September Workshop Series: How To Setup Your Social Media Strategy

While many businesses have a social media presence, many are not engaging on those platforms and thus not meeting their goals. Outlined below, are the first steps to setting up your social media strategy.

Determine Your Social Media Marketing Objectives

First things first, start by determining your business objectives for social media. Typically, organizations have already established their overall marketing goals. Working along these objectives, identify how you want social media to help meet these objectives. By establishing specific objectives you seek to carry out via social media, you’re able to set up a foundation that serves as guidance for your ideas. This also helps you identify what your social media metrics need to be and makes for more effective social media marketing.

Here are some objectives commonly identified by businesses:

Increase Brand Awareness – associate it with your product/service
Increase Customer Acquisition – attract new customers by driving traffic to your social media page and/or company website
Increase Customer Service Experience – Support sales (or customer service) by responding to questions and showing them how to use your products (or provide troubleshooting solutions to services offered)
Increase Engagement – give customers a reason to talk about your brand and encourage others to purchase from you

Understand Your Social Media Audience

Next, working from the target audiences defined for your business, align these customers with insights learned from your social media efforts to date. Connect common characteristics and create a set of marketing personas for the segments you plan to reach. The more you know your audience, the easier it will be to engage with them in social media and receive the results you’re looking for.

When creating your marketing personas, you’ll want to be sure to:

Understand your target audiences’ needs and what they value (what interests them). Think demographics, psychographics and past purchases when aligning these insights with your business offerings.
Segment your target audience by influencers, buyers and end users. By doing this, you’re able to distinguish which segment is most crucial to meeting your objectives. For example, if your main goal is to increase engagement, then you need to prioritize your social media efforts to reach influencers who can serve as advocates for your brand, thus bringing new or returning customers back.
Know where your audience engages on social media. Not everyone is on Facebook. Consider researching where your competitors spend most of their time reaching the same audience. More than likely if you notice they’re activity is higher on Facebook vs. Twitter (or vice versa), then you know where they’re receiving high engagement with similar prospective customers.
Consider your audience’s social media behavior. When thinking about the marketing personas you developed, decide what incentives will make them act. Do they seek information, discounts, etc.? Understanding what makes your customer take action allows you to better understand what kind of marketing message or offer you need to give.

Determine Budget For Getting Started in Social Media

Social Media Marketing Strategy

After establishing objectives and creating your marketing personas, it’s time to determine your social media investment. Whether that’s delivered by a social media consultant, a social media marketing agency, or an internal social media manager, the strategy is a roadmap that no company can afford to do without. The investment in your strategy will certainly take time and most likely dollars (if not outsourced), especially if you require creation of compelling content to prove the value of your strategy up the corporate chain. To do it right, especially if you’re on the marketing team of a mid-size or enterprise-size organization, you should expect to invest $5,000 to $10,000 in strategy development and a solid month of time.

Social Media Profile Setup

Setting up your social media channel(s) will be your first hard cost. This includes the creation of custom skins (your company header or profile page) for pages such as Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, and LinkedIn. If you’re like most companies that aggressively use technology platforms to drive your marketing (e.g. social media publishing platforms, etc.), you may even consider investing in a social app customized to meet your business needs and supports popular service functions. Your investment might include graphic design, technology app development, planning of your social media profile, and training on how to use the app. Again, if you’re a part of an established firm, you could look at spending anywhere from $2,000 to $5,000.

Key Takeaways:

The bottom line is social media has proven to be successful for businesses and your business can be effective in social media in achieving your business objectives. To this end, it’s important to start with the following:

Make your goals as concrete, measurable and achievable as possible – establish the foundation for which you will measure what success looks like for your business
Plan ahead to ensure that your time spent on social media reinforces your overall business objectives
Before jumping into social media initiatives, determine your budget and prioritize accordingly…don’t go all out without being able to do it right!

Authored By: Shea Morgan

Shea Morgan, a Social Strategy Director for Hotels.com, an Expedia, Inc. company, who brings 13+ years of business experience in digital and customer experience marketing, strategy development, governance, social media marketing and management, and training. Shea writes about the latest in social media and social business to help educate organizations on ways to use social to build their brand, generate leads and drive deeper engagements with the customer. Connect with Shea on LinkedIn.