Formulate Your Messages

What result do you want your messaging and communication to produce? Do you want to inform? Motivate? Call to action? Educate? Guide? Connect? Position? How does a Social Media Marketing Strategy fit into your integrated marketing and communications activities?

Traditional communication channels are one-way and often quite interruptive. They either allow the company to broadcast a message outward or they allow the business to collect input, often skewed and biased, but they do not allow large scale bi-lateral communciations to take place.

The new communication channels that “Social Technologies” provide for and allow mass communication between all parties of a business directly, without organizational control or barriers. This multi-dimensional, peer-to-peer communication aspect represents the most important dynamic of the new marketing strategies. It also generates the most concern and apprehension for C-level executives… fearing a loss of control over their brand, content and access to information.

Fortunately, the ability to facilitate customer-to-prospect-to-champion-to-Customer Service rep-to-executive free communication is one of the most powerful opportunities for businesses to drive significant growth and to tap new sources of revenue while improving member satisfaction and engagement.

Define Your Objectives

What do you expect from a Social Marketing Strategy? What is the result that you want to drive by using social technologies? What will result from enabling your customers/prospects/members to communicate directly with each other? How do these objectives relate to your mission and vision?

Most companies have a number of “soft” objectives that are difficult to quantify and measure (i.e. build brand, foster engagement, provide customer service, etc.) These objectives can also include a sense of community or member affinity, the perception of your brand, or the degree of influence and reputation your firm has within your industry.

“Hard” objectives are those that are easy to quantify and measure. These objectives include number of customers, how many prospects print off and redeem a coupon, total gross revenues or percentage of return on investment.

Although most associations strive to achieve both, “soft” and “hard” objectives, few are able to clearly define the relationship between these sometimes opposing, sometimes complementary objectives. It is important early on to clearly understand what it is you are trying to achieve and how you will measure your progress towards those objectives before you craft the content of your strategy.

Profile Your Audience (Current and Potential)

Your customers and your potential customers are multifaceted people that can be profiled in many different ways:  by age, by geographic location, by levels of income, by adoption of technology, etc.  One useful way of thinking about your target audience is to consider how they make use of technology, contrasted against whether they consider themselves to be more “extrovert” or more “introvert.”  Consider the visual below:

People that are naturally extroverted and that are technologically competent would describe “The Networker.”  This kind of person is active in the use of social technologies, is comfortable with creating and publishing content, and would have, for example, at least 100 connections on LinkedIn.

Contrast this person with people who are not yet comfortable with and therefore do not use the new social technologies or are by nature introverted.  This group of people are not accessible by social media marketing strategies which is why “old school” marketing methods (advertising, press announcements, radio ads, etc.) must continue to be used.

The goal is to be able to understand how many of your customers and prospects fall into which category to decide how to best reach all of your target audience in a way that will be effective.  One of the positive advantages of of Social Technologies is that they allow more people to engage, including those who are less like to network and communicate in person.

Social Marketing Strategy… Why is it different?

The emphasis shouldn’t be on the “social” or the “technology,” but on the value of the network… the value of the connections and the conversations of the members/users.  The Social Marketing strategy development should take place within the context of your overal organization’s mission, vision, and objectives.  It should enhance the company’s existing business strategy, adding new tools and capabilities.

Your company wants to gain more customers, sell more products, attract more champions, increase brand recognition, develop more conversations and reach more stakeholders.  Your audience wants to educate themselves, improve their lifestyle, network with others, gain recognition, obtain value and save time.  And, although Social Marketing strategies can be very similar to the development of an integrated marketing and communications plan, Social Media Marketing has a feature that demands special attention:  Social marketing has the unique characteristic of user generated content.

Social Marketing Development steps:

1.  Profile your audience (current and potential)

2.  Define your objectives (increase membership in a loyalty program?  sell more product?  attract more leads?  gather more email addresses?)

3.  Formulate your messages

4.  Identify your platforms  (Facebook?  LinkedIn?  Twitter?  Flickr?)

5.  Define your Intellectual Property approach

6.  Recruit your champions

7.  Craft your processes, plan, resources and budgets

8.  Measure results

Over the next few days, we’ll discuss the details of creating new ways to communicate, collaborate and associate with your prospects and customers.