In another previous post I shared the six steps to create an Online Marketing plan, today to go a little deeper I will explain how you can create and monitor a strategy in social networks step by step.
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Define your goals
There should not be a social media strategy without having a goal. In the marketing plan, you first define objectives and then the strategies and your tactics. In one sentence I would summarize it like this:
Your goal is where you want to be and your strategy is how to get there
Do not forget that your objectives have to be specific, realistic, measurable, and with a certain period of time. The most common objectives in social networks are:
- Increase your online community in one or more social networks
- Increase your online reputation, that is, make your brand known on social networks
- Get leads
- Improve the satisfaction of your followers
- Loyalty your followers
- Generate engagement with followers
- Promote your company and its respective products or services
- Sell your products or services on the Internet
Although working with the brand in social networks you will discover how new objectives are generated as a result of the results of your previous actions.
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Listen
It is very important to analyze the current situation of your brand on social networks before taking a new step, especially before creating and executing a new strategy. The listening task is time-consuming, but it certainly offers a number of advantages for the brand, including:
- Know what are the strengths and weaknesses of the brand
- Learn more about your followers by analyzing their behavior, interests, needs, etc …
- Know what type of content is most effective
- Know the opinion of the followers of the brand
- Now back to the topic, to create a strategy this is what you have to listen to on social networks:
- Brand – With the brand name spelled correctly and incorrectly, search for:
- What is talking about the brand?
- Where is more and less spoken?
- What do they say about the brand? Is it positive or negative?
- How do they say it?
Products and services – creating a list of “keywords” of your products and services search the social networks that are discussed.
Competition – using a new list of “keywords” with the name of the competitors and the keywords of their products and services, an exhaustive search is carried out to see what type of strategy the brand’s competition is using. Do not forget that it is not about copying, it is about learning from the good and the bad that they do to always make it BETTER.
Environment – do not just listen to your products and services, also look for what is happening in your brand environment by defining “keywords”.
Audience – listening to the audience you can find out their behavior, interests, and needs. This will undoubtedly help to better communicate the message of the strategy.
I recommend you read my post ” Tools to investigate a brand on the Internet ” in case you need tools to carry out this “listening” task.
3.Define your Target
In the previous step of Social Media Strategy, the brand has carried out an “active listening”, which means that the target we want to reach is already known a little better. What habits do you have and how can the brand engage with them? NOTE: not only do you have to define the target of your brand, you also have to define all those involved in the process of your strategy, for example:
If you are going to launch a press release as part of the content of your strategy, the audience is not your fans, they are journalists and editors of the media where the press release will be sent.
- Define your strategy and message
What will be the strategy that you will use to achieve your objective?
You have reached the intermediate point about Social Media Strategy, you already know your goal, you have listened and you have your target, the next step is to define the strategy. Imagine that your goal is to “Loyalty your followers”, your strategy may be to carry out a promotion on Facebook only for fans of the brand. The title of the strategy cannot be communicated directly to the fans, imagine the “Poker Face” they would put to know that you are using them.
Therefore, it is necessary to define a message (what the brand is going to transmit on social networks to achieve the objective of its strategy with business development consulting dk). Do not be stingy creating a good message, the more creative and striking the message, the better results will be obtained. Following the previous example, the message could be: “We are 10 years old and we want to celebrate it with our fans by giving away 10 super prizes.” As you can see, nothing has changed, only the way of communicating it.
- Generate the content of your strategy
Social Media Strategy and message ready, now you need to define and generate the content that supports the strategy. The content you generate must be, above all, constant and impressive. I share some of the most used content on social networks:
- Coupons
- Images
- Banners
- Videos
- Infographics
- Interviews
- Newsletter
- Polls
- E-books
- Whitepapers
- Events
- Online games
- Contests and sweepstakes
- Statistical data
- Success stories
- Streamings
- Blog post series
- News of interest
- Press releases
- Define the channels
Depending on the type of content that you want to communicate to the followers, different channels are used. Even so, I recommend you define the main channels that you are going to use to launch the strategy.
Social Networks: Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Tuenti, Pinterest, Instagram, Foursquare, Spotify, and more.
- Podcasts
- Web page
- Blogs, your own blogs, and others ( Actions with bloggers )
- Online advertising
- Media
- Plan the content
Usually, a strategy involves the publication of different types of content on different social networks.
This type of planning also serves to divide tasks with the rest of the Social Media Strategy team.
I invite you to download the Editorial Calendar template.
- Calculate the budget
Depending on the type of strategy you are going to use, the cost varies. Calculating the budget is not just another step in this process of creating strategies in social networks, it is very important to measure the results versus the investment made. There are also cases where you have to get the financial approval of the client to start. Remember that the generation of content, even if it is done internally, has a cost.
- I share some of the items that this type of budget can include:
- Idea (creativity)
- Content production (images, videos, infographics, etc …)
- Content curator
- Community Management
- Blog posts
- Tools and platforms (there are many free but many others paid)
- Monitoring (strategy supervision)
- Actions with bloggers and influencers (if they are part of the strategy)
- Writing and sending of Press Releases (if they are part of the strategy)
- Results report
- Launch your strategy
At this point, you only have to launch your strategy and monitor it from its beginning to its end.
Also read about: How the Internet and Social Media is Influencing the Mindset of the Youth?
- Measure the results
In order to measure the ROI of your strategy, it is necessary that you previously define some metrics, for example:
- Increase in the online community – # of new followers on social networks
- Sale of your products – # of sales made in response to your strategy
- Community loyalty – # of users who have participated, if it is a contest or a raffle it would be the number of participants, if it is promotion the number of people who have used it.
- Improve engagement – # of engagement actions of followers with the brand: comments, “likes”, rt’s, replies, mentions, etc …
Improve user satisfaction – increase the positive feeling of the service offered to followers and the brand in general
I always recommend that the measurement of Social Media Strategy results be done every day to see how effective the strategy used is having, in many cases the course of actions can be changed to achieve better results.
