Social Media Marketing Strategy

This course is designed to help you to figure out how to fit social media marketing into your overall marketing strategy. It is primarily for consumer marketers, B2C and government.

As marketers we’re used to trying to be in control – building awareness, generating enquiries, converting sales. SM is all about the millions of conversations going on every day in a multitude of networks, and if we want to get involved in those conversations we have to get used to listening and responding as well as driving.

Some specifics covered include:

• Why should we listen, what should we listen for and what tools do we have to do this?
• What should we respond to and how?
• What are we hoping to achieve by driving conversations and how do we do this?
• What KPI’s should we set for ourselves and what metrics should we use to track our performance?
• How should we allocate resources – financial and people?

Using case studies, class exercises and a simple framework for social media strategy, you will learn how social media can be used to meet your acquisition and brand objectives and come away with a simple action plan to apply the course learnings in your organisation.

Categorising Social Media networks and understanding trends

• Comparing SM marketing with traditional marketing models and why it requires a new way of thinking
• Social objects: categorising SM networks by what users share (audio, videos, views, news, comment, research)
• SM trends and the impact of SM on business, publishing and the internet

Social Media tools overview

How various tools are used with examples to show good and poor applications and an exercise to review live applications online, learn from and comment on their effectiveness.

• Tools for expressing: Blogs, Flickr, Youtube, Facebook
• Tools for connecting: Twitter, Facebook Groups, LinkedIn, Foursquare
• Tools for collaborating: Forums, Wikis, Ning

Social Media strategies

An introduction to a simple strategic framework which can be applied in any environment, with examples to illustrate who is using SM in this way and how.

Listening

Using SM to track, research and learn:

• How organisations listen to their customers, market and competitors
• What you should listen to, who you should listen to, why, how and what SM tools you can use
• Brand perceptions, tracking negative and positive conversations
• Listening for business opportunities

Responding

Appropriate use of SM to enter into a dialogue:

• Managing negative PR
• Capitalising on opportunities
• Who should respond; tone of voice

Driving

Creating an environment for users to share:

• Content – how to create something worth sharing
• Blogging – how to set-up, what to blog about, how to engage others
• Facebook groups – examples of how FB is being used successfully by brands
• Social Media campaigns – using social media to drive brand awareness and influence behaviour
• Why some campaigns work and others fail – tips and hints to generate results

Measurement

• How to set meaningful and realistic KPI’s
• Brand perception studies before and after
• Proposed scoring for SM effectiveness – the SIM score
• Tools for measurement

Resource Allocation

• Who should represent the organisation?
• How much time and effort should you allow?
• Balancing In-house vs outsource
• Budgetary considerations

Formulating a Social Media plan

• Using what you have learnt on the course about SM practice, the tools and their applications the last part of the day is spent actively creating a plan of action using the listen/respond/drive strategic framework proposed