How do I determine what Social Media Marketing Plan will work for my business?

So, I want to implement Social Media Marketing for my business. But how do I start?

The social media strategy for your business should be a function of the business objectives as well as the targeted audience. For e.g. If your audience is more business professionals, choose LinkedIn as the platform. If the audience is teenage audience, choose Orkut as the platform. Let us first define some attributes of various businesses and then explore what they mean:

What are you looking to promote or market?
What do you have that will generate interest of people in Social Media (Product, Concept around a Product, a Service or a Brand)

What are the primary objectives of your social media marketing campaign?
What and how do you want the social media users to engage with what you have for them? (View your offering, providing positive feedback...etc)

What is the rate and pace of content creation in your company?
Do you have sufficient content or relevant concept that social media users will value on an ongoing basis?

Lets explore these attributes in more detail
What are you looking to promote or market?

• Is your product or offering catering to a broad audience or are you targeting a specific customer segment?
• Do you have a new concept or offering you are looking to explore? Are you looking to create a new marketplace?
• Is their some unique community aspect to your product or service? Something beyond your business. This is extremely important since most people don’t want to interact with a business unless they have an instant requirement.

What are the primary objectives of your social media marketing campaign?
Most businesses say ‘yes’ to all the objectives mentioned below, and they are all valid for most businesses. However, a deeper evaluation is required to set up the short term and long term objectives into distinct buckets of primary and secondary goals.

• Awareness and visibility of your product, services or company?
• Brand Promotion
• Interactivity / Engagement with the target group
• Community Creation around your products and services
• Lead and Sales Generation
• Customer Relationship Management
• Reputation Management
• Recruitment
• Survey

What is the rate and pace of content creation in your company?
In social media marketing, content is the king. From short Twitter messages to world-class videos, your content needs to replicate your value proposition and offering. My experience in SMM says this is the single biggest stumbling block for most companies.  Never bite more than you can chew. Be very careful in selecting what social media campaigns you want to run based on what you are willing to commit from a content perspective. Key questions to address are:

• Does the senior management team want to commit their time in helping refine social media marketing content? Authentic participation from the senior management team best helps in building trust and credibility with the customer.
• Do you have a dedicated team for writing content? What you can attain in social media is a function of the quality content you can generate.
• Do you have access to resource that can create good graphics? An image speaks more than a 1000 words; this has never been truer than in the social media world. Attention spans are very limited for you to ensure people notice your messages.
• Do you have access to resources that can create good audio-visuals?
• Do you have people who love researching the internet for finding information and resources on your industry?

Once you have successfully answered all of these questions, you need to look for the right online marketing partner for your business.

Choosing the right expert to implement this on your behalf can be half the battle won. I would always recommend getting online marketing experts for implementation. The only catch is to ensure you choose someone who can understand your business, not only online marketing.

If you like this blog post, or have any questions on implementing SMM for your business, please feel free to communicate here and one of our experts will contact you.