Planning Your Social Media Marketing Strategy – Three Essential TipsPosted by Dave DiCola on May 10, 2011

In early April of this year, we opined about the difference between a “brand awareness strategy”

and a “social media strategy” in our “Brand Awareness and Social Media” blog.

If you don’t mind, we’d like to opine a little bit further.

Even if we can agree that at the end of the day, marketing executives should focus on brand

and overall marketing strategies rather than “social media” strategies, those same executives

still need a social media plan.

But where should they start? What are the things those well-meaning, bent-on-success

marketing directors should focus upon first when attempting to build a successful, social-media

leveraged marketing strategy?

We think it all starts with three simple questions:

1. Are you really listening? For any social media strategy to be successful, a keen “ear to the

tracks” will have to be adopted from the top down. This means not only listening to internal

influences (i.e. marketing staffers and their ideas) but more importantly, with rapt attention to

what your customers and prospects are saying via social media. In the end, you need to shape

decisions about which platforms (Facebook Application Development, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc)

you’ll use, and what your visitors will see when they get there, around what is relevant to them

rather than the egos in your boardroom.

2. How will you adapt? Once you’ve listened to what your customers tell you is relevant to

them today, you’ll need to plan for making adjustments that will keep your social media content

relevant to them tomorrow. Not only that, but the entire social media landscape is changing by

the minute, right along with the technology that’s improving every day and driving (at least

partially) the storm in social networking interest these last three years. In short, you need to

develop promotions, strategies and campaigns that are fluid, measurable and adaptive so that

you don’t wind up with stale content – and the stale traffic that comes with it.

3. What will it all mean? This one’s really important. Like any other asset your firm may

purchase, a social media marketing strategy has an associated cost. And that cost must be

measured against the potential return on the associated investment. It does little good to design

any business strategy before assessing the expectations with regard to return on investment,

and social media marketing is no exception.

Are your marketing executives asking themselves these questions? Are they truly planning their

approach to social media marketing – before they take the plunge of faith?

We hope so. Because without answers to these three fundamental questions, your firm may be

headed for a very long swim in very deep waters.