There are dozens, no hundreds, and probably thousands of decent articles about how corporate brands should get started with social media marketing. This article may, or may not, bring you something new. For me, it reflects a little of what I have learned about how brands can start thinking about managing their marketing funnel online through social media.
Your social media marketing strategy is different to, or rather an adjunct of, your general integrated marketing strategy. The latter is about awareness building and demand generation and likely involves time-limited specific campaigns like product launches or specific awareness campaigns.
Your social media marketing strategy is an umbrella strategy. It should be included as a part of all the integrated marketing campaigns you do, and it should be an on-going evergreen strategy.
Here are some discussion points.
1. All brands can be social
How can you be social? Start a conversation with your customers. Do it through a blog, a Twitter, an online forum, a social marketing page. Make sure it’s staffed by YOUR staff. Not your agency staff. You need to learn this stuff.
2. Start with Twitter and expand from there
Twitter is an easy way to get started. And get started you must. I have another post on this blog about how to get started with Twitter. Commit to being on there every single day — including weekends. Choose one, or two, people as the official Tweeters and have them agree from the start on their approach, voice, strategy and the most interesting things to tweet about with your brand.
3. Be clear about your message
What is the message you want shared about your brand? Be clear from the start, and be consistent. Your message is not only your brand’s core value, but also your brand’s personality. Are you fun, irreverent, serious, youthful, crazy, honest? And what is the cornerstone message you want to keep coming back to?
4. Determine your investment in your social marketing program
You can spend a fortune on an agency to help you. Or, you can kick it off by getting out there and getting started yourself.
Bring in an agency when you don’t have the resources to manage and implement your campaign. But don’t leave all the strategy and key learnings to your agency. You have to have formed an opinion yourself and determined a good approach yourself. Don’t pay the agency for this work up front. They are there to validate, fine-tune, and reflect.
I strongly recommend at least one in-house staff person having hands-on involvement in all aspects of your social media presence. That way you are investing in your own corporate knowledgebase, not in your agency’s knowledgebase. Don’t abdicate all these important tasks to an agency. If you feel you don’t know enough, hire a knowledgeable person to teach you and do the work. Much more valuable in the long term.
Don’t start with ‘what will it cost?’ Start with what you want to achieve, how you can measure it, how you can get your feet wet with little or no cost.
Remember, there is a risk to being outside the conversation. Jump in and learn to swim.
5. Selling up to management
How do you convince management to participate when they may not have a clue what social media marketing is? Further reason to get started internally first and gain key learnings. “We wouldn’t have known this without having done that.” Show value and engagement in small ways, and then extrapolate value beyond that initial engagement.
Show off what your competition is doing in this area. Or, if they haven’t arrived there, show off cool things that related brands are doing. These things are very hard to measure in terms of strict ROI. It’ll take months to get something off the ground. If your management is very reticent, try to kick off with things that are low-risk and low-cost. There is no fee to start a Facebook fan page and a Twitter stream, so that’s a good place to start. Begin writing your own corporate blog, without publishing it, to show what posts might look like. Again, with a tool like Blogger there is no cost to get started.