One of my clients asked me to write an article for her newsletter demonstrating a “generic social marketing plan” for a company that sells services. I’ve taken that article and rewritten it here because I think the concept of a generic social marketing plan can be summarized easily.
Many types of businesses are beginning to see real benefits from social marketing. Social sites are growing. Take a look at these impressive statistics from http://www.quantcast.com/ which show the top five social sites.
| Tool | Monthly Visits | Male/Female | Over 18 | With Kids | $60K + |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 113.0M | 54% Female | 71% | 48% | 59% | |
| MySpace | 64.3M | 57% Female | 69% | 6% | 51% |
| 23.0M | 55% Female | 97% | 39% | 50% | |
| YouTube | 81.6M | 50% Female | 78% | 43% | 54% |
| 11.7M | 44% Female | 99% | 22% | 67% |
You will notice that there are millions of people actively using these networks. If all these people, who incidentally are probably your target demographic, are active members of a social network, it makes good sense for your business to monitor what is being discussed, and create corresponding marketing platforms and services which target your lead generation goals.
This article attempts to simplify a strategy that will work for a generic company to make use of the data and connections available on social networks.
I’ve chosen four of the five social networks mentioned above, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn for my generic social marketing plan. The company blog or website will be the target of this social media plan.
Any successful social media campaign must begin with an exercise in listening to the issues people are discussing about your specific topic. After listening or monitoring various social networks using Google Alerts and other monitoring tools, you will have a good overview of the issues being discussed, the most influential sources of information, and where the opportunities for engagement exist. You should be able to make a list of blogs and social networks to monitor for opportunistic discussion participation.
The next step in a social media campaign is to prepare everyone who will be working on the campaign. You will need to prioritize the topics you will blog or write about, create your corporate social media policy and train the people who will be using social media tools on best practices. This will allow your marketing staff to recognize where, when and why to participate in social media conversations.
Next, you will need to plan your campaign around social media and make a campaign schedule. Your blog or website needs to be setup specifically to engage visitors for your campaign.
You will need to create or participate in social community (here we will use Facebook), and therefore, you will need a page on one of these networks describing your campaign and its objectives, events, and other features. You will need to set up a Twitter account to discuss subjects relevant to your marketing campaign. You will need to create a series of videos, which can be used on Youtube to virally influence visitors, and for this you may need to create a widget to make it easy to share this content. You will also want to create accounts on several social bookmarking sites like digg.com and de.licio.us to bookmark any interesting articles about your campaign.
Once your accounts are set up, your people are trained, and your plan is constructed, you are ready for engagement.
The next step in the social marketing plan is engagement. Remember, the idea behind social marketing is to start a dialog with your potential clients, not to hit them with a hard sale.
As an example, let’s pretend your generic business sells widget services and or makes widgets, and you have written an ebook. Let’s say it is called “How Widgets Help Get Us Through Tough Economic Times”, and it just happens to promote your services and products. Now you want to create a social media campaign to launch this ebook which will lead people back to your website and blog.
First you will need to decide on a specific keyword phrase you will use to “optimize” your website. Let’s pretend the keyword phrase is “widgets that help in tough economic times”. Then you will identify your target audience as small to medium sized businesses having trouble in tough economic times. You will start monitoring blogs and social networks using tools like Google Alerts to see what types of problems they are having, make a list of issues, and a list of networks and blogs they visit.
Next you could post your ebook on your website or blog – available via a download after filling out a contact form. You will title the post “Widgets That Help in Tough Economic Times” and use these words a few more times in the posting. On the download page you might add a button to “Tweet this” and a “Share” button for social bookmarking sites just so that it is easy for your potential clients to share this information with their friends in similar situations. In addition, you may allow visitors who have downloaded the book to write a review and to refer friends.
Next you may want to create a video “tease” called “Widgets that Help in Touch Economic Times” about the book with interviews from people who have successfully used it, or perhaps featuring the author discussing why he or she wrote it. Publish these videos on YouTube in your own account, tag them as “widgets that help in tough economic times” and link this account to your blog or website.
Next create a Facebook page for the book called “Widgets that Help in Tough Economic Times” and link it back to the website or blog. Use the event invitation system once you have planned the nature and specifics of your events for marketing the ebook. Call the event “Widgets that Help in Touch Economic Times Book Signing”.
Next create a twitter account called “Widgets that Help” just for the book and begin posting tweets about the upcoming book “launch”. Perhaps there will be “book signings” or webinars to describe various strategies in the book. Post these events in Facebook and Twitter about them.
Write a series of press releases and articles, using your “widgets that help” phrase and include the events and any reviews the book might have received. Bookmark each article and press release as “widgets that help in tough economic times”. Try to get reviews of the book published in trade publications and influential blogs by submitting articles or excerpts from the book to them. Identify groups in LinkedIn, MySpace and Facebook which also might be interested in posting an except or review of the book.
Finally, monitor your traffic to your blog or website using Google Analytics.
Many social media marketing campaigns follow this type of plan, however only those with active and constant honest participation succeed. In any case, you will soon dominate search result pages for “widgets that help in tough economic times”.
