Social media: the first step
Create a social media plan

The first question you need to ask yourself is of course: Do we need social media for our marketing? And, if so, what goals do we wish to reach with it?

As for the first question, seeing how the use of social media is evolving, you can hardly ignore it anymore, but too many marketing managers start with social media because they feel they “have to”. One example I read recently was of a restaurant owner, who told me “he made sure his customers received the best service possible while dining and they would take of his promotion through social media on their own.” Therefore he did not engage in active use of social media at all, because he could never get as good results as he already did in this indirect way.

Objectives
However if we decide we need to engage in social media, we will need to determine which goals we want to reach? Too many marketing managers start by opening a page on Twitter or even worse Facebook, thinking that that is all they need. I never understand how experienced marketing managers do forget the basic rules of marketing and start an online project without thinking it through thoroughly. For some reason everyone seems to think that Internet changes the rules.

Research
With our goals set we need to do research: What are our customers doing within social media? Where are they “hanging out”? What are they talking about? And, what do they want from us? You can try to do this kind of research on your own. Google alerts for example is a handy free tool to get a lot of data on a certain subject in a short while. However, if you want to do this thoroughly and over a longer period of time, you will need some serious resources to do research. Most companies will therefore contract a third party, which is already experienced in social media, to do this kind of research.

Monitoring
For certain companies damage control will be a large part of this “researching”. For the restaurant owner above, it will be good to know, when people start to complain about his food or service. As soon as that happens, his perfect social media campaign will start working against him. However, if he finds out soon enough, he will be able to correct any imperfections in his restaurant and/or act on the messages directly. Monitoring of this kind will certainly take too much time to do yourself and need to be outsourced.

Social media policy
When you decide to engage in social media, you will need to draft a policy. Who is going to react to anything that has been published about you out there? What can be said and what not? What kind of content is allowed to be published and what rules have to be followed with publishing. To do this properly, try to write the policy in a positive way: instead of restricting your employees, try to write what they can do in social media. You are trying to engage in a new medium, so try to shift the focus to creating instead of confining.

Budget
Although social media will be far cheaper than most of the campaigns you have run, it will still take a considerable investment. Think of a third party you need to contract for research and monitoring and think of the content you will surely need. Unless you are in the position of the restaurant owner above, where you can social media just take its course, you will most certainly need a reasonable amount of content, which you will probably ask a third party to do for you.

Strategy
If all is in place, it is time to draft a strategy for your online campaign and determine the key goals. With these goals you will keep an eye on the effectiveness of your campaign. Again, let me remind you that you need to plan your strategy around what your customer wants to hear from you. This is the hardest part for most marketing managers: to listen to the customer and if necessary act to what is said, without trying to push your brand all the time. Make sure the customer’s requirements are met first; the loyalty to your brand will follow from that, even if your brand has not been mentioned. Most likely your customer loyalty will be higher when your brand is mentioned little or never at all.

 

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