The Definitive Guide to Developing Your Social Media Strategy – Part 5: Sorting Through the Options for Your Social Media Marketing Strategy

This is part 5 of 7 in series.   You can view the first 4 articles here: Part 1  ,  Part 2 , Part 3 , Part 4

By now, you know that your social media marketing strategy essentially connects you with your users and customers.  You also know that planning and implementing your social media strategy gives you a better chance of having a successful social media marketing campaign.  If you’ve indulged in the prescribed crowd participation, you should have a pretty detailed description of your target audience, as well as your list of business objectives and the SMM goals that will help you to fulfill those objectives.

Now comes the How? of your strategy.  This phase of the strategy is all about options and there are a ton of them. I need to be thinking about how I plan to accomplish my goals. What is it that I can actually do to get things done? If you recall, my three business objectives and corresponding measurable social media marketing goals were:

My first business objective is to establish that there’s a space for my product in the market. I will feel confident that I have accomplished that goal when the numbers tell me that I am getting 5,000 unique visitors to my site every month, 1,500 subscribers to my RSS feed and another 2,000 people who have signed up to receive newsletters from my database. I am expecting all of this to occur over the next four months, so the question I need to ask myself at this point is how will I do it?

Well, in order to get 5,000 visitors to my site, I’m going to need a website. If I want RSS feed subscribers, I will need both the feed and content to feed.  Getting a few thousand people to sign up for my newsletter means that I have to produce a high-quality newsletter on a regular basis; I need to have a method for telling people about my newsletter; I need a platform that allows people to give their information so that they can be included in a database that will generate email addresses so that the newsletters can be sent out to my target audience.  Simple enough.

Options

But remember, this stage is about options and there are myriad options available still.  I could offer a downloadable eBook as a free gift for people who sign up for the newsletter. I could provide a single RSS feed that updates readers on all the information on my site or I could filter the information and offer several feeds that provide targeted info.  If I provide both news and editorial/blog content, I could keep the blog on the site, send the news through the RSS feed and save significant industry updates for publication in the newsletter.  What about frequency and the amount of content produced?  Should the newsletter look like the one I get from my condo association – 2 pages and huge fonts? Should the newsletter be distributed weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, bi-monthly or quarterly?  If I filter the content, should I stagger publication times according to the filters? Will a quarterly newsletter underwhelm my audience in light of the fact that I would still have daily, weekly or monthly updates to the RSS feeds?

There’s actually quite a bit to think about, but every decision you make should be made with your audience and goals in mind. Not every good idea will work for you.  Some ideas are creative and feasible and perfect… for someone else.  So get a pen and pad out, organize your thoughts, get your goals in front of you and run down your list of options.  The sky really is the limit.

Let me know your thoughts below.

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