With over a hundred of websites vying for your attention in all possible formats, be it blogs, chats, tweets, photos, videos, links, bookmarks, news, stories your options seem limitless. If you want to get on with an effective Social Media Marketing plan for your business, where do you start? What is the most effective strategy to achieve respectable influence?
Our answer to most of our clients in this situation is EVERYWHERE. You can not afford to ignore the millions of interaction touch-points available to your consumers. However, in practical sense of the world, it’s not a feasibility. So, keep the following points in mind to start building an effective social media marketing plan
1. Define your Target Audience: While this aspect is often well researched before GO-TO-MARKET, it takes even more credence in the Social Media landscape. What is the age group, what is the geographical spread, income criteria, and most importantly, Internet accessibility. For a company that is into products for the masses (and I talk about India specific markets here), only a fraction of your target audience can be influenced with a social media plan. However, for an organization that has product range with most of its target audience possibly online, social media should be one of the most important facets of marketing plans.
2. Identify the top social media properties within your target audience A simple alexa/google search and /or a small research within the peer group will throw out the names of most often used social media properties around your demography. Choose up to a maximum of 10 such properties to start your plan.
3. Classify communication objectives with each of the properties. What you use twitter for can not be said using linked-in and so on. Therefore, the objectives for each of the properties will define the allocation of resources in terms of manpower/finances for each of these. While some of these properties, like twitter and linked in will work primarily on ongoing mindshare, your strategy on facebook will probably involve an investment upfront to get the ball rolling. You may scatter your investments over a period of time through an yearly budget allocation but eventually, if facebook falls within your target audience, you cannot ignore it for want of immediate ROI on investment.
4. Specify objectives/KRAs for each of the properties. For all resources allocated to achieve your communication objectives, you should specify clear measurable goals for each quarter. Twitter goals, for example can be set using number of followers, pageviews/link views achieved by posting, and eventual conversions that happened using the twitter activity. Similarly for linked in, if you have decided to author/mentor a group with information about your business, the participation levels will define the KRAs.
5. Go Slow, but Go steady. You don’t want to spread yourself across a number of activities instantly. The right way is to target 4 top social networking sites in your demography and add one each quarter. Once you have the first activity on autopilot over the first quarter, add the 2nd activity to your portfolio and so on for the third and fourth quarter.
6. Have a plan B – Most of these initiatives will be viral in nature, and if an activity doesn’t show significant activity over a 3 month period, there definitely is a reason for you to revisit the modalities and tweek it or give it up altogether.
I will try and pick up some of the top social media sites in the country over the next few weeks and put together a roadmap for each one of those for three types of organizations, namely SMEs, Large Corporations and Individuals. In the meanwhile, if you have any questions about how we can help you define an effective social media strategy, do not hestitate to pick up the phone and call me at +91 9818955959 or drop us an email at info at e-businessinteractive dot com
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