A strong social media strategic plan must create strategies that are well-aligned and draws a transparent connection between an organization’s business goals / objectives and the processes that are needed to achieve those goals. Organizational/ business strategies at the top lead to marketing and communications strategies at the next lower level. Sub-categories of the marketing strategies are the social media strategies. A well-aligned social media strategy specifically addresses how social media and social networking activities will be applied to achieve its marketing goals/ objectives, and thus, the overall business/ organizational goals. The social media strategies then lead to micro-level social media tactics in communicating with target audiences through blogs, forums, communities, social networks, multi-media sharing, social bookmarks, microblogs, wikis and other marketing channels.
Unfortunately, the social media strategies are not typically fully aligned with the marketing strategies which are not well-aligned with the organization’s strategies. Every level of strategy must be in full alignment with each other and become a strong ‘strategic fit’. Because they are not aligned they often fail and waste considerable time and resources.
Before you can create a social media strategy, you need to identify what are the organization’s overall strategic mission, goals and objectives. For example, typical business goals may relate to:
- Increase economic viability or profitability;
- Cost of operation reduction;.
- Improve communication among stakeholders;
- Expand product/ service innovation.
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Common marketing goals to achieve the business goals are:
- Recruiting new customers;
- Enhancing customer retention rates;
- Improving customer referral rates;
- Creating a higher level of customer satisfaction.
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Related to each marketing goal, marketing objectives provide the outcome measurement and time line. For example:
Objective: Recruit 10% new customers by the end of 2011.
Objective: Enhance the current yearly customer retention rate from 50% to 75% by the end of 2011.
Objective: Improve referrals of new customers from 20% currently to 40% by the end of 2011.
Objective: Based upon the yearly customer satisfaction surveys, raise the ‘excellent’ and ‘good’ responses from 35% currently to over 50% by the end of 2011.
Some common goals for social media marketing to help achieve the marketing and business goals / objectives could be:
- Enhance brand awareness and loyalty;
- Build expertise, authority, thought leadership and reputation online;
- Learn more about your target audiences through social networks;
- Educate and inform customers;
- Improve customer service;
- Collect engagement, feedback and communicate directly with customers;
- Enhance online conversion rates;
- Improve search engine rankings;
- Expand visitor traffic to websites and blogs;
- Generate new customer leads.
You will notice that the broad goals are not measurable. You can then create measurable objectives. The eventual social media strategies and tactics will be directed to achieving these social media goals and objectives.
I will discuss more about cost-effective strategic planning in future posts. However, it becomes very important to take the time and build up to the strategy creation through all of the prior steps:
