- June 10, 2015
- 0
- Email This Post
- Print This Post
5 Steps for Social Strategy Planning
Not every company can afford to hire dedicated social teams or expensive monitoring and tracking tools. But Ron Schott, Director of Professional Services at Simply Measured, details some social strategy planning tips for enterprise-level companies that also apply to businesses of any size.
Whatever your current marketing mix, what follows are some key steps that large brands have used to successfully integrate social media into larger marketing campaigns.
Roadmap to Success
- Bring Everyone On Board
Social does not operate in a vacuum. As Schott says, “Social is a giant part of any modern marketing program.” Regardless of the names you have for your various departments, invite them all to participate. Get everyone to help in developing a strategy so it can have the broadest approval and greatest possible impact. Include sales, marketing, PR, customer service, product development and others.
- Plan To Succeed
Decide upfront what success will look like and how it will be measured by setting goals. Use data to inform your decisions. Schott suggests looking at questions like deciding whether your goals are action- or brand-oriented, then determining which networks will best help you to reach those goals. Dedicate enough resources to get the results you want.
- Divide and Conquer
Develop channel-specific plans. Remember that every channel won’t necessarily match up with every goal. The main thing is to know which benchmarks are most important to you. “There has to come a moment when you can say, ‘If this is our goal then this is our mix,’” says Schott.
- Monitor and Measure
Establish metrics and tracking procedures and follow them faithfully. Don’t be shy about changing up your tactics. Experiment to see what works and what doesn’t and adjust accordingly. That’s how you learn and refine your campaign. Measurement and tracking allows you to identify trends and change your message or placement. Effective metrics will help you expend your marketing budget more efficiently.
- Optimize and Adapt
Don’t wait until the end of your campaign to measure and share reports. You may miss out on an opportunity to optimize by adjusting during the campaign. Schott reminds marketers, “You have a ton of data. You shouldn’t ever make a guess in marketing, especially in digital because there’s so much data out there. Even if you don’t have your own data you can look at your competitors. See what they’ve done. See what works.” Finally, marketers need to share their results outside the team, to learn from and apply insights gained to future campaigns.
