6 Social Media Strategy Tips

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6 Social Media Strategy Tips
for Market Leadership
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2 6 Social Media Strategy Tips for Market Leadership

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Intro...........................................................................................3

Socialize and Benchmark............................................................4-6

Discover.....................................................................................7-9

Assign Goals and Accountability.................................................10-12

Test............................................................................................13-16

Measure.....................................................................................17-19

Learn..........................................................................................20-21

Conclusion..................................................................................22

www.socialmediahq.com


Intro
For many, coming up with a strategy is a foreign process. But it doesn't have to be.
In this e-book, you will learn about the 6 exercises that you will need to
accomplish in order to form a full-fledged social media strategy. For small
businesses, this task will be somewhat easier, but for enterprise businesses, this
process could take some time depending on the complexity of the organizational
structure, data, communication, flexibility, among other factors.

This e-book is divided into 6 sections:

 Socialize - collect different points of view
 Discover - establish company goals
 Plan - get it on paper
 Test - experimentation
 Measure - tie data to company goals
 Learn - iterate and keep testing

After reading, you will be able to manage human resources, budget, return on
investment, daily operations, and continuous improvement. Continue reading to
become your company's social media leader....



Socialize and Benchmark:
"Take the time to understand the needs of stakeholders and
your audience"



Before you can write a plan, you need to gather the appropriate information from
all the parties that will have a stake in your social media program. This is
especially true if you are a multi-department business. If this step is skipped, you
will set yourself up for failure, so take the time in the beginning to speak with
people and gather historical information. In doing this, you will set proper
benchmarks that you will measure against when you deploy your social media
program

Speak with all internal stakeholders

 C-Suite

These are the big picture thinkers and are most concerned with the bottom
line. They are going to be concerned with lifting revenue or decreasing
costs. Understand what their concerns are before making any type of
recommendation. Note: This could include legal staff or compliance staff
as well.

 Managers

Managers have a different set of concerns. Most likely, they are more
concerned about the performance of their individual team or function
within the business, which doesn't necessarily equate to bottom line
reporting. For example, managers are concerned about the metrics that will
make them look good like decreased time to resolution for the customer
service department or increased leads from the marketing department.

 Front Line Staff

Front Line Staff are going to be concerned about optimizing their
performance. For example, call center staff will be concerned about
relevant information to give to the customer at a quicker rate. Another
example is human resources staff will need more efficient ways of weeding
through job applicants.

 Gather feedback and document it

Upon interviewing each stakeholder, make sure to record and report on the
current needs of the organization. Outline the top priorities.



Look at analytics and data for all marketing activities

 Web analytics

To create a business case, you will need to bench mark where the firm
stands without social media. How much traffic is the site generating?
Where is the traffic coming from? Is the site converting visitors into leads?

 CRM data

Now you will have to dig into your customer relationship management
reports. How many people that are website leads turn into prospects? What
is the average sales cycle? What is the lifetime value of the customer. Most
CRM software can provide an array of marketing reports that are specific
to your business goals.

Read industry reports

 There are countless white papers and reports delivered by companies
within your industry. Use this data to create benchmarks and opportunities
for capturing market share.

Surveying Customers and Preliminary Listening

 Email a survey

This may seem counterintuitive, since social media is a great channel for
low cost-high value market research, but you will need to figure out what
your customers desire when engaging with your brand in social media

 Conduct Preliminary Listening

Through the use of special software, you can figure out where your
prospects and customers are hanging out online, what they are talking
about, who is hanging out online, how they feel about you, and why are
they talking about you.



Discover:
"Identify Goals"



Each department of the business has specific goals, and the advice that we would
give is to focus in the beginning on 1 or 2 goals. Then as the program rolls out,
expand your goal setting to other areas of the business. In this section, we will
explain some of the goals you can focus on.

Lower customer service costs

 If your proposed strategy revolves around customer service, you can
benefit greatly from social media's impact on customer service costs.
Comparing the cost of accessibility and quicker response rates through
online content and social networking communication, you will come to
rely on phone calls less, which are historically higher cost.

Increased Leads and Sales at Lower Cost per Lead/Sale

 Over time, your content library will accumulate and produce ongoing leads
and sales at a fraction of the cost of advertising. In addition, by sharing
your content on social networks, you can strengthen the reach of your
messages.

Lower market research costs

 One of the most efficient ways of gathering feedback on what your
prospects and customers want is by asking them before building out a
product, service, marketing campaign, among other business initiatives.
Focus groups and other types of market research can be quite expensive, so
you can compliment this research with high value insights from your
current audience. The only issue with gathering feedback from social
networks is that the samples and feedback could tend to be biased and
statistically insignificant. Therefore, complimenting your current market
research with social media will garner the best results.

Lower recruiting costs

 The cost of attending recruiting events in-person can also run up a
potentially large tab if you account for travel, accommodations,
registration fees, materials, etc. Digital recruiting is more cost efficient,
and you will be able to pick out the best applicants through public
information that they provide on the internet.



Increase brand awareness

 Since many social networks have built in viral capabilities, your content
and messages can potentially spread far and wide if you have something
valuable to share. You can track brand awareness by issuing special link
tracking and calculate the word of mouth multiplier. The formula is:
(number of direct clicks + number of clicks from
recommendations)/number of direct clicks. Of course there are other tools
and formulas to help you gauge brand awareness within social media.
Note: the true answer to brand awareness is by conducting survey research
to find out if people are "more likely to buy from you after interacting or
seeing your content". But social networks make this question a little easier
by looking at the data.

Increase Loyalty and Lower Churn

 When providing exceptional content and social customer service, your
customers will form a community of loyalists. If you can reward this
community for being active members of your brand, your retention rate for
these customers should theoretically be higher than customers who are not
part of the community. The only way you would be able to measure this is
through connecting social data into your customer relationship
management software.



Plan:
"Assign goals, dates and
responsibilities"



In order for any plan to succeed, accountability is vital. In this section, we will
present several questions that you will need to ask of one another. People carry out
plans, so management will come into play here.

Who is going to be held accountable for results?

 After you identify the business goals, picking a department head or
manager that is responsible for results is important for taking your social
media program forward. Without accountability, nothing will happen.

This responsibility will most likely rest on one person's shoulders in the
beginning and expand to multiple people as the program scales. The
program champions will then communicate goals and priorities to their
team.

Who is going to handle the content production?

 Content production will need to be planned, and this responsibility will be
given out by department heads, or for smaller companies, the social media
manager will also be responsible for content production. Scheduling will
be important at this phase.

Remember to account for pre-production, creation, and post-production.
This concept is the same whether you're writing, filming, recording sound,
performing webinars, among other content types.

Who is going to handle the community management?

 You will want to choose your community managers wisely, as they will
be the voice of your company on the front lines. Most likely, you will
want to hire someone with the same characteristics and interests as your
target audiences.

 Determine how much time will be devoted to community management if
the employee has other duties within the organization. At what point will
they need to be transitioned into full time community management? This
is where benchmarking and milestones will be important to establish in
the planning phase.



Who is going to handle the analytics and reporting duties?

 After figuring out what you are going to measure, who is going to be
responsible for collecting, analyzing, and reporting these numbers? Do
they have the required skill set? Do you need to outsource this duty? How
much time should they take out of their day to perform these duties?

What technology are you going to use to collect data about
customers?

 If you don't have the technology to generate accurate reports on how
social media is affecting your bottom line, you will need to invest some
money. Some of the things you will need to think about are connecting all
of these things into one dashboard: customer relationship management,
web analytics, social media monitoring, plus social analytics from all the
platforms where you are active. Then you need to organize this
information into a way that management will be able to equate to positive
or negative return on investment. If you are reporting to community
managers and social media managers, you will have to present a different
set of information, so that they can optimize their efforts.



Test:
"Don’t promise the stars and
deliver the moon"



In this section, we are going to discuss the roll out of a social media program.
Some of the items that you will need to pay attention to are channels and tools to
use, testing methods, and relationship building. Naturally, it will be more tactical.

Create a communication schedule involving all channels that will
support your strategy

 After you have planned what type of content you will produce, this is
where you will produce your editorial calendar. You will need to consider
all variables within content production and distribution. For example, if
you are shooting video, document when production will start, and when
the video will be posted. What social channels will the video be posted
on?

Social networks, landing pages, e-mail, content development, off-line
tactics, public relations such as blogger outreach, search engine
marketing

 You will need to make sure that social media is integrated into all
marketing tactics. Here is a real world example: You have a 1 year goal of
increasing qualified sales leads by 100%. At the top of the funnel you will
be creating daily blog posts that will be optimized for search engines and
shared on your social network profiles. You will also be guest blogging on
other blogs. In the former and latter, at the end of every blog post, you
will have a call to action for downloading a premium piece of content like
an e-book or a video. After the content is downloaded, a sequence of e-
mails will be triggered to nurture the lead through the sales funnel.

 To support the process, you will be attending conferences and events
where the goal is to collect e-mail addresses, so that you can send them
premium content and to get them into the sales funnel. Also you will test
pay per click advertising on search engines and social networks.

Test which social networks drive the most engagement, traffic,
leads, and sales to your organization over a 1 year period

 You will need some type of web analytics program like Google Analytics
or Omniture to help you measure website traffic being driven from social



media sites. You can then make monetary and time budget decisions
based off of this data.

Conduct a/b and multivariate tests on your website and e-mails.

 If you want to continue to increase marketing success, the best way to
achieve this is by conducting a/b and multivariate testing on your landing
pages. The essence of these tests is creating variations of the web page
and using testing services to see if the changes result in a lift in leads or
other types of performance criteria. A great testing platform is Google
Website Optimizer or Visual Website Optimizer.

 Testing can also be performed with your e-mail program. Make sure to
test subject lines, body copy, time windows, and calls to action.

Test different types of content and timing

 While you create your editorial calendar, make sure to account for testing
different types of content formats when sharing to social networks. You
will never know if one piece of content works better than the other if
you're not testing.

 Timing is an important step in reach your audience for a couple of
reasons. The first reason is that every company's audience has different
social networking habits. Second, most people do not use social networks
during regular hours, so you will have to test different posting times,
collect the data, and determine the appropriate time windows for future
content distribution.

Test which types of offline marketing activities are best supported
by social media (i.e. speaking engagements, workshops, networking
events, print advertising, radio, and TV)

 Most likely, many offline marketing tactics are easily complimented by
social media tactics. For example, events can be live tweeted and blog
posts can be written during the event. Lately, you have probably seen
social networks being promoted in print, radio, and TV. This is an



excellent tactic for building an audience and providing a place to create a
deeper relationship with your target market.

Create relationships with a number of bloggers in your industry and
narrow down the list over a 1 year period for blogs that drive the
most qualified traffic to your website.

 Blogger outreach is one of the best ways to establish credibility and drive
business growth. The point of this tactic is to access the audience of these
influential figures. Their audiences are highly influenced by their
endorsements, so it could prove to be the most crucial thing you do in
social media. After all, the essence of blogger outreach is being "social"
and creating "real relationships". Just be careful not to be too pushy or go
for the quick sale with influential bloggers. They are bombarded with e-
mails, link requests, and pitches every day. The best way to look at blogger
outreach is the slow and steady route. You'll win in the end.



Measure:
"It’s not one size fits all"



In this section, we will help guide you through the often misunderstood world of
social media measurement. It's not cut and dry, and it takes work to collect the
appropriate information. After reading the section, you will have a better idea of
what you need to do.

Identify areas where data is readily available (i.e. Google Analytics
or customer relationship management reports)

 When you are first starting out in social media, you will need to
demonstrate some type of movement, whether that is increased
conversions, or correlation of engagement metrics to lower costs, revenue,
or market insights. That is the best you will be able to do in the beginning.
Find the data that is easily captured and present it to management. You
will need to show management that numbers are trending in a positive
light. You can use social analytics tools like Hootsuite combined with
Google Analytics to show the initial performance. From here, you can ask
for budget to expand your measurement capabilities by integrating data
sources into one dashboard, or a social crm.

Align data collection with your business goals

 If you don't specify what your business goals are then you will be buried
in a pile of useless data. For example, if increased sales leads is the goal,
then retweets or likes might not be the best data source to present to
management. A better data source would be referral traffic from social
sites that convert into downloads or event registrations. At the operational
level, retweets and likes might be a signal of driving more referral traffic,
but this is something that should be reported on the functional/operational
level.

Create control groups for measuring lift in sales or cost reduction
attributed to social media.

 To see where social media impacts bottom line metrics, you will need to
compare the results of actions that are taken in social media to actions
without social media. Nichole Kelly of Full Frontal ROI explains this in-
depth on Social Media Examiner.



For example, if you want to see if people convert to sales better when
originating from social media compared to people that originate from
offline events like tradeshows, you will compare the two channels side by
side in your CRM software.



Learn:
"Move quickly, fail fast, and
iterate"



The last stage of your social media rollout plan should be focused on taking
calculated risks. If certain tactics don't work, that's ok. There's room to iterate.
Finally give your program some time to materialize. It is advisable to give
programs at least 1 year to mold into a business asset.

Test and iterate tactics, and present the results of the winning
tactics over a 1 year period.

 Since social media is a long term aspect of any business, you will need
test and gather data for at least 1 year. After collecting the relevant data,
you will be able to spot patterns, with the winning and losing tactics
within a social media program.

After the 1 year period of testing, budget by quarter for strategies
supported by the winning tactics from the prior year

 Now you can take what works and continue to test and further optimize
your social media presence. Taking this approach, you will continue to
build upon your success, thus creating assets that compound themselves.



Conclusion
Coming up with a social media strategy is no easy task, especially if you
have to gather information from and work with multiple stakeholders
within your organization. By following the advice of this e-book, you
should have the correct framework for creating an asset for your
organization. We hope you enjoyed reading, and best of luck to you in
your social media adventures!



Questions?

Need more in-depth discussions of what we covered in this e-book, or Need
help with your social media strategy? Feel free to reach out to us at
info@socialmediahq.com.

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6 Social Media Strategy Tips

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