How to Create a Social Media Strategy

Too often, people are swayed by smooth talking sales persons who liberally use buzz words to create a magnificent fade of social media, one they simply can’t live up to. Don’t get me wrong; social media is an incredible channel, one you must pursue in order to keep up or improve your product’s visibility in today’s world. However, going into it blind and leaving the strategy in the hands of these experts is not recommended. They may have some good ideas, but your preparedness not only helps you identify the truly good ideas from the duds, but also helps foster a collaborative brainstorming environment between you and the social media strategist. This is how the truly remarkable strategies are created because ultimately, no one can know your product, brand or service better than you. Here I hope to provide a few tips and tricks along with case studies of popular, well-executed social media campaigns in an effort to help you start thinking along these tangents.

1) Know your goal

The majority of people will answer the question “What is your goal for this campaign?” with a simple “To boost sales”. Fair enough. Unfortunately it’s not always so cut and dry. It is important here to ask the question, what will boost sales? A few things spring to mind; increased exposure of your product to newer markets, improved brand identity in existing markets, reacquiring ex-users by providing incentives such as discounts, among other things. If it is safe to say that reaching these targets will lead to increased sales, then we can simply say that our goals for this social media campaign are defined above. We have effectively broken down the ultimate goal into smaller, more manageable and track-able goals.

Pepsi Refresh Celebrity Challenge

The Pepsi Refresh Celebrity Challenge has clear cut goals and objectives. They want people from Facebook to vote, submit ideas and learn more about the project itself.

2) Define (small) measurable metrics

Determining whether or not your campaign was a success is usually the number one priority for any marketing manager, and success is often measured by ROI. Unfortunately, they end up measuring success by looking at overall sales or other bottom line effecting results. While this may apply in some cases, the results of social media campaigns are usually seen over a period of time rather than overnight. By setting realistic goals and milestones such as;

• reach 10,000 fans in 3 months,
• create a giveaway for the 10,000 fans and collect their e-mail addresses,
• give away a grand prize while providing others with discounted rates on future purchases through newsletters with special offers, you break down the strategy into several measurable metrics which will make it easy for you to calculate your ROI and determine if your campaign was successful. If through the aforementioned strategy (let’s say arbitrarily six months in duration) the cost of developing, running the campaign and prizes is outweighed by the value found in acquiring x amount of new users, your campaign can be deemed a success with respect to ROI.

Chilis Grill and Bar

Chilis, together with Bud Light are giving away 6 Port Paradise Cruises! If that won’t entice people into joining their Facebook page, nothing will. They will be able to track the amount of entries they got for the contest and gather their e-mail addresses and zip code. They can then reach out to them via e-mail at a later point, offering them discounts or other incentives to visit their restaurants.

3) Know your target market

Everything from the look & feel to the shape & sound of the strategy depends on which market you are targeting. The functionality it provides is largely based on what kind of users can be expected to interact with the campaign.

Consider a Facebook Page promoting a graphic tablet. In coordination with a clothing company, they hold a contest where artists are asked to submit their designs with the winner set to receive a brand new MacBook Pro complete with a state of the art graphic tablet and having the honor of their T-shirt design printed and sold on a famous online clothing store. Now let’s compare this to a Facebook application which allows you to upload a picture and give it a virtual makeover, selecting from a library of hair styles, make-up accessories and more, providing all the tools you would find at a beauty salon to help you create your masterpiece, and ultimately selecting one person with the best entry as the grand-prize winner. Clearly both these applications, although having similar goals and methods of going about attaining those goals, have very different target markets.

Target College Checklist

The Target College Checklist campaign is perfectly aimed towards college students and is launched during a time when the new college year is starting. With the Roommate App allowing you to send messages, split bills, post to a calendar and more, they have engaged users coming together around a common subject matter.

4) Platforms

It is important to define what platform(s) to use as some may contain a higher abundance of your target market than others. For example, Facebook is known to be a female-youth majority platform while Twitter contains a larger number of young adult males. In many cases, entire campaigns have been brilliantly designed and developed only to find that the response was lackluster at best, leaving the strategists confused and the marketers frustrated. The reason for these failures was as simple as not enabling the campaign to reach the correct target market. The better understanding you have of what market you wish to capture, the more efficiently you and your social media strategist will be able to define which platforms to utilize and make your campaign appealing to those who frequently visit said platforms.

Old Spice

Old Spice recently launched a campaign that took the Internet by storm. Previously they had social profiles that existed but were never brought forward into the public eye such as this. Their campaign ran simultaneously on Facebook, Twitter & YouTube, and less than a month later, Old Spice has reported a 107% increase in sales thanks to this campaign.

5) Get the word out (drive traffic)

It is incredible to see that sometimes after overcoming all the hurdles successfully, campaigns stumble on this last, simple and (arguably) the most important hurdle of all. Once the campaign has been developed and deployed on the platform(s) of choice, it needs traffic to thrive. Social media strategists misuse the word viral growth far too much and marketers eat into it too easily. Although viral growth is most definitely an important and exciting part of creating campaigns on the social media networks, it cannot grow something out of nothing. Viral growth of zero users will remain at zero. In order for viral growth to actually work, the application needs seed traffic. There are several options available to drive traffic, from leveraging your existing media spots such as billboards, print ads or web site to purchasing banner advertisement spots on a pay-per-click basis. All these factors play an important role in bringing traffic to the campaign.

These are just some things to take into consideration when delving into the social media world. As you can probably gather, none of this is rocket science, yet people make it out to be. Don’t get intimidated and ask plenty of questions. There are logical and reasonable answers to all of them.