Marketing plan for Social Media

Lisa Koivunen

Social Media strategy Social Media in Marketing MAR8PO067-2 10.11.2013

Table of content
1 Introduction .......................................................................................................................... 1 2 Setting goals and objectives ................................................................................................ 2 2.1 SMART goals ............................................................................................................... 2 3 Determine your success metrics ......................................................................................... 3 4 Get to know your audience and find right platforms ..................................................... 4 5 Create a plan for each channel/ platform ......................................................................... 5 6 Gather resources and determine roles ............................................................................... 6 7 Create your accounts and start creating content .............................................................. 7 7.1 Be Social ......................................................................................................................... 7 7.2 Use #hashtags .............................................................................................................. 8 7.3 Visualize your thoughts .............................................................................................. 8 8 Analyze and measure ......................................................................................................... 10 Sources...................................................................................................................................... 11

1 Introduction
Social media is a powerful and affordable marketing tool if its taken seriously. (Stringfellow 2013.) This report is about planning a marketing plan for social media. It includes all the steps that need to take into consideration when a company is planning to take social media as part of their marketing- and communication efforts. Those steps are all explained further in this document. As said in the article by Lorna Li, Social Media has the awesome ability to e ngage your audience in meaningful conversations about your product, issue areas, company, and brand. (Li 2013.) And that is something companies should remember. Social Media is a channel where to be interactive and where to communicate with customers. It is a great way to increase companys web presence, expand awareness about company and also to encourage customers to communicate with the company and with each other. Social Media is not a place to make business or trade and it shouldnt either be there to convert people. Steps that a good planning of the Social Media strategy includes are following. As all strategies in the company, a good Social Media strategy starts by creating realistic but suitably challenging goals; what the company wants to achieve, how they are going to achieve it and how results are going to be measured. After goals have been determined, company should learn to know their audience; who they are and which social media channels they are using. By using that information the company can now decide which channels it is going to use and create an individual plan for each channel. After the company has found the channels and responsible persons to update and take care of Social Media, they can start creating accounts, making profiles and update content in platforms they have decided to use. While social media is part of everyday routines, measuring it at regular basis is a vital part of keeping social media side of the company alive and interactive. Following chapters open each phase and goes deeper into the topics that are therefore explained further and throughout. (Salesforce 2013.)

2 Setting goals and objectives

Like every strategy that is created inside a company, Social Media strategy as well starts by defining goals and objectives that wants to be achieved. They are pointing the direction to which company should focus always when using social media. Social media goals should always reflect from a whole companys strategic goals. For example if your companys business is the web store in your website: Companys strategic objective for next 6 months can be to increase sales 25%. In that case your Social Media goal can be to increase traffic in your website that is therefore eventually increasing sales in your web store. Simplicity Social Media goal has to support whatever goals the company has been set. (Dugan 2013.) 2.1 SMART goals

Good help in shaping a goal is to use a SMART chart. SMART comes from the words Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Timed. The goal should therefore be SMART. (Salesforce 2013.) Specific: For example instead of just increasing sales, the specific goal is to increase sales 25% in the next 6 months. Measurable goal is something that can be measured with tools that has determined already in planning phase. Achievable goal is a goal that the company can actually achieve. For example if you want that 100% of your current loyal customers will follow you on Facebook, its not an achievable goal. Instead, an achievable goal can be that 95% of your current loyal customers will follow you on Facebook in next 2 months. Realistic goal is something the company has enough resources to meet. For example you need enough staff (or enough resources to hire more) to cover all the work that is needed to achieve Social Media goals. Timed goal means that time frame has to be given when setting a goal. That makes a goal more tangible because it has to be done within a time that is given in advance. It also makes development more fast-paced because the tasks are made with the objectives in mind and not just when you have time. (Salesforce 2013.) 2

3 Determine your success metrics

As important as it is to define goals is to define how the success in Social Media is measured. Metrics that will be used for evaluating your Social Media success and effectiveness has to be defined right after goals have been set. Metrics are something that tells you how your company has achieved the goals you were chasing. Examples of a good goal metric correlations are for example: Table 1: Goal metric correlations Goal Get more followers Generating interaction Saving costs in customer service Metric The amount of followers and subscribers in Social Media Type of comments your customers are leaving and the amount of conversation in your Social Media. How much feedback and/or contacts regarding the traditional customer service topics are asked on Social Media?

Metrics, as well as goals, have to support the bigger business goals. Below is one example how the measuring metrics are linked to the big business goals. (Salesforce 2013.) Table 2: Measuring metrics Business goal a web store Social Media goal website traffic

Measuring metrics
How the amount of visitors is increasing right after posting in Social Media (within 24h/48h)

Increase sales in Increase

4 Get to know your audience and find right platforms

No matter where you go in Social Media, your company will always have audience. Who the audience is depends on how you are using your Social Media, which channels you use and what you are posting on there. Everyone in Social Media can affect with whom they will be interacting and which kind of followers they get by posting content that is tempting the audience you want to approach. Learning about your ideal audience makes this possible. First of all you need to know who your audience is. Plan who you want to reach in Social Media, create imaginary personas of your possible customers. Doing that helps you to get clear picture of your ideal target audience. Again, remember to reflect it to your Social Media goals. (Salesforce 2013.) When you have defined your ideal Social Media target customers, get to know where they are spending their time and head your company there. While analyzing that data, concentrate more on where they are networking and where they are active, not just in which channels they appears to have an account. This part is vital and extremely important while making the Social Media strategy. (Stringfellow 2013.) Existing customers are good source of that kind of information. Find out where they are interacting. You can even make a survey about that. Also by using Social Media monitoring platform you can find channels where people are talking about your brand, products or industry. Third way to find the right channels is to learn from your competitors. Find out which channels they are using to interact with their customers, where their customers are most active and which kind of conversations happens in their Social Media channels. (Salesforce 2013.) When you have found the channels you are sure your target audience is affecting go there. But remember to follow in regular basis, whether they have found new channels where to interact and where you could expand. Or whether they have decided to move totally away from the channel they preferred to use yesterday. (Hemley 2013.)

5 Create a plan for each channel/ platform

Now that you know your goals, your target audience and which channels you are going to use, it is time to create a plan on how you are going to use each channel. Every Social Media channel is different and has also a different audience which is the reason you need to create a different plan for all the different channels you are using. Good help for planning the strategy for different channels is to ask the questions: who, what, when and where of your Social Media strategy. For whom you will write? What topics? How frequently? Etc. (Stringfellow 2013.) For whom youll write depends on your audience. You have defined your target audience in the planning phase of this strategic project and now you should write straight to them. Learn by following them; which kind of language they use? Use same terms and tone that they use in Social Media. Topics youll write depend on your company. Write content about your brand and products/ events etc. so that you engage your audience. Write in a way that they want to discuss about you. You can also write same topics or eventually even same posts in different channels you use, but before posting, think that it fits to style of the channel. How frequently depends on the channel you are reviewing. On Facebook good frequency is couple of times a day (2-3) while on Twitter you can tweet couple of times per hour. Learn from your competitors. If your competitor is Tweeting 8 times a day and you just 1-2, something is wrong and you need to change your frequency. Remember also to learn about your audience. If you are posting many times a day and you see that you are losing followers, try to post less and then follow how your followers are reacting to that. (Hemley 2013.)

6 Gather resources and determine roles

Now that you have plans for every channel, you need just to hire a new person or name a person inside your company who is responsible for Social Media. What is important for you is that the person is suitable for the post. He/she needs to have right skills and you need to make sure that the person knows and has internalized the whole Social Media strategy; knows the goals and objectives, knows the whole company goals and knows how to measure the success of Social Media effort, even better if the person could be involved already in creating Social Media strategy. Also all the tasks and responsibilities need to be determined well and clearly. (Salesforce 2013.) Good list of responsibilities could be for example following: - Creating content in different Social Media channels that company is using - Posting updates in Social Media profiles - Keeping Social Media profiles updated - Discovering and following outside content (content of competitors, customers, target audience) - Monitoring conversations - Engaging audience - Analysing data from conversations - Connecting with internal and external partners (Salesforce 2013.)

7 Create your accounts and start creating content

Now that your company even has a person in responsible of Social Media, he/she can start the real work: creating the profiles and updating content in Social Media. Creating accounts and profiles is an important part of the whole project and needs to be made with patient. Profiles of your company needs to visualize the brand image and needs to look like it belongs to your company. Profiles need to have consistency and your brand identity needs to be similar across platforms. Use consistent colors, fonts, styles, pictures etc. (Hemley 2013.) When all the profiles and accounts are ready, the content creating is ready to begin. When creating content in Social Media, its extremely important to keep in mind the goals that has been set in the beginning. If your goal is for example to streamline customer service and reduce costs, your Social Media updates can be for example to publish a social FAQ in your blog so that it is easy to find and can be easily shared in other Social Media sites. There are plenty of new and innovative tricks and words that can be posted on your Social Media. Ask help from your customer service agents to know the most common issues regarding customer service and create content around them. (Salesforce 2013.) 7.1 Be Social

The most important thing while updating content in Social Media is that it needs to be social (as it is called Social Media). Create content that engages your audience; listen, create text that people wants to talk about, go deeper in your customers mind and use a conversational tone in your posts. Asking questions is also one way to get your audience interactive. Also keeping your goals in mind, ask different questions that are tempting different kind of conversations. Questions that are getting feedback about your service and products are good if your plan is to learn what your customers want from your company in future, e.g. you want to get help in product and/or service development. Keeping the discussion active and social, it is vital for you to be there answering and responding your customers comments. (Hemley 2013.)

7.2

Use #hashtags

Other important thing in your Social Media content is to use search words and also #hashtags. Hashtags are words/links that make your customers easier to find and filter your content across many Social Media platforms. Also it makes your customers easier to talk about your brand/company/event by using your hashtags in their Social Media profiles and updates. It engages them to talk about you and also they become more sensitive to give public feedback to you. Hashtags are something that a company can use in creative way. They are so used in Social Media nowadays that using them in innovative and entertaining way gives you more power and it definitely gets your audience to notice you better. (Hemley 2013.) 7.3 Visualize your thoughts

Also using pictures and info graphics makes you more visible and interesting in your customers news feeds. All of your customers are drowning in all the information that is published in their Social Media. Posting pictures that are different, striking and conspicuous are the ones that will be noticed. Use photos to show the human side of your brand. Take pictures of your team working, a funny Friday in the office, be silly, be creative or then just be serious if it fits better to the content. Pictures of real people help your customers to see you as their peer and it makes your company more authentic and trustworthy. If you need to post some heavier content that includes graphics, numbers or tables, use more visual pictures to show them at once. To create an impressive graphic, use designers to design you one picture of all the information you need to show. (Hemley 2013.)

Picture 1: Example of a good infographic. (Hemley 2013.)

Picture 2: Example of a good infographic. (Roosevelt 2012.)

8 Analyze and measure

Last thing in this rat race (before it goes back and again on and on) is to analyze and measure your success with tools that has been determined before, in the very beginning of this process. Use built-in analytics that are offered by many Social Media platforms. They allows you to see which posts are most popular and which are leaving a biggest impact, which are most shared, most commented etc. If your Social Media strategy is working, you should see how traffic is increasing in your social network. Measure your success periodically and you will know how to develop your effort in Social Media. (Stringfellow 2013.)

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Sources
Dugan 2013. How To Create A Social Media Strategy That Makes Sense For Your Bottom Line. URL: http://socialtimes.com/how-to-create-a-social-media-strategythat-makes-sense-for-your-bottom-line_b131736. Read: 6.11.2013 Hemley 2013. 26 Tips to Create a Strong Social Media Content Strategy. URL: http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/26-tips-to-create-a-strong-social-mediacontent-strategy/. Read: 9.11.2013 Li 2013. 6 Steps for Creating a Social Media Marketing Roadmap & Plan. URL: http://lornali.com/6-steps-for-creating-a-social-media-marketing-roadmap-plan/. Read: 6.11.2013 Roosevelt 2012. New York City At A Glance [Infographic]. URL: http://www.rsvlts.com/2012/09/07/new-york-city-at-a-glance-infographic/. Read: 9.11.2013 Salesforce 2013. How to Develop a Social Media Strategy A Step-By-Step Guide. URL: http://www.salesforcemarketingcloud.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/How-toDevelop-a-Social-Media-Strategy.pdf?1d9d63. Read. 9.11.2013 Stringfellow 2013. Social Media Marketing Plan: 6 Steps to Creating a Strategy. URL: https://www.openforum.com/articles/social-media-marketing-plan-6-steps-tocreating-a-strategy/. Read: 9.11.2013

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