WEEK12_STOKES_CH17 (1).pptx

Social Marketing Strategy Stokes - Ch. 17 Learning Objectives ● The strategic uses of social media. ● The steps involved in creating a social media strategy. ● To design documents and protocols you should have in place for social media success. Introduction In the previous chapter we covered som...

Social Marketing Strategy Stokes - Ch. 17 Learning Objectives ● The strategic uses of social media. ● The steps involved in creating a social media strategy. ● To design documents and protocols you should have in place for social media success. Introduction In the previous chapter we covered some of the major social media channels and platforms, and the three phases involved in using them to reach your customers. These included: strategy, implementation, and analytics. Strategy is by far the most important, as it informs what and how often you post, and how you choose to engage and relate to your audience. Strategy also informs how and what you will analyse. It is important that all these parameters are clearly established in your strategy, and that your strategy is in turn informed by the analytics you receive on your content and style of engagement. Social Media Strategy Social media can be used to solve business, marketing and communication challenges, and is an important part of digital marketing. With so many platforms and choices available in social media, this chapter will show you how to use these spaces strategically to address these challenges. The last few years have seen a shift in social media strategy. The space is becoming a more traditional medium for advertising, but with a far better ability to target consumers. Using Social Media to solve Business Challenges Strategy is an important aspect of social media planning. Part of that strategy is identifying which business challenges, marketing and communication challenges in particular, your social media will address. These can include: ● Communication and outreach ● Community management ● Support and customer service Which ones are relevant to your brand? ● Reputation management ● Advertising and awareness ● Sales and lead generation ● Search engine optimisation ● Insights and research. Community Management Social media platforms are built around communities, and are sometimes virtual representations of real-world networks and communities. This feature of social media can be used to build and maintain a supportive community around your organisation. Community manager’s role has risen to prominence as more organisations start using social media, but it has always been an important role in any community, from groups that thrive on forums, to communities run on Facebook. Creating, building and nurturing a community means that organisations don’t just participate in conversations that are happening around and about them, but also actively lead and guide those conversations. These communities are generally made up of the organisation’s biggest fans, often called brand evangelists, who feel as if they have a big stake in that organisation. Support and Customer Service Social media is also an additional customer service channel. As consumers are increasingly comfortable transacting online, they expect the businesses with which they transact to respond to customer queries in the social space, as they would do through a call centre or email. Some customers have found that problems or questions on social media tend to be resolved more quickly, as brands are wary of having unresolved issues left out in public. For any organisation that runs a social community, customer service is often one of its primary functions. Reputation Management Social media is a very effective tool for crisis communication and management. In certain instances, it is the place where some crises start. This can be due to offensive content, an employee saying something stupid or inappropriate, or even just angry customers sharing their complaints and getting reactions. It is important that you do not delete angry post, but acknowledge them. Social media is also a great tool for monitoring what is being said about your brand, and to spot a potential crisis long before it becomes one. Such a ‘heads up’ allows your brand to mediate the crisis by being proactive and ameliorating the crisis before it takes hold. And when a crisis does hit, social media is a great space for managing your communication as it enables you to get your side of the story out. Advertising and Awareness Where there is an audience, there is advertising. The more time users spend in social media, the more brands want to advertise there. It’s not just the large numbers or users, and the time users spend on social networks that make them appealing to advertisers, it’s also the rich demographic and psychographic targeting opportunities. Adverts can be targeted based on the profile information that individuals provide, either overtly or through their actions on the social network. Most social networks offer a number of advertising options that are accessible to both small advertisers and big spenders. Social advertising is dynamic, with new advertising options released regularly. Sales and Lead Generation Adding a social layer to a commercial transaction can create a richer experience for online consumers. These can be based overtly on social connections, or on inferred connections based on behaviour. An excellent example of the layer based on inferred connections is Amazon’s collaborative filtering. If you’ve browsed on Amazon.com, you will no doubt have seen product information such as ’People who bought this also bought that’. SEO - Search Engine Optimization Social media plays an important role in SEO. It provides additional assets that can be optimised so that a brand ‘owns’ the results page for searches for their brand. A savvy SEO strategy will also make use of social media assets, links and likes for strengthening the position of other web assets in the search engine results pages. Insight and Research Social media can be a very powerful insight and research asset, but the information needs to be judged in its proper context. When you are planning a campaign, social media can provide a rich source of data, both demographic and preference based. You can use the information users share freely to understand more about your market, brand or product. ORM tools help you to track mentions and sentiment, giving you insight into how you are perceived by consumers. Using social network ad planners, such as Facebook’s Ads manager or Google Display Planner (Google discontinued Ad Planner in November 2016), can give you rich information about the size of your market, and things that consumers like. You can measure sentiment and the changing number of mentions to help you understand the impact of other campaigns. These can be offline or online campaigns. Step-by-step guide to creating a social media strategy Social media is fast-moving, which means proper planning is vital to success. Effective social media strategies come from embracing the fact that social media is a two-way communication tool. Organisations need the resources not only to push messages out, but to deal quickly with the messages coming in, too. Planning is the foundation of success. STEP 1 - Get Buy In Getting buy-in for using social media is essential. It may be seen as a free resource, but even if you are not paying for exposure, there is a time and resource investment required. A number of stakeholders will need to be aware of your social media plans, and these may be both internal and external. And, of course, you will need sign-off for any budgeting or additional resourcing requirements. Step 2 - Listen and understand the landscape Social media is more than the social spaces you may interact with in your personal capacity. A good first step to understanding the full social media landscape is to listen well to conversations your target market is already having around your brand or industry. Some important questions to answer include: ● What conversation already exists around your brand, your industry and your competitors? ● Do they have the facts? ● Where does it take place? ● Who is doing most of the talking? ● What are the emotions involved in conversations about your brand? ● What are the motivations of those that comment on your brand online? ● What can you, as a brand, add to this conversation? Is it valuable? Online monitoring tools such as BrandsEye (www.brandseye.com) can help you with the listening part of your planning, but in the early stages you may want to start with free tools such as Google Alerts (www.google.com/alerts). Step 3 - Analyse Using all the data you have been gathering, analyse! Think critically about social media and your brand, as well as your brand’s broader marketing, communication and business challenges. All of this should be looked at within the context of the information that you already know about your local marketing and business environment. Your outcomes here should include: ● A list of the social channels and platforms your brand should be on. This is based on who your customers are, where they interact, and where they expect to interact with you. ● Non-official groups or communities that already exist, which may have been created by fans. ● An overview of the existing conversation (volume, frequency and sentiment), as well as any content or conversation themes that occur. ● An overview of what your competitors are doing in this space. ● A list of potential brand evangelists and influencers in your industry. STEP 4 - Set Objectives Your objectives are the desired outcome of your social media strategy. Your ultimate objective, as to what social media should achieve for your business, should be established upfront and be based within the context of your marketing and business challenges. After listening and analysing you can now set specific social media objectives that will feed into your overall outcome. You need to identify exactly how you will use social media to reach the business objectives for your organisation, and then set SMART objectives that will help you to achieve these. STEP 5 - Create an Action Plan Once you have a clear idea of what you want, you can begin compiling an action plan to get there. This is where you need to make sure that you have created the necessary documents and processes that form the foundation of your plan. Remember to keep your and chosen platform in mind when making these plans. You will need to: ● Decide on the roles and responsibilities of the project team and other stakeholders. ● Determine what social media tools you will use. ● Commit to a frequency and volume of activity, and how quickly you will respond. ● Develop a conversation plan. ● Create tone of voice guidelines, frequently asked questions, community guidelines and content plans. STEP 6 - Implement This is the fun part! It’s time for your plans to kick off and put all that research and thought into action. Set up your platforms according to the specific guidelines for the platform. Most platforms have helpful and informative guidance for businesses wanting to be on their site. T hey also provide brand packs and assistance in establishing yourself on the site. Pinterest, for example, offers detailed guidance on their platform, see: https://business.pinterest.com/en. Alert stakeholders that you are starting your engagement plans, and make sure you have tracking in place. Continue to monitor for mentions of your organisation and responses to your messages. Keep to your general plan, but be prepared to adapt. STEP 7 - Track, analylze, optimize The beautiful thing about digital marketing is that you can track every single user interaction and use this information to learn from and improve your efforts continually. You should track the success of your social media campaigns on an ongoing basis, and set milestones for your team at less frequent intervals (every couple of months or so), when you will sit down and do an in-depth review. There are several tools you can use for tracking social media. You will need to build a suite of tools to suit your measurement and reporting requirements. Tools… Platform insights From the previous chapter you saw how each major platform offers its own analytics to businesses and brands that sign up for business pages or profiles. These are a useful starting point for reporting on your social media efforts, from numbers of followers or fans, to interactions with the content you share. Web analytics If you are using social media channels to send traffic to your own website, you should tag the links so that you can segment that traffic in your website reports. In Google Analytics (www.google.com/analytics), you would use campaign tracking parameters. URL Shorteners URL shortening services such as bit.ly, goo.gl and ow.ly offer usage data that will tell you how many users click on links you share, when they click on them, and where in the world they are from. More Tools Online monitoring software Online monitoring software, also known as sentiment analysis or opinion mining software, is an important measurement investment that you will need to make. It helps you to keep track of all mentions of your brand, and to understand the sentiment and influence of those mentions. You should be tracking your reputation for trends and changes over time. Some popular choices are: BrandsEye (www. brandseye.com ), Brandwatch (www.brandwatch.com ), SEM Rush (www.semrush. com ) and Hootsuite (www.hootsuite.com ). Social media dashboards There are a number of services that make it easier for you to centralise management of your social media properties, as well as making collaborative management easier. They also integrate analytics data from a number of sources, making reporting easier. Documents and Processes Good documentation and processes are the foundations of social media success and your social strategy is likely to involve many stakeholders from across your organisation. Processes and guidelines ensure consistency across the various channels. These should be created, agreed on, and approved before you take any action on social media. Start with the documentation and processes you already have in place for marketing and communication, for example, brand and tone of voice guidelines, or PR policies. Build on these to create a robust foundation that suits this spontaneous, dynamic space. A social media checklist is a good starting point to make sure that you have everything in place. Examples of the checklist, conversation calendars and escalation protocols are also included for you. Community Guidelines As well as a privacy policy and terms and conditions, it’s a good idea to establish community guidelines for the communities you manage, especially when the community is on behalf of a brand. Community guidelines help to set the tone for the community, and are useful to refer to should members behave in a way that is undesirable. Guidelines indicate what will, and will not, be tolerated, such as hate speech, profanity, discrimination, or other inappropriate content. Of course, community guidelines don’t prevent such behaviour, but are useful to fall back on should you need to remove comments or community members. Guidelines should be friendly, with the tone in keeping with your community or brand. Many social media platforms provide their own guidelines that all users, including brands, have to adhere to. Failure to adhere to any of the guidelines could get you removed from the platform. Content Plan Content plans help you to plan your community conversations and the messages you send. We suggest weighting your content to your objectives. Decide on what you want to achieve with each objective, and by when, and what level of priority it is for your business. Map these objectives weekly and monthly as necessary. Then create weekly or monthly content plans around these objectives, based on each objective’s relative priority for your business per week. For example, if your objectives are brand awareness, sales and app installs, you need to weight them according to their importance. If your main objective on social media is brand awareness, make this 50% of your content plan. This means that 50% of all content you post will be aimed at increasing brand awareness. If the other two objectives are equivalent, then content driving sales and content driving app installs should each make up 25% of your content plan. If this changes over time, so that in week three, you want app installs to be your most important objective, then content driving app installs becomes 50% of your content plan, with content promoting brand awareness dropping down to making up only 25% of your content plan. Communication and Escalation Protocol An established communication and escalation protocol helps to ensure that all parties are aware of procedures for handling social messages, and can respond as appropriate. This is especially important for large organisations where several users might be interacting in social media on behalf of a brand, or where several departments or agencies have a stake in the organisation’s social media presence. A communication and escalation protocol should include: ● Anticipated messages, frequently asked questions and appropriate, standard responses (for both positive and negative situations). ● Guidelines for determining the sentiment and risk of messages, which includes a flagging system for comments that need more senior attention. ● The crisis management process to follow if a brand crisis erupts on social media. ● An escalation plan for messages that need signoff or further consideration. Dealing with Opportunities and Threats When to talk (and when not to) When everything being said is nice A fantastic position to be in is that every possible mention is overwhelmingly positive. Well done. However, that does not mean that there is nothing to do. During this time, the brand must do everything in its power to drive high volumes of conversation.Stakeholders are being positive about the brand because their expectations are being exceeded. Unfortunately, expectations change. Brands need to stay on their toes and constantly be on the lookout for new and innovative ways to meet and develop their brand promise. When everything being said is neutral If this is the case, it sounds as if the company is very boring and is not a good way to get attention. As Seth Godin puts it, “Safe is risky” (Godin, 2010). If a company is playing it so safe that no one can be bothered to send either praise or criticism its way, it’s in danger of being forgotten. The next step is no one talking about the company at all. When negative things are being said Negative statements can often be understood as broken brand promises. There is underperformance on expectation, and it must be dealt with as a matter of high priority. During this period, brands need to be very careful not to stir up any more conversation than is absolutely necessary. That said, it’s certainly not all doom and gloom. If the conversation is broadly negative, it is normally because there is some underlying problem, and this information provides the business with focus to resolve it.