Giving social media marketing a strategic purpose

Six key questions to answer in your social media strategy

Assuming that you're clear on what you need from social media in terms of goals and objectives, there is often a key missing ingredient from a social media initiative - a fully considered strategy. It sounds a little glib, and yet it remains important to be clear on the how and why of implementing and integrating social media marketing into the business.

There are multiple benefits to getting this right:

• Get buy in from budget holder, project sponsors and senior management
• Clarity on vision, purpose and direction with business context
• Ability to scale both the size and scope of the social media programme
• Budgeting and resource management against objectives and goals, to understand the return against any other marketing activity

I find that strategy is generally misunderstood, and it appears that this is even more the case in social media where focus is so often about the goals (I want 10,000 Facebook Likes) or the tools and tactics (we need a Facebook Fan page).

Strategy is neither goal based, tactical, about timings or the plan itself. A strategy is what's needed to achieve the goals, the road-map, not the destination.

“All men can see the tactics whereby I conquer, what none can see is the strategy out of which victory is evolved.”  – Sun Tzu, The Art of War.

This issue is a marketing wide problem, probably business wide. We certainly have seen the same issues within siloed tactics like search engine marketing, PR, email and display advertising all running individually from any communications strategy. I appreciate that this maybe getting a little marketing textbook, yet a social media strategy desperately needs a wider operational context, it must be aligned with the business strategy and the subsequent communications strategy. Identifying and tying the social media strategy right back to the business strategy is therefore fundamental those 4 bullet points above too, of course. Strategic alignment immediately informs the perspective of the person creating the social media strategy saving a lot of pain further down the line.

Ensuring strategic alignment?

If you want your social media marketing processes and campaigns to deliver something of value back to the business then you need to align with the business. Forgetting the tactical, ad-hoc approach to social media ("We need a Facebook fan page") which is where most businesses currently are, there are two common strategic approaches that we see:

• Social media marketing. Whereby you're most often reacting to the need to be using social media but nonetheless are integrating into a wider communications strategy. Reasonably advanced companies are in this space and it's where companies investing in the future are very quickly headed. Typically this is where there's a focus still on "campaigns" focus and how social media marketing can be integrated as a part of that, the listening and conversation is there with the consumers though the purpose remains promotional or at least very marketing orientated. The social tools and techniques have a purpose within the campaign context. Old Spice guy typifies this for me, it's great, hugely successful and yet it still remains campaign orientated. Tools like Buddy Media for Facebook, and Hootsuite for Twitter in particular have made social campaigns easier to execute for smaller brands, teams and organisations.
• Integrated social CRM. several big brands seem to be getting really serious in this area, the focus is way beyond marketing and about the consumer and wider market interactions pre, during and post purchase. The case studies that we read about around Dell and Gatorade and their command centres, for example. Stuff of social media marketing dreams! Where the business is so customer oriented and leveraging social media to engage and interact with the consumer, marketing is but one component in meeting the consumer needs. It's right-side-up marketing done via social media tools, what does the consumer need over what do we want to say.

Key questions to be answered in your social media marketing strategy

Focussing on the marketing strategy, the reality for 99% of businesses, is that there are a handful of questions that are needed to tighten the strategy, and for the sake of this post I'm borrowing a lot from Jay Baer here who I think does a great job on explaining it so succinctly, he pushes us to ask the questions around people first, not abstract concepts, tactics or  tools:

• Is your strategy about brand awareness, customer engagement or sales? It can only be one of them in reality, otherwise it's two strategies, two strategies is fine so long as you realise and resource for that - most of us are not in that space.
• What is your relationship with your intended audience? Jay suggests picking 2 adjacent audience types on this scale: Nothing > Aware of you, but never acted > Acted once > Repeat actions/enthusiasts > Advocates. The value in this question is significant in its simplicity I feel in how it informs your approach to marketing, especially when combined with the next point...
• How does your audience typically engage in social media? Using the Forrester Social Technographics Ladder, understand how your target audience (as defined by gender, age, and geography) uses social media. Some audience types are not creative and simply want to consume and share content.
• What's your purpose? Jay Baer calls this your "one thing", Joe Pullizzi (from a content marketing perspective) talks about the intersection between you and your audience.
• How will you be human? Easier for smaller businesses, harder for larger businesses.
• How will you manage social media? Think not only return on investment and KPI's, but governance and roles and responsibilities, easier again in smaller businesses where there's far less hierarchy and politics.