Social Media: What is All the Fuss About? Stage 3 & 4

Stage Three: What are Your Social Media Objectives?

Once you have matched your customer persona/s to targeted social media platforms you need to be clear on your social media objectives, which should directly align with your core business objectives. Social media tends to achieve three marketing goals:

·         Lead generation

·         Customer retention

·         Brand awareness

You also need to consider the 3 Ms of: Management, Monitoring and Measurement. Generally, marketers dedicate an average of 1 hour a day to social media activities and according to research by EML Wildfire (May 2012), the following business benefits have been experienced from the on-going use of social media:

31%        Customer engagement

30%        Loyalty

25%        Traffic to website

21%        Sales turnover (due to active use of social media)

Stage Four: Plan Your Campaign

Once you have decided what channels to use and have clear objectives, it’s time to consider your overall strategy and tactics. Example strategies include:

·         Generate product awareness with solicitors who deal with ligation cases

·         Generate product awareness with new mums

·         Increase lead conversions from the company website

·         Develop and promote content to help facilitate a prospects’ decision-making process

·         Reduce customer service calls by dealing with enquires via social media channels

Ideas for tactics should be gained from: researching case studies, attending a course or employing a digital/ PR consultant to help you.  Four key questions to ask yourself at this stage are:

1.       Does the tactical idea deliver on the strategy?

2.       How likely is the customer persona likely to respond to this tactic, compared to others?

3.       Does my business have the resources to implement this tactic (in-house or outsourced)?

4.       What are the critical success factors and main barriers to achieving these?

Social Media: What is all the Fuss About? Final Stage

This article has been written by Tanya Hemphill, Senior Lecturer and Programme Leader in Public Relations, based at the Warrington School of Management (University of Chester).