More than just followers – how social media helps your business

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Many businesses focus their social media marketing efforts on attracting followers and building customer engagement.  These are by far the greatest value-added social media objectives for business.  At the same time, a comprehensive social media marketing strategy should also take into account the broad range of opportunities and benefits afforded by the social media platform to enable holistic business development activities. 

Perhaps one reason why businesses often miss out on the full range of benefits made possible through their Facebook, Instragram, or other accounts is the fact that many of the value-added benefits of social media are difficult to quantify.  What is the value in a business reputation, and how does a business owner know if their reputation as a business is improving or stagnating? 

While it is difficult to ascertain an RoI for a social media strategy, particularly as it impacts more abstract qualities of a business such as brand value, there is value available for the taking.  The following list provides some insights into detailed categories of social media strategy, ones which can be integrated into the top-level strategy of gaining new customers.

Public relations:  Promotional content placed online must have a purpose for the business and speak of the business’s ethos.  That can be done indirectly, conveyed through the way in which content is presented and the tone that is used in telling stories or depicting graphics, and it can be done directly through messaging which conveys subjective, value-based comments about its products, services or even about the world around us.  Public relations benefits can arise from highlighting a firm’s corporate social responsibility or sustainability initiatives, or otherwise, activities done in support of charities.

Search engine optimization:  As a more technical consideration, social media marketing is more than just gaining followers, but can also play a direct and significant role in increasing your organic search rankings on Google and other search engines.  Increasingly, search engines are looking for businesses which engage with their customers and show an active pattern in posting and customer interaction.  Responding to customers, no matter what their comments are, is a way to show Google that you are an active business and that your business should be featured when someone does a search on relevant topics.  Businesses must also be sure that there is a link between online content and social media accounts.  This link ensures that Google crawlers know what to look out for when indexing sites and ranking for content.

Industry thought leadership:  Social media offers a chance to convey your company’s knowledge of the industry and, in so doing, further establishing your business as a leader.  This leadership role can be conveyed by posting white papers or original research in trending topics, by providing resources and links to other websites which have valuable content (but which are not necessarily a direct business competitor), and highlighting insights you have gained from past interactions with customers.  Your performance metric in this category – when you know that you’re gaining traction in the market with customers – is when you can post information about a trending topic and receive replies from people who either agree or disagree with your viewpoint.  In this case, it is not necessarily important to have the “right” content (the majority view) but to show respect to the full range of opinions and have well-founded reasons to support your own views.

Local leadership:  While thought leadership takes a global view on the positioning of your business, for the vast majority of businesses, interaction with customers will be on a local basis.  Highlighting your roots and your cultural heritage in the local context is a way to identify yourself in the community, creating a natural bond between you and the audience.  More than just creating a bond, many searches by customers are geographic based, often including a “near me” at the end of their search to find a vendor or service provider who is locally based.  As a basic technique, ensure your address and phone number is on the website, and mention of the local area is key, particularly for service businesses which rely on face-to-fact interaction with their customers.

Marketing message development:  A social media marketing campaign should indeed begin with consideration over the main themes and messaging to be conveyed.  Some companies, however, may use social media feedback and customer comments to help develop and hone marketing strategies for future use.  Particularly for those businesses which mainly rely on mass media marketing, social media can be a great testing ground for new ideas in marketing.  Content which receives negative responses or lower engagement can be quickly pulled, while well-performing content can be further developed and refined.  As a proving ground, social media enables greater agility by your business with respect to its overall marketing strategy.

Recruitment:  Business success begets business success.  Not all “customer” engagement is about customers.  By conveying a positive corporate culture, and even including a hint of seeking exceptional talent in occasional posts, people will respond, and you won’t have to spend a single cent to receive employment inquiries from people who you know already have an interest in your industry in general, or specifically in your product or service.

Customer and industry insights:  Social media is as much an opportunity for current or potential customers to learn about your business as it is an opportunity for you to learn about your customers.  This learning opportunity extends beyond analytics and engagement tracking, but into the very heart of what makes social media the amazing medium it is today – genuine personal interaction in all its different forms, including one-on-one chats with individual customers.  While engaging customers directly can be time-consuming, smart questions and bring smart answers.  Social media enables that interaction like no other medium to learn from people that you otherwise may never have even met.  We all like to chat with our friends and colleagues, and more often than not, these people have similar views and think like us.  The chance to hear an honest opinion from someone who has a completely different outlook on life could be worth its (or their) weight in gold.

As noted above, a comprehensive social media campaign will first, focus on generating business, but with that objective in place, your holistic marketing strategy may also take into account opportunities to enhance engagement with customers and show greater value-added potential in the market place by tapping into the broader range of benefits that social media platforms offer.

Developing the SMM Strategic Plan

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Pre-development Stage

Before you begin with developing the strategy, taken an inventory of your current situation.  List the current platforms on which you have a social media, or any online presence.  Note how many likes and comments you have received in the previous month on content that you’ve posted, include the number of followers, and note the engagement statistics (reported by some platforms, but not all).  Then write one or two sentences which characterize the activity on this account over the past month.

The next step is to make a quick survey of your competitors.  This exercise is useful not only to make you aware of what other businesses are doing, but also to inspire ideas in your own content development that can be useful in defining your social media strategy.  In assessing your competitors’ presence, note which social media sites they use, how frequently they post, what type of content they post, and as a final thought exercise, write a one or two-sentence characterization of their strategy, based on your own speculation as to what what you think their strategy may be and how you would describe it. 

The third pre-development step is to describe your customer profile.  This description can include, where relevant, factors such as income level, family situation, typical interests which bring them to your business, and reasons they need your product or service.  If there is any factual or statistical data you have upon which to base the profile, include that in the description.  While as business owners we may welcome customers from any walk of life, as long as they pay us money, the main point of this exercise is to create a mental picture of the customer, something to use as a framework and basis to develop different types of content.  When we think of content development as being merely about the product or service of the business, we are greatly limited in the potential to reach out to our customers and connect with them.  On the other hand, when we focus our mind on who are customers are, the type of people they are and the things they like to do, we can develop a much broader potential portfolio of content, one which enables online blogs and postings to have a deeper impact from the customer’s perspective.

Case Study:  On many occasions, prior to our first meeting with a prospective client, we ask them to pull together the information described above (although when it comes to customer research, we usually have a good sense of the industry and what kind of content businesses are posting).  Having this information ready makes the first client conversation much more meaningful and efficient, and helps us to better target first round campaigns, and to develop a cohesive message or theme which can be reinforced in other areas of the business and through other, ongoing marketing efforts. 

Strategy Development

The Commander’s Intent

In the army, offensive campaigns begin with the Commander’s Intent, which is a brief statement of the objective in battle, such as “To take out the city’s main bridge.”  Having this statement in place ensure that during battle, when unexpected scenarios play out and things go wrong, the soldiers on the ground know what the main objective is, so that their improvisation, if it needs to occur, can still be done with the main goal in mind.  So also it is with the social media campaign, having a statement of the commander’s (or business owner’s) intent.

The Social Media Mission & Vision Statements

Based on the statement of intent, the Mission and Vision statements can easily follow.  What we’re looking for here is not a Fortune 500 corporate-level company vision statement, but rather, some brief notes on what you want to achieve out of the marketing campaign.  There is no need to write the words in gold and hang them above the office entrance (you can do that if you want, and that would be helpful to galvanizing your employees’ efforts), but rather, a starting point for imagining a future state to carry the business and, in this case, its marketing efforts.  You may modify the statement over time. 

A vision statement differs from a Mission statement in its focus.  Whereas a vision statement is a state of being to which a business aspires (near future or possibly more distant future), the Mission statement describes in high-level actions how you intend to achieve the vision. 

Some companies supplement these with a values statement, which is a description of the values which drive the vision and its implementation.  Since we are focusing on a practical and actionable social media strategy here, the values with which those are achieved would include basic, honest and ethical business practices, something we assume among our clients. 

The best way to advise on the development of the guiding statements is to demonstrate the outcome with some examples:

– Statement of Intent:  To attract customers and increase revenue

– Vision – Example 1:  To be identified by customers as a leading expert in the service we provide, and to be the go-to service provider which comes first to mind when they are ready to buy.

– Vision – Example 2:  To offer products and services which are the best in the industry, fostering a reputation of excellence among followers through social media content.

– Mission – Example:  We will achieve this vision through relentless customer service as seen through active responsiveness to inquiries and comments on social media, which will be borne of high quality content that is informative, entertaining, and thought-provoking in nature.

Many variations can be developed of these statements, all of which speak to the goals of the business and the ensuing content that is published for the world to see. 

With these statements in writing, we have the foundation for the development of not only the content that will be published, whether it is in the form of memes, blogs, stories, photos, videos or other, but also the ways in which this content can be communicated. 

While statements such as these are by nature abstract, they can have a profound impact on the development of the marketing plan, and on the implementation of the details along the way.  As most entrepreneurs and business owners will attest, success is often made or broken on even the tiniest of details.  That is why having a firm picture in mind of the intended result, expressed through the vision and mission statements, is so important to the social media marketing strategy, and particularly important as a primary reference for those in your organization who are carrying out the plan, or to the external consultant that is supporting the process and content development.

Implementation Plan

The core of the social media strategy is in the implementation.  As a strategic analysis, the purpose at this stage is not to go into the detailed action plan or long run project planning, but to identify the ways and means of implementation, including resources that will be dedicated to achieving the plan.  The following are the main categories of activity that should be described in the social media marketing strategy:

– Social media accounts:  Which platforms will be prioritized?  The answer to this question is based on a few factors:  the determination of the social media audience and its relevance to your business (does the crowd fit your profile?), the potential on this platform to continue growing the network, and your level of comfort in using this platform.

– Frequency and timing of posting:  How often will you post?  For every business, there is an appropriate balance of posting frequency.  Too much posting over meaningless content will lose attention from your customers, however if there is a commitment to develop content that is diverse, engaging and relevant to the customer profile, reaching the point of saturation would be almost impossible.  On the other hand, too little content (only 2-3x per week) risks insufficient exposure of the business to generate any meaningful results.  Content Savants recomments a starting point of daily content publishing, as long as that content is diverse, and only a fraction of the content should promote the business directly.  With respect to timing, a detailed schedule should be developed to determine which social media accounts will publish content at pre-determined times of day, to help optimize visibility among the targeted customer profile.  Determining the best time of day may require some testing in the early days of the campaign.

– Content development process:  How will you develop content?  Is there a person in-house who can design and develop memes, who can write blogs and tweets, and who can be responsible for posting the content on a daily or frequent basis?  Will you appoint an external creative agency for development of the content?  This service is at the heart of what we offer at Content Savants.

– Define the engagement funnel:  At the start of a social media marketing campaign,

– Engagement & Reaction Tracking:  How will you track success of the marketing campaign?  Who will oversee results?  Here is where you can list the metrics to be tracked (depending on the social media platform) and the aspiration for growth of those metrics over time.  As your social meadia presence grows, you will also have the opportunity to reply to comments.  Timeliness of the reply is critical to achieving conversion to actual sales.  Who will be in charge of this activity?  Will you employ any SMM management tools to aid in this process?

– Analyze and Optimize:  There should be a continual effort to improve and enhance the strategy, not only with respect to the type of content that is posted, but also the overall objectives and success of the marketing campaign.  A part of the social media strategy will be trial and error.  In other words, there is no established formula for businesses to follow, therefore a system must be put in place to enable analysis of results, and to direct a response to the results.  You may call upon an external consultant for assistance in interpreting the results of the campaign, and in developing a plan of action to respond to customer comments or to modify messages according to success, market trends, changes in the business situation, or other driving factors. 

– Risk management:  Every strategy should include a section on risk management and mitigation.  Not every scenario can be predicted, but among those that are considered, a pattern of responsiveness will emerge, with an individual appointed to lead a response to any risks which might come to fruition.

Refinement of the strategic plan

As part of the campaign itself, refinement and optimization of social media activity will be important to its continued success over time.  The social media strategy itself should be regularly reviewed.  As a business grows, the potential opportunities for marketing and customer engagement also grow.  With a larger audience and more resources available, after the low-hanging fruit is captured, different approaches may prove more effective in reaching new audiences and in gaining responses from silent customers.

Another key opportunity that will become increasingly critical as your business grows is that of integrating your social media marketing with other channels.  This point speaks to more than just ensuring there is a consistent message across channels, but to the ways in which activity in one channel can complement others.  For example, inclusion of a QR Code in print media advertising can direct potential customers to a social media account or organization website.  Timing of a live streaming presentation can initiate social media campaigns, which can be used to promote product announcements on a live streaming service.  The combination of possibilities is endless. 

The most important part, however, of any social media strategy is the part that reads, “do it.”  Every day without a posting or blog is a day lost forever, and with it, an opportunity to connect with customers.  The sooner the campaign begins, the sooner you and your business start climing the ladder of success.