What is A Social Media Marketing Strategy?
It’s such a simple question. But so fundamental to either scoring a hit, or totally missing the mark and wasting huge amounts of time and money on misguided social media marketing.
What do we mean by misguided? And what even is a “social media marketing strategy”?
Vanity metrics do not underpin a proper business-oriented social strategy.
Let’s talk about misguided objectives and what should not sit at the heart of a social media marketing strategy.
The so-called, “vanity” or engagement metrics, such as social likes, shares and comments, are fine. They’re nice-to-haves. They make you feel good. They make the marketing team feel good. And that’s OK. But they almost never directly correlate to the fundamental business metrics that will actually drive your business.
Traffic, leads, add-to-carts, trials, appointments, sales, subscriptions, referrals, market-share, revenue growth, customer retention; these are the metrics that will actually drive your business.
Think about it. Social chatter and engagement swirl around all sorts of topics, people, brands and issues on social media. Sometimes this noise is positive. Sometimes it’s extremely negative. The point is, from a marketing and business perspective, it never reliably translates into consistent sales gains or even purchase intent.
That’s why, from an overall commercial perspective, a strategy that chases the vanity metrics, in absence of proper business KPI’s, is folly.
But people use the word, “strategy” all the time. What does it even mean? Is it a 37-slide PowerPoint deck? No. Is it a catchy tag line or nifty concept from the agency? No. If we remember only one definition of a proper social media marketing strategy, it should be that:
Your objective defines a proper social media marketing strategy
Not just any objective – a proper business objective, e.g.:
How many leads off social will comfortably sustain your business next month?
What does a sustainable social CPA (cost per acquisition) target look like for your e-commerce business?
How many enquiries do you need to convert to triallists or subscribers off social?
What percentage of overall sales do you want via social commerce by this time next year?
How many apps do you need downloaded a month to lead in your category?
What impression share target (social market coverage) do you need your business to win share-of-voice and out-flank your competitors?
What revenue growth or market share milestones will drive any scaled-up social investment?
What key brand attribute metrics will you track alongside your key social content pillars?
What brand preference or NPS scores will you track amongst prospects and customers who have interacted with your social communications?
How many monthly white-paper downloads or tutorial views will underpin success of your thought-leadership strategy
The point is that there are a hundred ways to place a real business objective at the heart of a proper social media marketing strategy - but if you don’t define a proper objective… you simply can’t even start to form a viable social media marketing strategy.
What else defines an effective social media marketing strategy?
Put simply, a complete social media marketing strategy also includes a perspective on what is the best way to achieve your objective – as well as specific tactics that you’ll test and refine to help get you there.
There are also some specific tools to use and useful questions to cover off along the way. See here six specific questions that we try to cover off at Social Sugar when we create a social media marketing strategy for any of our clients.
But, in essence, after you’ve set a simple business objective or two, an effective social media marketing strategy charts the most likely path towards that objective by answering the basics of who, how and what:
Who is available to us on social?
There are incredibly sophisticated and ever-changing ways to, “filter” audience demographics, location, interests and behaviours on platforms like Facebook. Who sits in your prospect pool? Whom can you exclude to reduce media waste?
Determining exactly who your audience is - is key to your social media marketing strategy. It dictates what social platforms to use, what kind of content will resonate best - and what kind of call-to-action will appeal most.
Even better, Social media is a powerful tool to test a range of different audiences and see who actually is your sweet-spot target or persona on social. Your strategy should either drill-down on a crystal clear, “who” (if you already know this in your business) or allow for flexibility to test different audiences over time.
How are we talking to these people?
This stage of the strategy involves delving into platforms, imagery, copy, landing pages and more. It involves some research into the audience to find out their behaviours, preferences and habits.
What if you’re just starting out and don’t have a great fix on these things? That’s OK. Your strategy should simply lay out a calendar or structured approach to test and learn more about these crucial aspects of your social media marketing strategy. See here how easy it is to incorporate testing and learning into your day-to-day social media activity – and in turn refine and constantly improve your social media marketing strategy.
What do we want these people to do?
Once your target audience has seen your social ads, campaigns or posts… what do you ultimately want them to do?
A marketing funnel is a simple framework to use, to try and answer this question and round-out your social media marketing strategy. Here’s a recent example for an FMCG food brand, where we start to frame-up the kinds of social activities that will help our audience take specific actions to:
Become aware of our offering
Place our brand in their consideration set
Actively engage and
Finally Convert to purchase.
More sophisticated models will also articulate how social and digital activity will foster repeat purchase and loyalty.
Another way to ensure that your social media marketing strategy is actually focused on outcomes that migrate prospects down the funnel to become customers – is to define the action (and therefore call-to-action) that you’ll be testing at each phase:
Are we incentivising them to sign-up to a database for discounts, inside information or added-value?
Are we offering a download of a valuable voucher, white paper, recipe or how-to guide?
Are we offering to schedule an appointment for a consultation?
Have we crafted an online survey or calculator that can provide simple recommendations or solutions?
Have we remembered to simply ask for the order in a compelling or attractive way?
Platforms like Facebook have powerful tools to optimise campaigns in ways that target people who are most likely to take specific actions – so articulating exactly what those actions are, is a fundamental role of your social media marketing strategy. checkout our social media management case study to help you get the maximum impact within your community.
Tactics follow strategy
Once your social media marketing strategy has been crafted with a clear business objective and simple overview of the, ‘Who, How What’ – then you can begin to delve into the nitty-gritty details of what each content pillar, campaign or post will look like.
But just remember – these are tactics… and tactics - just like those on the battlefield - constantly need to be changed in light of ever-changing consumer preferences, competitive response or market conditions.
In the heat of the day-to-day battle, it’s easy to get lost. To start debating subjective positions around the marketing table as to what tactics are, or are not, on the mark.
This is when your social media marketing strategy comes into its own.
Just pull it out of the top drawer and ask yourself:
Are these tactics getting us closer to, or further away, from our business objective?
Are they a distraction - and a waste of time and effort?
Or are we seeing measurable actions that are proven to move people down our funnel to become valuable customers?
If it’s working; rinse, repeat and continue. If you’ve stalled, take out a clean sheet and come up with a new tactic that’s in line with your social media marketing strategy.
Need help?
We’ve helped to develop social media marketing strategies for countless brands in almost every sector; from E-commerce, to tourism, FMCG, financial services, events, professional services, manufacturing, tech and start-ups.
A decent social media marketing strategy will save years of frustration and wasted production effort, plus precious media dollars. You’ll also be able to develop content and social activity in an efficient, agile way, without becoming repetitive.
Even better, a proper social media marketing strategy will produce quicker-wins, more consistent sales results and a clear road map to long term ROI.
Need help? It costs nothing to chat. Get in touch now.