Social Media Marketing Plan & Identifying Target Audiences

SMM Plan

• An SMM (Social Media Marketing) plan details an organisation's social media goals and the actions necessary to achieve them.

• It involves the understanding of corporate and marketing strategies and the creation of promotional strategies.

• Integrated strategies and solid SMM plans are crucial for the successful execution of SMM.

  - An SMM (Social Media Marketing) plan is a comprehensive document that outlines an organisation's specific goals for using social media and details the actions required to achieve those goals.

  - It demonstrates an understanding of the company’s overall corporate and marketing strategies and involves creating specific promotional strategies tailored for social media.

  - Well-integrated strategies and robust SMM plans are crucial for the effective execution of social media marketing initiatives, ensuring alignment with business objectives and optimal use of resources.

SMM Planning Cycle

• Creating a social media plan is a continuous process.

• Skilled social media marketers constantly monitor the progress of the plan’s action elements.

• They modify plans to improve results and test alternative approaches.

• The core planning cycle for managing social media includes:

  • Listening

  • Setting goals

  • Defining strategies

  • Identifying the target audience (market)

  • Selecting tools

  • Selecting platforms and channels

  • Implementing

  • Monitoring

  • Tuning

Listen and Observe

• Five Stages:

  1. Listen to conversations about a brand or company.

  2. Listen to what people say about the competitors.

  3. Listen to what people say about the industry or category.

  4. Listen for the tone of the community.

  5. Listen to different social media platforms and channels.

Listening Centers

• Examples:

  • The National Football League (NFL) listens to Super Bowl conversations.

    • In 2015, the Super Bowl game was the most-tweeted game ever, with 28.4 million game-related tweets sent during the telecast.

    • In 2019, due to calls to boycott the game, the total sentiment toward the game on social media was negative.

    • Keeping in touch with consumers and the brands they follow will be critical to the success of the NFL and the Super Bowl in years ahead.

  • Cisco demonstrates the importance of social media listening in B2B marketing by monitoring the who, what, and where of social media about Cisco, and current trending topics.

Social Media Listening Tools:

• Tools for Social Media Monitoring:

  • Google Alerts: https://www.google.com/alerts (Free)

  • Google Trends: https://www.google.com/trends (Free)

  • Sentiment Analyzer: https://www.danielsoper.com/sentimentanalysis/default.aspx (Free Version)

  • Social Mention: http://brandmentions.com/ (Free Trial)

• Tools for Social Media Management:

  • Hootsuite: https://hootsuite.com/# (Free Version)

  • Tweetdeck: https://tweetdeck.twitter.com/ (Free)

  • SproutSocial: https://sproutsocial.com/ (Free Trial)

  • Zoho social: https://www.zoho.com (Free Version)

Sentiment Analysis

1. Marketers can track analytics through listening tools.

2. This can be a form of data mining.

3. The sentiments of customers towards a brand or post can be viewed.

4. Even those of competitors can be filtered.

Setting Goals and Objectives

• Goals must be flexible in the light of new developments while engaging in social media.

• Unintended benefits from social media engagement might be discovered.

• Key objectives of SMM include:

  • Provide customer service

  • Build brand awareness

  • Build brand preference

  • Drive direct leads or sales

  • Increase customer loyalty

• The SMART acronym represents a standard for judging the quality of goals and objectives at any level:

  • Specific

  • Measurable

  • Achievable

  • Realistic

  • Time delimited

• Social media marketing campaigns vary in duration, so it is especially important to specify the time frame for each objective.

• The Valid Metrics Framework represents a strong framework for understanding SMM objectives and the metrics associated with them.

Determining Strategies

• Considerations:

  • What are the overall goals?

  • What was learned from listening?

  • What best practices can be applied?

  • Goals may change, so be flexible.

The Eight C’s of Strategy Development

1. Categorize social media platforms by target market relevancy.

2. Comprehend the rules of the road on the platform by listening and learning how to behave, successfully spark conversation, and engage the participants.

3. Converse by acknowledging and responding to other users of the platform, always remembering to be a contributor, not a promoter.

4. Collaborate with platform members as a means of establishing a mutually beneficial relationship with the platform participants.

5. Contribute content to build reputation and become a valued member, helping to improve the community.

6. Connect with the influencers so that you can enlist them to help shape opinions about your product or service.

7. Community participation (and creation) can elicit valuable consumer suggestions for improving products and services.

8. Convert relationships built in social media to the behaviors specified in the objectives.

Linking Goals with a Call to Action

• To measure success, you need to clearly define someone’s desired action—your “call to action.”

• Getting to the sale is the final step in a chain of actions:

  • Click on blog post from Twitter or Facebook.

  • Sign up for email newsletter.

  • Sign up for webinar (collect lead scoring and contact information).

  • Have salesperson call.

  • Purchase.

  • Convert the customer to a brand advocate.

Marketing Goals and Calls to Action

Self-Promotion versus Building an Army of Advocates

• Creating advocates is the final element in the Valid Metrics Framework.

• These brand advocates will talk to their friends—not because of a contest or prize—but because they are truly passionate about a business and want to tell the world.

• Word of mouth (WOM) is the leading purchase influence.

Best Practices for Developing a Social Media Strategy

1. Start with a road map. That is your SMM plan. At a minimum, it should specify:

   • Who your target audience is and the audience characteristics

   • How you plan to interact with the audience

   • How you will measure the success or failure of your activities

   • How you will adjust to stay on track to meet your objectives

2. Listen before you start interacting; you must listen strategically before you engage with your audience.

3. Welcome audience participation, feedback, and collaboration, and use these conversations to locate and nurture brand advocates.

4. Be patient. Give it an adequate amount of time and resources to become successful.

5. Be flexible. Social media itself is constantly evolving.

Personal Branding Exercise

• Incorporate listening into your personal professional branding strategy:

  • Clearly define your personal professional goals for how you want to be thought of in your selected industry.

  • Define your personal mantra or brand positioning statement; make sure it is authentic.

  • Now listen on forms of social media. Are you being perceived as you wish to be? What changes to you need to make to improve the conversation around you and your professional brand?

Importance of Targeting in SMM

• What is targeting in SMM?

  • The right person to get

  • The right content

  • At the right place

  • In the right format

  • In the right language

  • On the right device

Targeting Process in SMM

• The most common characteristics marketers use to identify and profile target markets are demographics, geographics, and lifestyles or psychographics.

• Identifying and segmenting the target market is a key marketing activity.

• Rarely does the marketer want to reach the entire target market—all the market segments—with one campaign or one message; usually, the campaign is designed for a single market segment.