Planning Checklist For Social Media Marketing

Here are some tips picked up from CK’s Blog and through our own experience at DDM for putting together a successful social media strategy. There’s no getting around it. To make social media successful, you need to work at it.

1. Goal Setting
You need to establish what specifically you are looking to achieve through the use of social media tools. Is it to provide product feedback, increase SEO, position your brand in a specific sector, provide a new customer service channel or to meet another goal?

Don’t make the mistake of creating a huge time and resource drain. Define what makes the best sense for your company before you get started. Analyze what the competition is doing. And even more importantly, analyze how your key customers are using social media.

What should the content be focused on and how can you differentiate from others in the marketplace? What gaps in your marketing program can social media help you fill? Do you need more customer outreach; do you need to encourage more brand advocacy, or do you need to involve our market in decision making?

2. Strategy
Which of the many tools available are the best for your company? Blogs, Twitter, Facebook, online videos, etc. Do the tools you’ve identified support your strategy and the comfort levels of your markets? Some audiences are very comfortable reading blogs, but not Facebook or Twitter.

Define how you can make your brand more “human.” Social Media requires authenticity, not ad pitches. Identify which executives from your company will represent your brand on your selected tools and what style they should exude.

And most importantly, choose the direction of content that will provide the most value to your audience.

3. Promotion
You should not only have a plan in place for creating and maintaining your social media programs, but also for promoting them. Develop an integrated mix as you would for your other marketing programs. Include email blasts, web site links and even ad placement on Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.

4. Feedback
Make sure to clearly invite ideas, recommendations and feedback for improvements, new features or new offerings. This is not only done through posts, but also as a clearly labeled area or forum within your site and/or blogs.

5. Resources
Identify who in your organization is going to be responsible for the ongoing work. Developing and posting new and relevant content on an ongoing basis as well as responding to reader inquiries is essential to your social media success. Who will be tasked with assessing and disseminating the information so you can track how well (or poorly) your strategy is working?

6. Processes
To ensure your program remains fresh and timely, develop what your posting schedule will be (e.g. daily, weekly, bi-weekly). What processes are you implementing to analyze buzz and feedback? Depending upon the company, feedback may want to be viewed by more than the marketing department, it can be very helpful to customer service, sales, R&D and management.

And, you’ll want to have a discussion with your management and legal department before implementing programs where you clearly set policies and guidelines - not only for content posting but rules for company employees on use of social media in general.

7. Tracking and Optimization
Just as with other media and marketing programs, once you’ve created your social media presence and launched your set of programs, you’ll find areas that need to be optimized. This requires you to regularly ask the “what do we need to improve” question and assess data. It also necessitates that you set processes to regularly review the results and areas of potential improvement.

Doing the upfront work will help you make the most of the opportunities of social media.