give them, and derive, from meeting them there.
• Creating Relevant Content is key to creating a sustainable relationship with customers.  You can’t fake good content. People know it, and like it, when they see it. Your content is your connection to them.
• Drawing People Back to Your Website from all points of contact is key. You must ensure they know where to purchase products and services.

Six Elements of Social Media

As reviewed previously, there are six elements to social media: Blogs, Networks, Content Commuities, Social Bookmarking, Microblogging and Wikis.

Examine networks to determine which are most used by your community. For consumer products, Facebook might be most relevant. For B2B Linkedin might be more appropriate.  Look at how the sites are used, which facets may best serve your objectives (fan pages versus groups), and where you can excel.

You must demonstrate “social proof of value” in these communities. Do you want to be producing articles, images, photos, blogs?

Their perception of you and what you do is key.  Who can you get to talk about you in these groups.  Start with Friends.

When creating blogs, focus on conversational strategy.  Be personal, engaging, interesting and embed in every word “the sell” of your promise and your determination to fulfill it.

Your mission is create a strong personal and professional relationship with those people who value that promise and who care if you deliver on it.

Seek out influential people. For example, you can find people with huge Twitter followings on Twellow and Tweepz. You can use Lists on twitter to create “groups” of tweets from your followers that target specific niche’s.  These lists are very handy to your customers.

Remember that content you create always has a context, and that changing the context changes the meaning of the content.  A boxing match caught on video can be used to tell people about the match, to support biographical information about each fighter or to tell the story of boxing over time.  Reuse content modules in new context to maximize its value over time.

In order to turn contact into customers, you must focus on:

• Content creation
• Context
• Conversations
• Conversion

You design your strategy working backward from conversion to initial contact through content. You are laying out a path for your customers to follow.

Action is Not Effect

Without a good strategy, social media marketing is either ineffective or toxic.  You need to marry your vision of who you want to attract to the tactics required to find them, court them and convert them.   If you punch out a great deal of social media that is not to purpose, you risk not attracting anyone, or attracting people you do not want to cater to who will hang around for months in great, noisy, dissatisfaction.

So start your social media marketing with a clean, coherent, well considered plan based on research and an understanding of the resources you can bring to bear over time.