How to plan your social media marketing strategy
Get something really good long term for your brand in social media is a challenge. Creating objectives, knowing the market or setting a budget individually are not a strategy. Strategy is the way to turn your brand into what you want it to become and of course you need an initial planning to which we must pay close attention.
To develop a strategic plan we must take into account three important parts: Prioritize objectives, establish a clear direction and define our activities.
- Improve customer commitment to our brand, or what is the same create engagement
- Enhance brand management and reputation
- Accelerate customer-driven innovation: feeling listened and followed will keep you loyal
- Increase your sales?
ESTABLISH AN ADDRESS
- Identify opportunities
- Locate and understand the risks
- Clarify the risk of not creating commitment
- Establish a clear corporate social media policy
- Communicate this policy internally
DEFINE ACTIVITIES
- Define the phases you are going to follow
- Choose target platforms
- Identifies required resources
- Create a content strategy
- Establish responsibilities and time commitment
- Link to your company’s offline marketing activities
At the same time, it is very important that you develop capabilities in your company :
- Identify your most qualified staff to work with Social Media
- Train and support these champions and the rest of the staff
- Stay updated on Social Media technology
- Establish pilot programs
- Develop a transparent culture of responsibilities
Now what we have to think about is to create commitment, or what is the same Engagement. For this, it will be fundamental to take into account all those factors related to interaction, listening and conversation.
HEAR
- Identify the relevant monitoring tools in Social Media
- Learning to use these tools
- Discover what is said about your brand and the market
- Find relevant communities and conversations
- Discover your key influencers
CONTAIN CONVERSATION
- Participate in the conversations
- Provide useful information and interesting topics
- Add value to communities
- Engage in conversation with your influencers
- Reply positively
EVALUATE AND PERFECT
- Establish relevant measures of success
- Monitor these measures
- Capture and communicate success stories
- Reporting
- Adapt strategy and measures
MAKE A CONSTANT LEARNING
It is very important not to live outside of what others do in the company. For this reason I recommend that you use social networks yourself and experiment in social media by consulting relevant case studies.
We must also invest in the education of your employees for social media behavior. And not least it is that you listen to the professionals of your sector and that you explore the last tendencies of the social media. This way you will not take any surprises and you will know at every moment what the situation is.
