Social Media Goals and Strategies

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A Social media marketing plan details an organization’s social media goals and the actions necessary to achieve them. Key among these actions is the creation of solid marketing strategies without which there is little chance of successfully executing the plan.

Social Media Marketing Plan?

Social Media Marketing Planing Cycle

Creating a social media plan is a continuous process, as illustrated by the social media marketing planning cycle. Skilled social media marketers constantly monitor the progress of the plan’s foundational elements, test alternative approaches, and adjust the plan based on the results

ListeningListen to what people are saying about your organization. This enables you to evaluate the organization’s current social media presence, which guides you in setting social media goals and strategies to achieve them. Listening also helps you better understand what the competition is doing and helps you discover what people are discussing before you join the conversation.

Setting goalsOnce you understand your audience’s behavior, location, tastes, and needs, it’s time to focus on what you want to use social media to do for them. Set social media goals that satisfy your audience’s unmet needs and capitalize on your organization’s strengths and the opportunities available to it.

Defining strategiesHow do you plan to accomplish your goals? You answer that question generally here by identifying organizational specific methods you will use to accomplish your social media goals.

Identifying the audienceThis is where you identify the audience you want to reach with your social media communication. It may be your current audience and people like them or a different group altogether.

Selecting toolsBy now you should have determined the social media sites where your target audience resides. You should focus your organization’s social media efforts on those platforms.

ImplementingThis is the process whereby the goals, strategies, target market and tools are taken into consideration in creating actionable social media platform specific marketing tactics. Executing well-defined tactics makes it possible for an organization to implement its general social media strategies across multiple social media platforms and realize the company’s marketing goals.

MonitoringWhile the steps above are important, they are not fail safe methods of using social media. It’s important to track, measure and evaluate your organization’s social media marketing initiatives. You may need to tweak your initial methods. You also likely will discover that your organization and your audience change over time, resulting in the need for adjustments.

TuningThere is nothing stagnant about social media. It is a constantly changing method of engaging directly with your audience. These dynamic platforms result in the need to continuously adjust and improve your social media marketing campaign to maximize its success. You can’t just post a photo on Instagram and sit back and watch your audience (and customer base) flourish. It just doesn’t work that way.

Your organization can’t afford not to communicate with 70 percent of people online. But you also can’t take a chance of communicating the wrong message or wasting your efforts because they’re not strategic. Using this social media planning cycle will help you create and implement a strategic social media marketing plan instead of just adding to the noise and potential creating problems for your organization.

When we look at online marketing, there are three broad categories into which nearly all social media related goals can fall. They are usually either aimed at:1. Building/Strengthening the Brand2. Driving Conversions3. Increasing/Monitoring the Presence

Social Media Goals

Starting at this broad level and thinking about the goals you have for your business can help you begin to write up a list of realistic ways in which social media might help you reach those goals.

Goal #1: Build the Brand

When it comes to building and reinforcing your brand, social media is one of the most powerful marketing tools available. It gives you the strongest and broadest opportunity to both find your target audience and to engage in conversation with them.These days, you have no choice but to differentiate yourself from your competitors unless you have an exclusive product. Otherwise, you’re forced into the unwinnable battle of competing for the lowest prices and the fastest shipping.

Think about the things that make your company different from your competitors; your Unique Value Proposition. This is the thing you want to use social media to built awareness of.

Goal #2: Drive Conversions

One of smartest reasons to use social media is for the potential boost it can have to your conversion efforts. Whether you are looking to drive sales, increase leads or simply drive people to action, conversions are an easily trackable goal in the realm of social media.Sit down and write out a list of all the potential actions someone might take while engaging with your company’s web site or while interacting online.Obvious options like buying your products or becoming a lead spring to mind, but don’t forget about other valuable actions like subscribing to your newsletter, rewetting a blog post or downloading a white paper.

Read over your list and think about the different ways you might be able to use social media to increase conversions for each item. Often times, this is the best way to start planning your social media efforts.

Goal #3: Increase Presence

Finally, we come to the goal most often associated with social media outreach efforts; increasing the conversation

about your brand. After all, social media is all about the conversation. It’s about the only space in the world where consumers talk to each other and to companies in an environment that can be tracked, sorted and followed-up with. This makes social media a prime outlet for PR driven companies who want to know what customers are saying about them.

Setting up even a baseline of social media monitoring can go a long way toward helping you follow these conversations. Whether you’re launching new product and aiming to get people buzzing about it or trying to reach out to a new target audience to share information about one of your best selling services, it’s all trackable.

When it comes to the conversation people might be having about you online, ask yourself a few questions.

· Who do you want to hear talking?· What do you want them to be saying?· Who do you want them to say it to?

These are your starting points for setting up key goals within the realm of increasing your presence.

Social Media Strategies

Goals and objectives guide your social media strategy to help you successfully connect with your customers.

1. Clarify your goals. What is it exactly that you’re trying

to accomplish with your presence on social media? To drive awareness? Increase website traffic? Improve conversion rates? You won’t be able to create a useful game plan unless you know what it is you’re trying to do – simply throwing random content up on a blog or Twitter feed without a specific purpose in mind will not lead to results.

Creating Strategies

2. Define your audience. Who is your ideal customer? Defining your audience is crucial to your online marketing efforts. If you are trying to reach women between the ages of 18 and 29, you’d be smart to focus most of your attention on Facebook. If, on the other hand, you’re aiming your marketing at men with graduate-level education, you’d be better off using LinkedIn. Your audience determines not only where you spend your time marketing, but also the type of content you will be providing, as well.

3. Consider your resources. Be realistic. If you’ll be implementing this marketing strategy on your own, keep your time limitations in mind as you plan. If, however,

you have an entire marketing department at your disposal, take full advantage of it!

4. Analyze your competition. Before you jump in headfirst, take some time to see what sort of online marketing your competitors are doing. Check out their strengths and weaknesses, and the use that information to craft your own unique strategy that fills in the holes they’ve left wide open.

5. Determine tone and frequency. You can’t just write a blog “every once in a while,” or it’ll never get done. Plan in advance to write two blog posts a week, every Monday and Wednesday…or to post three Facebook updates per week…or to contribute to two LinkedIn discussions each week. You’ll also need to decide what your official voice or tone will be in all these posts. Funny? Conversational? Formal and businesslike? Choose a tone that will appeal to your audience.

6. Identify core topics. Decide in advance what sorts of things you’ll write or post about, so that you’re not faced with the challenge of coming up with new material out of the blue each day. You can even plan out an editorial calendar to help in the generation of ideas.

7. Engage your audience. Now that you’ve completed the first six steps, you’re ready to get started. Share that content, but don’t stop there. Be sure to engage your audience in conversations, to build those relationships.

8. Use analytics. Finally, check your stats frequently to see what’s working and what isn’t. Analyze your performance based on the goals you set out in Step One, and then make changes as necessary.

Follow these steps, and you’ll be well on your way to using social media to its full business potential.

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