Social media continues to evolve, new players are emerging and we see many of our entrepreneurs still not sure how to maximize their return on (time) investment for their businesses. In this edition of Marketing At Work, we will explore a little deeper what goes into a strategy, share some resources from around the web, and we’ll close with a special offer for those of you still on the social fence.
What is a social media strategy and why do I want one?
Social Media continues to be a challenging aspect for small business owners. Those that have adopted it but who are still in the trial stage are probably seeing time devoted to social media marketing without clear results. Those that have strategies, processes and metrics monitoring ARE seeing ROI, and that’s an expected outcome from Social Media Marketing today. If you’re in the trial or transition stages, developing a comprehensive social media strategy will assist in this progress to social media maturity.
What goes into a Social strategy?
Like all good marketing strategy processes, we develop SMM strategies that align with current marketing strategy. We look at markets, messaging, content and calls to action – we are looking at each market and asking “what do they need? What do we want them to do?”
You should be measuring return on investment
Companies who are operating at full social media maturity will be tracking ROI – and the method for tracking varies depending upon the client’s business model. A service or expertise business (such as Spoke8) will measure ROI by the number of signups to our e-mail newsletter, or the number of inquries and downloads of whitepapers and case studies from our web site that lead to a meeting and project engagement with a client. A client who has an online store will measure this by tracking the customer across their site and into their e-commerce store, knowing which posts yielded the most purchase activities and what dollar amount those posts represented. A client with a brick-and-click model or a brick and mortar store may use unique coupon codes for each offer and track these with their point of sale system, again, measuring what dollar amount those posts represented. With modern web
site code tools, it’s easy to track all of these activities.
Content and network mix depends upon your business
With our social strategies, we take into consideration content uniqueness of each client – some clients will want to develop video-based content (professional or on-the-fly depends on the audience), others will want to have information content (whitepapers, documents) still others will offer photograph-based content and many will offer all three. A content-development strategy is a key part of all of our social media strategies. Content is king – it is what keeps clients returning to your site, and in turn your ‘store’ – whether that be on line or in person. Converting content use by prospective clients to sales of goods and services is the goal of all marketing activities.
Here are a few resources on social media strategy and social media marketing maturity that will be helpful.
How can I make sure the person I have posting is doing a good job?
Have someone on your team you’re assigning to Social media activities? Check out our 11 tips for social media content managers.
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