DMN3 Blog

You begin your venture into Social Media Marketing by doing research and planning. Social media marketing is not creating a Facebook page or Twitter account. If you are to be effective, you must do your homework. Here are some things you need to know…

If you have been reading my blog for any length of time, you understand my belief that research and planning are extremely important to the success of any undertaking. Your likelihood of success will be increased in direct proportion to the amount of research and planning you put into it.

Once you have finished planning and developed your strategy, you will need to evaluate over time how successful you are. Based upon that evaluation, you should update your strategy to reflect what you have learned. It’s the common business truism of Plan, Do, Evaluate.

Social Media Research: It begins with research. Hopefully, you have already done most of the research you need as part of this effort. You must understand your audience, i.e. your target market. I’ve previously written on the need to know your potential customers and what drives them to take action. You can read those posts here:

Customer Insight: Why a Little Research Pays You Big Dividends

Customer Insight: Marketing Research You Should Be Doing

Begin with a clear understanding of the consumers you want to reach. Once you have them targeted, you need to research where to find them. Where are they congregating on the Internet? If you have been using Affiliate Programs and online advertising as part of your marketing mix, you and/or your online advertising network should have already asked and answered that question.

Social media marketing requires you to identify the social media sites being utilized by your targeted population. Once you have located these social media communities, you need to understand the nature of the interactions taking place. How and why are they conversing? What is the nature of the conversation already taking place? Should you or how can you plug into it in a way that is perceived as adding to the conversation?

Remember it is all about engagement on social networking sites. I suggest you read my previous post on social media marketing:

Social Media: Do You Know How?

Social Media Strategy: The research should provide the basis for creating a social media strategy. Remember that a social media strategy is a marketing plan that is designed specifically for social media that engages the members of your targeted audience. It is part of a strategy designed to build a relationship with them. It speaks to the parameters of the conversation in which you expect to engage the community.

You cannot be too promotional or you will rapidly lose credibility within the community. You want to make clear how you can inject relevant usefulness and value into the conversation that will earn their trust over time. Once trust is earned, how can you direct the conversation in ways that will help achieve you marketing goals? What are ways you can utilize to get others in the community to promote your agenda? These are some of the issues that should be addressed as part of your social media marketing strategy. Many of these issues cannot be addressed without getting to know the communities as part of your research.

Engage: This is the hardest part for many organizations. Engage doesn’t mean just watching the conversation take place. It also doesn’t mean just posting content or creating a Facebook page or Twitter account. Engagement means actively listening and taking part in the conversation taking place in a way that adds meaningful content and advice. It means asking questions. It means being personal in the approach to interacting with the community. Remember that social media exists to provide a place where people can go to hear trusted, third party information without a sales pitch.

All of this takes a great deal of effort. Many organizations do not understand either the effort or the sophistication needed for a successful social media marketing campaign. All too often we find social media marketing delegated to a new hire or intern who has no specific training and has other functions as well. These efforts hold little chance of having a meaningful impact to the organization’s marketing objectives.

Evaluation: Each organization needs to define the metrics it will use to determine how well their social media marketing is performing. There are a number of tools and ways you can measure. Remember that numbers can be deceiving. The number of Twitter followers or Facebook fans may or may not be an indication of your success. I say; So What?

Determine your evaluation methodology ahead of time and make sure you make strategy course corrections using the information you obtain from your evaluation.

If you take this approach, you are much more likely to have a successful social media campaign.